Marketers who have made blogging a priority are 13 times more likely to receive a positive return on investment—and nearly 60 percent of SEO professionals report blogging as a top inbound marketing tactic.
Blogging is an important part of your digital marketing strategy. It helps to:
· Boost your company’s visibility online through search engine optimization.
· Position yourself and your business as a subject matter expert.
· Give you access to a global audience.
· Establish credibility for potential consumers.
· Amplify awareness and recognition of your brand.
Put an end to writer’s block
If blogging is part of your digital marketing strategy, you might find it difficult to constantly develop new topics. A strong blog topic should be created with the reader in mind and be useful, timely, informative and simple.
The first step to coming up with new blog topics is the brainstorm. Set aside time each month for this—and don’t be afraid to ask a friend or colleague for help if you need some fresh ideas. Keep a notebook handy or a file on your phone for ideas. You never know when inspiration will hit!
RELATED: Tell better brand stories on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and your blog.
Create an editorial calendar to clearly lay out your ideas and develop regular features, such as a monthly product review or bi-weekly recaps of industry news.
By planning three, six, nine or 12 months at a time, you can see the overall structure of your content topics. Looking ahead also enable you to include upcoming events important to your organization, industry and community.
If you’re still stuck, use these additional ideas to find inspiration:
- Conduct and review keyword research.
- Look at your websites’ analytics to see which posts have been popular, and come up with a new angle to the same topic.
- Set a Google Alert with industry keywords, then scan headlines for inspiration. You can also use this to pull several articles together into a “roundup” post.
- Think about problems your readers face and write a post with suggestions that solve them.
It also helps to change up the format of your blog posts. Create a list post and then write a “how-to” article that showcases your insight, tips and tricks. You can also interview industry leaders or employees, or write a post of curated content (just make sure you credit original sources).
The anatomy of an outstanding post
Once you’ve come up with topics, think about how to make your posts powerful for your readers as well as search engines. Here are a few tips:
1. Spend time on the title. It should catch your readers’ attention, clearly explain what the post is about and tell your readers why they should care. Be concise—about six words is ideal—and include a keyword for SEO. You might want to write the headline last so that it will naturally form based on your content.
2. When it comes to the content, don’t write just to write. Make sure each post provides value to your readers and reflects your organization’s voice or personality. In addition to writing well with a clear message, include current statistics, trends and industry news. You can also make it timely by relating the post to current events or the current time of year.
Each post should include a call to action, too. Ask your readers to comment, share, contact you, sign up for your newsletter, etc.
3. Consider your blog post’s formatting. Strong content isn’t enough for readers’ short attention spans. Make sure your post is easy to digest with sub-headlines and numbered and bulleted lists. Break up chunky paragraphs with quotes or images and add charts and tables to support your content.
4. Include at least one visual. Research shows that articles with images receive 94 percent more total views than those without.
Select clear, crisp high-res images that are engaging and related to the post’s content. Make sure you have a right to use any images you use.
Expand your reach with SEO
It’s not just enough to write posts consumers want to read—you almost must employ SEO tactics. Follow these best practices as part of your blogging efforts:
5. Consider frequency. For strong SEO, it’s important to be consistent (posts going live the same day of the week and time of day). Active blogs engage readers better, which translates into better search engine rankings. With this in mind, publish new blog posts a minimum of once per week.
6. Incorporate keywords. Not sure which keywords to use? Moz and Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner can be helpful tools. Once you have your keywords, sprinkle them throughout the post in places where it seems natural (3-5 times is plenty). Also include at least one keyword in the first sentence and in the post’s conclusion.
To get the most out of your keywords, make sure you include keywords in these areas of your post:
- The title
- Sub-heads/section headers
- Photo captions
- Image file names
- The URL of the post
- The meta-description
7. Think about length. Keep the following length guidelines in mind for various parts of your blog post:
- Title: 50-60 characters, or about 6 words long.
- Body: The most recent research says to aim for about 1,500 words.
- Meta description (the quick summary under the title): 150-160 characters or 1-2 sentences.
8. Format for SEO. Format your blog posts using these tips:
- Use header tags. The post’s title should be H1, but after that use header tags H2-H6 as often as you’d like. This is a great way to break up the content so it’s easy for the reader to use, in addition to the SEO benefit.
- Include internal links. These can help readers find other interesting articles on your website, plus they’re good for SEO.
- Use high-quality outbound links. By linking to other decently-optimized websites with information relevant to your blog post, Google will recognize your website as one with strong links.
9. Look at analytics. You won’t know which posts are bringing traffic to your website unless you track the data. Install Google Analytics to get helpful information about who’s visiting various pages of your website and for how long, and then look at what the data tells you.
Emily Sidley is the senior director of publicity for Three Girls Media. A version of this article originally appeared on the firm’s blog, and was previously published on PR Daily in September 2016.
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