The purpose of a business blog is to inform, create brand awareness, keep people up to date, and drive traffic to your site. Content should be worth people’s time, providing them with educational information that is both useful and engaging, with the ability to point interested individuals toward your business. Writing blog content will help you build trust with potential customers.
Blogging has changed over the years. Now we need to optimize information for people using search engines (what they need or what they will try searching for), opposed to search engines themselves. There are a lot of bloggers out there today. Back in 2004, there were around 4 millions blogs, and in 2013, there were an estimated 152 million. These numbers are surely greater in 2014, making it harder for individual businesses to stand out. Bloggers need a well-defined strategy targeted to attract the right people.
5 Quick Tips to Make Your Blog a Whole Lot Better
Keywords: When writing articles, focus on the context rather than specific keyword phrases. Articles should be answer-focused, not keyword-focused. Incorporate keyword phrases in blogs but don’t make them sound forced or unnatural. Break the wording up to make it flow smoothly. Long-tail keywords are much more useful and more important than short-tail keywords. Don’t just repeat the same keyword over and over again. Use variations via long-tail keywording. A good way to come up with keywords is to look at your old blog posts and identify topics that you haven’t touched on much across your blog. Take one of these topics and identify more titles that relate but will contain new information, expanding on what you have already. Some possible ideas for good topics can include “how-to,” “top 5,” or “best practice” posts. Most importantly, make sure your information is helpful, good quality, and shareable. A smart blogger creates posts that can be easily searched, found, and shared.
Content: There are two types of content: topical and evergreen. Topical content is information that is very valuable for a lot of people for a short period of time but then loses value and is quickly outdated. Examples of this would be subjects based on current or upcoming events, trends, fads, or statistical reports. Evergreen content, on the other hand, is information that will be valuable for years to come. Examples include careers, food, finance, or services that your business will be providing for years to come. Both types of content are important to include in your blog, but overall, at least 85% should be evergreen, and 15% should be topical content.
Expand: Another tip is to write numerous posts on topics that you want to be seen as an expert in. This doesn’t mean you should be redundant, writing about the same thing over and over. Choose broad subjects that you can take apart to produce good SEO building content. The information should be useful, educational, attractive, and informative. The quality should be good enough for people to want to share it with others. Make sure your information is evidence-based, original, and genuinely interesting for your intended audience. Also, make sure your writing doesn’t contain any spelling or grammar mistakes!
Go the Extra Mile: Go into your blog library and categorize, analyze, and map out what content you have. If it isn’t so already, try to get close to the same amount of blogs in each category. Don’t have too many topics and don’t have too few. You don’t want to be overwhelming, but you don’t want to be redundant either. You should try to stay around 15-20 topics to expand from, choosing only information that is important and helpful for customers.
Icing on the Cake: Aside from great content, imagery really helps a blog stand out and grab people’s attention. Use royalty free imagery, take your own photos, or create something from scratch to enhance the reading experience. Videos are also an option. Also include social media buttons on your website (if applicable). Call-to-action buttons are very useful to include in your blog. They give readers a chance to contact you immediately after learning about a service or product they are interested in. Including links to other pages either on your website or blog is also a great way to increase traffic and keep potential customers roaming your site.
In summary, your optimized blog should be focused on answering a question that a lot of people have. It should have a captivating title, an enhancing image to draw people in, and great content to keep them reading. Blue Frog Marketing in Des Moines can help you produce a blog that will serve as ongoing communication with customers. We write professional, high quality content for business websites, combined with keyword optimization and other SEO strategies to attract and engage potential customers.