Blogging is integral to any company’s website, but employing a few clever tricks can help you boost the value of your small business blog posts even further.
It doesn’t have to be time-consuming, either – try out the tips below and watch your numbers grow.
Target your audience
Have an image of your target reader in your head. It should be specific: think age, gender, nationality, social class, interests and hobbies.
Let’s take a reader of an investment website as an example. Mark is 57 years old and lives in East Sussex. He’s a white married male with two children in their 20s and is interested in classic cars.
Hold the picture of that person in your head when you’re writing posts. Does it relate to them and would they want to read it?
Long-tail keywords
Aim for long-tail keywords when targeting your post. Long-tail keywords are three or four words long and much more specific than ‘fat head’ keywords which are one or two words. Fat head keywords have higher search volume but are much more competitive. Though they’re more niche, people using long-tail keywords are more likely to be closer to making a purchase and thus a more committed customer.
Coming back to Mark from East Sussex, an example of a long-tail keyword (or search term) which would be relevant to him is “how to save money on buying a car”, rather than just “buying a car”.
You may end up ranking for other synonymous keywords/keyphrases too – in this case, words like “saving money when purchasing a car” or “save money when buying an automobile”.
Aim to include the keyword in your headline, promo and introductory paragraph.
Publish blog posts regularly
Posting on a regular basis is conducive to building a loyal audience. If you post content on particular days or times, the audience know when to come back to visit your site. Not posting on a regular basis could frustrate your readers and push them away.
Google also likes consistency and will reward you by placing you higher in the search page rankings.
When you’re setting out your content schedule, it’s important to establish what you can stick to. It could be daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly or whatever days of the week work for you.
Variety is key
Writing about your specialism helps to position you as an authority in your field. However, it’s unwise to talk about the same topics from the similar angles repeatedly. Writing duplicate or similar content puts you at risk of cannibalising content on your site which may already be performing well.
If you’re struggling for new ideas, keep up with what’s happening in your industry and take note of reader comments, questions and requests.
Offer value, not a sales pitch
Readers may expect some sort of product promotion to be weaved into a blog post, but they’ll want information that will benefit them too. If you go ballistic on the sales push, readers will go elsewhere. Offering advice will satisfy them and make them more likely to return to your site. It’ll also help your status as an industry authority.
Use multimedia in posts
Google scans posts and prioritises those with multimedia such as images, videos and tweets. Even if a photo is a little blurry, it’s better to include it than not. Blog posts with multimedia get more social media shares too.
You can frame important facts and statistics as shareable snippets. Write them in bold, use it in a drop quote or include a social media share button next to them.
Calls to action
You’ll know these already. They generally appear at the end of articles and invite readers to comment, sign up to a newsletter, click on a related article or donate to a charity.
For these it’s best to be as specific and direct as possible.
Post on social
After you’ve finished your post, put it on social so that your followers can see it. With Twitter you should Post it two or three times as the lifespan of a tweet is so short.
Use relevant hashtags and tag any individuals or companies mentioned in the article – they can retweet if to their followers, expanding the article’s reach.
Platforms like Buffer and Hootsuite let you schedule social media posts in advance so you can do your week’s repeat posts in one go.
Understand your readers’ behaviour
To help you figure out what content to write in future, focus on the analytics. Google Analytics is free and lets you see who has visited your site, which pages they’ve visited, how long they spent on the page and whether they clicked onto any other articles on your site.
You can also find out who your search audience are by age, gender, geographical location and other demographics.
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