How to Use Your Blog As a Content Marketing & SEO Tool
Social media isn’t just limited to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat – blogs are an essential medium of communication for your brand and your audience.
More than filling the content holes that Instagram photos and skimmable tweets provide, blog articles tell more of your company’s attributes & latest news, delivering more in-depth value to your fans and customers. By blogging, you place a spotlight on your unique brand strengths, effectively separating you from your competitors.
Blogging is a proven method to boost your online presence (and in turn, your SEO), connect with your audience, and establish your reliability.
To get the most out of your blog, here are a few tips to keep in mind:
Know your blog’s audience
Your audience is your number one priority, and your posts should be tailored to them. Don’t use advanced jargon if your audience is consumers, save it if you’re writing for the Wall Street Journal. That means tailoring to an audience – not a subject matter. That opens up the floodgates to share more information than ‘How to buy ads’ or ‘How to boost SEO.’ Satisfy your targeted audience by giving them the power to solve their problems. Read their comments and fulfill their needs. Niche doesn’t always cut it – unless that’s what your business fits strictly within. Aim for a well-rounded blog that follows a theme to generate more readership within your target audience.
Post quality content
Think bigger. Quality supersedes quantity. Businesses can quickly exhaust all their resources by attempting to post content at every hour of the day, every day of the week. How will you make your content shine through? By simply being better. Don’t throw around content like confetti, make it engaging, informational and most of all, beneficial. Create superior infographics, videos, how-to’s, and explainers that your audience looks forward to reading it in the morning. Be timely with your blog – your content should be relevant and useful to your audience at that point in time. Why is this Blogging Tips post timely? Because blogging is on the rise – you’ll be in awe once you see the sheer number of blogs written just today.
Be consistent with your blog
We are creatures of habit – we wake up at the same time every day and go to bed at the same time every night (if you’re lucky). We also want to read our content at the same time every day. Being consistent with your blog posts makes you a reliable source for your audience. As you gain subscribers to your blog, they gain expectations that you need to meet by giving them novel content. The more consistent you are, the more likely that people are going to come back for more. Make a schedule and stick to it.
Keywords, tags, and SEO
To really take your blogs to their peak level in a search, it’s important to do your research and understand the top search terms and criteria of your audience. In writing your blog, incorporate the top search terms, phrases and keywords and be sure to finish off with best performing tags. By creating more keywords and tags, you create more opportunities to climb up those search engines. Many blog platforms allow you to view the “grade” of your blog before you post to optimize it to its fullest.
Also link your blog to your website and resources with hyperlinks. This practice both advances your SEO and benefits your readers who wish to dive deeper into the topic, or in ecommerce marketing, link to learn more about a product or service.
Promote your blog on social media
Create connection between your company’s website, blog and social media. Blogs are highly searchable, however they should also be shared in your social media and enewsletters. Placing your blog posts on social is a great way to hear exactly what your audience has to say, generate blog subscribers and get them more engaged, which is important to Google and Facebook’s algorithms. Hear what they have to say and respond back – encourage conversation.
Blogs do take up quite some time, but the investment is worth the return. When in doubt, seek the experience of Into the Blue for content marketing that produces results.
Check out more Into the Blue’s blog here, and let’s talk.
