HOW TO TAKE YOUR BLOG TO THE NEXT LEVEL
And Why Blogging is Important to Your Marketing Strategy!
A blogger writing about the importance of blogging for your business - pretty meta, right? But really - who knows better than us? We work with all kinds of brands to build and upkeep their blogs because it is an integral part of marketing content and strategy.
If you’re ready to start a blog, you came to the right place. We will give you the basics on strategy and how to take your blog to the next level.
The Benefits of Blogging
Why is blogging important to your business?
Thought Leader - Demonstrates your expertise, credibility, and trust through quality content such as how-to’s, expert advice, and reviews. By offering valuable information, you’re positioning your brand to become a leader in your industry.
Search Engine Optimization - Improves the SEO of your website because you are posting fresh content, increasing your usage of keywords, and building your expertise, credibility, and trust. These are all key factors taken into account by Google when it is evaluating your ranking in the search results. Better SEO means you are more likely to show up higher in the search results organically, which brings traffic to your blog.
Conversion - Creates opportunities for conversion, which means you earn money. Blog posts (when done correctly) are a valuable, no-cost offering to your audience that can guide them through the purchase funnel and lead them to your for-purchase offerings. An example we love from Terakeet:
“ A healthcare company looking to improve team collaboration and efficiency may land on Slack’s blog post The Ultimate Guide to Effective Collaboration in the Workplace. They’re not aware they’re looking for a digital communication tool yet. So a “Buy Slack Now!” CTA probably wouldn’t convert. A study on workplace communication, however? Heck yeah. The healthcare company reads through the study and realizes that a digital communication tool is exactly what they need. Now they’re in the “Consideration” phase. The only roadblock? HIPAA laws. So they start looking around for how healthcare providers use digital communication tools without violating HIPAA. There are tons of tools out there. But their research leads them back to Slack: How Health-Care Teams Can Maintain HIPAA Compliance Within Slack. With all this new and highly targeted information, they’re convinced Slack is their number one choice. They’ve moved into the “Decision” phase. All they need now is that final push. Add in a “Buy Now!” or “Get Started!” CTA and…boom!”
Marketing Collateral - Builds your library of content that can be shared across social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. Not only does this give you more opportunities to stay active online, but it also creates a loop of traffic back to your website.
Blogging Basics
Understand your target audience and define your brand voice
Knowing this informs what kind of content you should be blogging about and how you’ll speak to your ideal reader to build a connection with them. Ask yourself questions such as:
What are my audience’s pain points?
What do they care about?
Who are my current customers?
What is my brand mission and values?
What kind of relationship do I want to emulate with my customer? Trusted friend, sister, colleague, teacher, neighbor?
Build Your Content Planner
Fresh content is a big factor in determining where you rank in the search engine results so you want to plan out a schedule of content that you can stick to every month for consistency. Planning allows you to think ahead and prepare for generating buzz before product releases, offering solutions during different holidays, promoting seasonal items and addressing life events like graduation or the back-to-school frenzy.
Take it an extra step by finding the time of the year that your priority keywords are most popular. This really fine-tunes your calendar to optimize conversions by releasing content when it is most likely to have an impact. We suggest using a tool like Google Trends to find the ideal times for your keywords.
Content planning can be really time consuming and difficult to manage for a solopreneur with many other tasks on their plate. If this sounds like you, let us know! We are 3 creative women with lots of experience creating content planners for our clients and lots of passion around supporting small businesses.
Research Keywords for SEO
To identify the best keywords for each blog post, first review your audience, your competition and your own goals. This is the context you need to be thinking in when determining keywords. Then ask yourself:
Why would someone search for this keyword?
What are they trying to accomplish?
Where are they in the customer journey?
Which content format would best answer their search query?
How else might they phrase this search?
Once you’ve found your targeted keywords, make sure they appear in the content of your blog post along with contextually relevant terms. Continue reinforcing these keywords to Google by including keywords in your metadata and organizational headings like H1s and H2s (H1 is your title, H2 is your subtitle).
You may be asking what is metadata?
When talking about blogs, metadata is information that gives your content more context and helps visitors use your site more effectively. For example, blog posts can display metadata such as author names, categories, and tags. We mentioned including keywords in your blog metadata but use them lightly! Instead of jamming in keywords, focus on telling the search audience exactly why they need to read the post. What problems will they solve? What will they learn?
How can you bring your blog to the next level?
You may have started a blog already but you’re asking yourself, why aren’t I seeing the conversion or engagement that I’m looking for? We provide our pro tips below to make your blog more targeted and more effective in creating conversions.
Pro Tip #1: Identify buyer personas and make specific content for them.
We discussed understanding your target audience in the beginning, but only at a basic level. Creating personas for the different individuals that will be attracted to your brand is deeper and more specific. Think of it as creating a character in a story. You want to identify things like their background, finances, online behaviors, hopes and dreams, worries and fears, what they are looking for, what makes their life easier, what influences them, what a day in their life looks like, and what other brand affinities they have.
Typically, going this in-depth requires a fair bit of research into your competition, your current customers, and trends that are affecting your industry. This is another step in the marketing process that we excel at because we are all about alignment and attracting the right audience. Reach out to us so we can set up a meeting to build the characters in your story.
Once you create the characters that will be attracted to your brand, you know exactly what kind of blog posts they will want to read at the beginning, middle and end of their buying process.
Pro Tip #2: Organize your blog into categories and link between your blog posts.
Site organization is important because it helps your SEO and makes it easier for your reader to navigate to related content, increasing the amount of content that they consume. The more content they consume on your site in a short period of time, the faster they will get to know your brand and discover you are an authority on the subject they care about, which builds trust. You can link to the blog categories on the side via a simple navigation style like Whole Foods’ blog. Or you can create different sections and use an image-driven navigation system like Slack’s blog.
In addition to organization, readers can find more related content that you publish from links that you put right into your blog post.
Pro Tip #3: Commit to great content!
300-word fluff pieces are not going to generate leads, follows, or purchases on your website. Instead, go for informative, helpful topics like advice, reviews and how-to’s. Mix up the format of your blog content to include visual content, like infographics or videos, in addition to text.
Hiring amazing writers that can create content that is creative, interesting, fun or important will make a big impact on the success of your blog. Consider working with a creative agency like us!
Pro Tip #4: Get creative with your CTA’s (Call to Action).
Utilize visual call-outs and CTAs instead of sticking to traditional text. Make sure they flow with the blog and test each link to make sure it’s functional and smooth for the UX (user experience). Always change up the CTAs to match the context on the page.
Pro Tip #5: Keep in mind that credibility is really important to your blog’s SEO.
Google values websites that demonstrate expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T). One way you can boost your E-A-T is through your author. If you have an author and a reviewer for your blog post, link their names back to a bio page that describes their credentials, expertise and shares their website or social links. In addition,use citations and footnotes to build trust in the content of the blog post.
One thing to note: credibility isn’t always measured by formal expertise but by life experience as well, so don’t count that out. However, for certain topics it is more important. In Google’s eyes, a thorough medical article written by an experienced doctor on the Mayo Clinic website is much more valuable than a random blog post dispensing unverified medical advice. However, Google accepts less format expertise too.
Pro Tip #6: Try getting backlinks from other sources.
Backlinks are when another source inserts a link to your website, web page or web directory into their website. When this link is clicked, it drives traffic back to your web resource. Bingo!
A couple simple ways to get backlinks:
Distribute your blog to your network like associations you are a member of, social networks or a newsletter network.
Reach out to reputable websites and publications about your value offerings. For example, let’s say you sell guitar accessories. You can reach out to a publication that is guitar focused and ask them if they'd like to write a review on your guitar product.
To read more on how to get backlinks, visit this article from SemRush (also, this is an example of a backlink that we are giving to SemRush).
Now you have expert advice (and maybe a small headache), what’s next?
If you want to pick our brain to prepare to start your blog yourself, or feel overwhelmed and want to have a conversation about what you just read, or ask further questions, book a marketing therapy session with us.
You have great ideas, you know what your skills are but maybe you need help organizing and narrowing your focus to take the best next steps. We can be your sounding board, your business partner for an hour, to really flush out ideas to reach clarity and confidence in your next steps. This is our invitation for you to dump your questions on us!
Whether you’re on the DIY route or want to hire us as part of the team - we want to support you in any capacity that we can because we love seeing small businesses succeed.
Congratulations on taking this next step in growing your brand to meet your business objectives. We are cheering you on from the blogosphere and here in person when you need us :)
Let's have a no-obligation chat for 15 minutes and discover how we can elevate your brand. Limited slots available.