A business blog helps to drive traffic to your website, showcases your knowledge and authority, and can help convert those casual readers into paying customers.
But you know that because you’re already working hard to create new high-quality content that resonates with your audience, aren’t you?
If you’re averting your eyes and feeling slightly embarrassed at this point, don’t be. Many businesses just like yours aren’t using the power of their blog to get them real results, or they’re making many minor mistakes that could have a huge impact.
But don’t worry. Just by making a few minor changes, you can soon take your blog from average to outstanding. Here are our tips to help you do just that.
1. Focus on your audience
The first thing you need to do when creating content for your blog is to make sure that you’re writing about things that your audience genuinely care about and will find useful.
That way, you’ll know that your content is highly likely to be successful from the moment you hit that ‘publish’ button, and you won’t be just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping that it sticks.
You’ll also be far more likely to get engagement in the form of comments, likes and, because you’re creating useful content, your audience is far more likely to like and trust you too.
To do this, you need to find out exactly who your audience is and what they want. The best ways to do this include:
- Creating buyer personas
- Gathering customer feedback
- Doing surveys
- Looking at your FAQs
- Reviewing your website metrics
- Researching keywords
From this data, you can narrow down those topics that they most want to learn and then create your content based on these ideas.
2. Create high quality content
These days, it’s not enough to sit down and fire off 500 words of content on a randomly chosen topic. If you want to make your content get results for your business, you need to make sure what you’re sharing is good.
Each piece of content you publish on the internet should be high quality, add maximum value, and showcase your expertise.
This is what Google is looking for when it ranks your website, it’s what your business needs when it comes to building a strong brand, and, most importantly, it’s one of the factors that will keep bringing customers to your (virtual) door.
Some tips you can use to do this include:
- Choosing a topic your audience will love (see the last tip)
- Make your writing interesting
- Speak to your customers in their language
- Check for spelling mistakes, typos and grammatical errors
- Always write for readers, not search engines
3. Be consistent
How often do you currently post new content? If you’re like many businesses you aren’t posting as often as you could be.
Although this is completely understandable given the stressful few months we’ve just had, this sporadic posting isn’t doing your search rankings or the popularity of your business blog any favours.
Research has shown that posting new content on a regular basis is key to content marketing success. It’s what gets you noticed by the search engines, what helps you to stand out on social media, and what shows your customers that you care about your audience.
If you can commit to publishing on a certain day each week or month, you’re also more likely to find time in your schedule to get it done, or hire someone to do it for you.
How often you actually post is completely up to you. While the general rule of thumb is ‘the more often, the better’, this is unlikely to be sustainable if you’re a solopreneur or don’t have a large marketing team.
As content marketing experts, HubSpot say, “The frequency of blog posts depends on what’s best for your company. Smaller businesses have found comfort and success posting one to four times a week, while larger companies can push out daily and, sometimes, multiple daily posts.”
The key is to find out what works best for you, then stick to it.
4. Use keywords
Keywords are those words that a user types into the search box when they’re looking for information, and they can be extremely useful when you create blog content.
When the keywords searched match the words found on your website or blog post, Google is more likely to send this person your way.
So how do you know what keywords to include?
Luckily there are a variety of tools that can help you find the keywords that are relevant to your audience. You can then use these words to guide the topics you choose to write about, as well as including them in the posts themselves.
We can also help you research and optimise your keywords and other SEO assets – contact us for help.
But a word of warning – don’t overdo it. If you try to squeeze in too many keywords, you could get penalised by Google.
Instead, keep it natural, and don’t think you need to include the exact same words – synonyms are also effective.
5. Add meta descriptions
If you were to type the keywords ‘Fibre Marketing Cheltenham’ into your search engine, you’d get the following result:
As you can see from the screenshot, you’ll see the domain name at the top followed by a nice big title (meta title) then a short description (meta description).
Both the title and the description are known as meta tags.
Every page on your website should have them if you want to improve your online performance. They can substantially improve your SEO efforts, capture your user’s attention, and attract more readers when used correctly.
So, if you haven’t already tweaked yours, now is the perfect time.
6. Format your blog post correctly
With the average attention span getting shorter, it’s more important than ever to make your blog posts as user-friendly as possible.
Fail to do this and your reader might just take a look at your website, find it hard to use, and then click away to your competitor’s website. They won’t bother to read your blog posts because it’s just too much work.
The good news is that it’s very easy to solve this problem. You just need to format your blog post correctly. Here are some tips:
- Avoid using big blocks of text on your websites
- Use short paragraphs
- Split up your content using subheadings
- Use bullet points and number lists
- Use subheadings (H1, H2, etc)
- Include plenty of white space.
7. Learn from your mistakes
It can often take time to see an improvement in search performance and customer engagement, so don’t get frustrated or give up if you don’t get the results you were hoping for.
Be patient and you will often see improvements. If not, simply take a look at your website metrics and see what feedback you can get on what you’ve been doing so far.
For example:
- How many people are visiting your blog?
- Are they engaging with it or just clicking away?
- Which piece of content is performing the best and why do you think this is?
- How about the worst performing?
- What does customer feedback tell you?
By using this information, you can tweak your approach so you can start creating the right kind of content for your reader.
As Barack Obama said “The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.”
Summary
With the coronavirus restrictions starting to ease, now is the perfect time to improve your business blog.
By consistently posting high quality content that you know your reader will find useful, including keywords, getting the formatting right, and tweaking your metadata, you can boost your search rankings and grow your customer base.
If this doesn’t work, continue to make improvements and your efforts will pay off in the long run.
