There’s little point writing a blog if nobody reads it. Mark Rushworth, search engine optimisation (SEO) manager at agency Blueclaw, gives ten tips for better business blogging.
1. Make sure your website links directly to your blog
In an ideal world your website’s blog should reside in an easy to remember address such as website.com/blog/. Make sure you have links to this page from your website’s home page or better still, link to it from your main website navigation to ensure that the search engines can view your content. As your blog’s default installation doesn’t link back to your website’s home page by default, make sure there is some way to navigate back into your main website.
2. Create search friendly URLs
When clicking around your blog, does the website address bar display URLs like website.com/blog/?id=123454&cat=34244? If so then your website isn’t correctly configured to maximise its search engine performance in Google and other search engines. Simply log into your control panel and click to Settings > Permalinks to fix this. In the box labelled ‘Custom Structure’ enter /%category%/%postname/. Now your website page addresses will look more like this: website.com/blog/news/great-news-for-our-customers/
3. Do your keyword research
Matching your blog posts to keywords that could potentially drive traffic is one of the major benefits of blogging as it enables you to attract custom for terms that would be difficult to work into a corporate websites. You can even back-track through old posts and edit them to be more effective.
4. Work your keywords into your post titles
Post titles are by far the most important factor of your blog posts. In addition to making them inspirational and informative, try and insert keywords from your keyword research to help improve their search engine effectiveness.
5. Don’t kill your slugs
A slug is the address of your blog post on the site, such as website.com/blog/this-is-a-slug/. Slugs are typically created from your article title, but many blog systems truncate slugs making them unreadable by removing words like ‘and’, ‘or’ etc. Keep your slugs small and if possible use the keyword to which you have aligned the target article.
6. Keep your ego in check
Don’t just write about your business. Google prefers blog content that talks about newsworthy topics within your industry. Remember you can and should link out to third party websites which contain the subject of, or reinforce your blog post’s content – just don’t link to your competitors (news sources are fine) and use the anchor text (the clickable text in a link) ‘read more’ as opposed to using a keyword.
7. Link to your content
When content has been discussed that relates back to your products or services make sure you add a link back into your commercial content. This helps Google identify this as the most credible page on your site for each keyword. Just make sure that your links are consistent and that only one ‘product page’ is related to any one keyword.
8. A picture speaks a thousand words
Don’t forget to add images into your blog posts. This helps to break up your text and potentially makes the blog post look more considered. Just make sure you don’t use copyright images, instead look to sites like FreeImages where you can download many royalty free images.
9. Kill the competition
Make sure your blog categories and blog posts don’t compete with the commercial content of your website: for example, don’t have a blue widget post or category and a page on your website selling blue widgets. This helps Google identify what page is most relevant to what topic and helps keep your commercial content stronger than your supporting blog content.
10. Think like a news broadcast
Google loves long blog posts. To help keep your blog posts as lengthy as possible with a minimum of effort think like a news broadcast. News broadcasts typically tell you a story in three sections, an introduction, the news item and finally a summary of what has been said. Repeating this formula in your blog posts means you can easily improve your keyword use in your blog and provide informative content.
Bonus – Check your Google Search Console account and see what keywords drive traffic to your blog posts. Then revisit these posts and change the Titles to broaden or tighten the keyword relevancy to suit. Just make sure your slugs remain the same.
Further reading on SEO tips for small businesses
