The humble blog has become a powerful tool in any company’s marketing strategy. It’s a great way to try and rank for different keywords, prove your authority within a particular niche and provide useful content for social media and email marketing.
Blogs can be a creative place for your company to show personality without impacting the overall branding. Blogs don’t have to be as formal as some other marketing channels – in most cases the more informal you are, the more you connect with your readers.
Create Content for Search and Your Reader
Content should be at the centre of your local online marketing strategy. It’s the key to every other marketing strategy that you’ll more than likely be running. Content is what helps search engines determine where your website appears in the rankings.
Your content should be written for your audience first. It should grab and hold their attention to keep them reading all the way to the end. However, be sure to include the keywords that your audience and search engines will come across your content. This shouldn’t impact on how the content reads. You don’t want an article that is almost impossible to read because it has been keywords stuff to try and get it to rank. Even if it did rank, your readers will switch off because of how hard it is to read.
For help with your online content or business marketing needs call 1300 642 633
Create Fresh Content
Creating fresh content for your inbound marketing strategy not only creates more avenues for potential readers to come across your company but it provides indicators to search engines that your content is up-to-date and your website is regularly active. Now, this may not be a huge factor for search engines if the content you are creating is evergreen – the content that doesn’t really go out of date.
Create Content from FAQs
This is a great strategy to help your website get found. If you have come across a number of questions write an article. The chances are that potential customers are searching for those questions. Why not be the business that answers them?
This approach can help you constantly attract visitors from search engines who are specifically seeking the information that your content answers.
Article Length
The length of a blog article is a delicate balancing act. Too long and your readers might not get all the way through to making the decision to purchase. Too short and you might not get enough information across. However, there’s nothing that says you can’t chop and change between the two. And being the internet, there are no hard rules to how long a blog has to be.
A good rule is usually nothing shorter than 500. The biggest thing is to write for your audience, then write for your intended purpose – whether to inform, sell or promote.
A comprehensive “how to” guide on a specific topic in your industry is a strong indicator to search engines about how relevant your site is to certain keywords. Whereas a short article can be much more persuasive and easier for your readers to digest.
Great Content Helps to Build Trust Signals
The more authority signals you have for your site, the more favourably search engines will look upon it. Content that provides real value to readers will always perform better than content that is shallow. Content that is full of great information will help you rank for long tail keywords because this content will naturally mention these words. It may not happen for every article but over time, you will slowly build a bank of trusted, searchable content.
Get other thought leaders and influencers within your industry to write a guest post. Ask if you can write a guest post on their site. As their websites are already an authority within your industry a link to your site from them will only help to boost the trust signals. It tells search engines that you are someone to be taken seriously, that you know what you’re talking about.
Turn Blog Posts into a Comprehensive Guide
If you’ve completed a number of posts on a specific topic you can combine these into complete guides. There are two ways in which you can use this. You could create a dedicated page that you try to rank in search engines. Or you could use it as a PDF giveaway to help increase your email subscriptions.
For help with your online content or business marketing needs call 1300 642 633