For any business owner, blogging is one of the best ways to increase your lead generation, build traffic, rank organically in a search engine, and develop brand awareness. However, blogging isn’t just writing content about your business and posting it on your website.
Since your blog is an incredibly important digital marketing tool, there is a lot of work that goes into ensuring you have compelling, engaging, and SEO-optimized content on your website. Here are some of our favourite content marketing tips and tricks to help better optimize your blog content.
Choose an unusual topic
The Internet is a big place, and there are tons of blogs out there just ready to be clicked on. So the one thing that will make your blog stick out from the others is to choose a killer topic to write about. Not only will creating a clickbait-worthy article make you stand out compared to your competitors, the more likely it is that your prospective clients will share it on social media and spend more time exploring on your website.
As a way to figure out the best topic, do a quick Google search on the idea you have in mind. Take what topics are already written about and flip them around to give a different spin on the article. For example, if you see generic articles titled “ Home Improvement 101”, create something that is focused on how new homeowners can invest in specific home improvement repairs to help get a higher ROI on their home. Notice how these two articles fit under the same content topic umbrella, but the latter is different and more specific.
Experiment with your keywords
We know that keyword research is pivotal to any SEO strategy. However, there are some ways you can experiment with your keywords that have the potential to reap great results. Some examples include:
- Using your main keyword in your title and meta description.
- Using LSI keywords. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, which are related keywords to the topic of your article. So if your main keyword is HVAC cleaning some LSI keywords would be HVAC services, when to get your HVAC cleaned, and HVAC fall cleaning.
- Change up your topic tags. Having the same keywords in each of your topic tags can look spammy and not organic.
- Including your keywords in your image’s alt-text.
- Using the keywords on social media as hashtags. Remember, there are more ways for a prospective client to find a keyword than via a search engine!
Make your blog easy to read
Not only do search engines value relevant content, but they also want to make sure the blog can be widely received by many. This means making the content easy to read— after all, prospective clients are coming to your website to gain easy information on your service and industry. This does depend on your niche, however, so always think of your readers when you are writing.
For example, if you are writing technical language meant to be dissected by lawyers, the language used may be a bit more nuanced than what a home improvement blog would publish. As a general rule of thumb, try to keep your blog at a sixth-grade reading level.
Don’t be afraid to link internally
It is widely known that backlinking is a great way to boost your website’s domain rating and position on a SERP. However, it is also important for your website to have internal links to your other pages. So if you are writing about a topic you have already touched on before, don’t be afraid to link to this other page on your new blog post. Doing this will keep your readers on your website for longer, show the search engine bots that what you are writing is relevant to your industry, boost your website’s link profile, and help your website show up on other correlated searches.
The best practices are easy to learn but can be difficult to implement systematically – especially so if you hold many other responsibilities for building and managing a business. In that case, you may be best off seeking help from a marketing agency that offers content marketing services.
With these tips and tricks in mind, you will be on your way to having blog content that will do wonders for improving your SEO. So go forth and blog!