Giving your blog content a refresh is easier than you may think. It’s all about understanding what your audience wants (and needs) and tailoring your writing to complement that. Here, we’ve put together some top tips on how to refresh your blog content – to keep those potential customers engaged, increase the chances of click-through and sales and create refreshing, innovative content.
Understand what you need to include
You’ve no doubt dabbled in keywords before but if you haven’t done any keyword research for a while – check out this guide from Moz if you have never done this – it may be time to load up AdWords and check out what’s popular.
Low hanging fruit – such as keywords with lower searches – is a good option. Once you feature a blog that targets these you should receive more organic search traffic, as there is less competition to contend with. Of course, the important, high search volume keywords should be included too – but it’s so important they’re featured naturally.
The search term ‘sell house fast’ may have thousands of searches against it but that doesn’t mean it can be naturally featured in content. Adding the word ‘your’ – sell your house fast – instantly makes it human and still captures the search.
Decide what you want the blog to achieve
Is the blog there to inspire people? Build engagement? Or do you simply want it to act as a tool to encourage people onto the site and into your sales funnel? Understanding what you want from your blog is one of the key steps when refreshing it.
Put together a plan
Many refer to this as your blog strategy and basically means deciding what titles to write and when. You can fill this with evergreen content, that targets search, as well as fun pieces that talk about national days or events going on in your industry. Try to stick to this and ensure that once a piece is live you share on every one of your business’s social media platforms too.
Write for the reader
Search is important – we all know this – but what’s more important is ensuring you don’t litter your blog content with salesy, keyword heavy sentences. Matt O’Connor, of copywriting specialists Conversion Gods, refers to these as ‘dark sentences’.
He points out that many of us think we need to write robotically, caring only about generating the right sales words when you should be writing ‘how you talk’. This creates more engaging, relevant copy that those people landing on your blog will actually enjoy. It breeds familiarity with a brand and encourages the reader to return.
Learn what your potential customers actually want to read
Perhaps you’ve received comments on other blog posts, asking further questions or have spotted this on competitor’s blogs. This offers you an opportunity to create content that is tailored towards answering their questions – giving them more reason to stay on your blog and perhaps click through to another post or even the main site.
Prepare to be reactive
It’s important that your blog content taps into what’s happening now. Evergreen content works too but you’ll capture search around an event or news story if you jump on it right away and respond to it with a post. It could be an opinion piece or a prediction style response but getting it up on the blog and sharing on social is a great way of encouraging more hits. Add this type of content into your strategy.
Take some time to rework old content
Definitely DON’T delete your old blog posts. A post written three years ago could be revamped to make it relevant to things ongoing now, this means it’s still had time to gain traction on the site but reworking it to include more relevant keywords or up to date statistics could see it picked up again. Internal linking to older, relevant posts in new content is also a good idea – giving people more insight and more content to sink their teeth into.
Invest in content success tools
There are a number of tools out there that can help you write better content. Grammarly can be used to improve the general readability of your content and remove typos while a tool such as Ryte Content Success can comb your content and suggest better ways of optimising it. Look into a few of these tools to support you, next time you sit down to write a post.
Now you should have the confidence to give that blog a refresh. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different content styles – add imagery, create graphs and charts and see what gets the most engagement then incorporate this more in the future. Blogs are a trial and error for every industry – what works for one may not work for another – take on these tips and your site will bring in the traffic you need.