Did you know small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth than those that don’t? These businesses also see 67% more leads on a monthly basis. There are many benefits of consistently blogging, you can generate more traffic to your website, increase SEO, and gain relevance in your community. Any type of business can benefit from prioritizing a consistent blogging strategy.
Build an SEO-Friendly Blogging Strategy
When it comes to blogging, you can’t just start anywhere – establishing a blogging strategy that is equal parts strategic and actionable will be paramount to growing your company’s blog and increased SEO. While there are numerous aspects to keep in mind, we’ve broken it down to the five most important factors when building SEO through your blog.
1. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize!
Have you installed the Yoast plugin? If not, go ahead and install this plugin immediately! Yoast allows you to add an SEO title, meta-description, and focus key phrase to your WordPress website. The plugin will also let you know if your SEO is good, okay, or bad. Though you’ll want to optimize every page of your website, you’ll especially want to make sure this isn’t being missed for blog posts.
Remember your focus keyphrase should be included in your SEO title and meta-description, as well as throughout the blog content. Include the focus key phrase in H1 and H2 headings, and throughout the content. Likewise, you’ll want to make sure your blog images are also optimized through alt-tags.
2. Choose the Right Key Phrases
Wondering how to choose a focus key phrase? You’ll want your key phrase to be relevant to your blog topic, and less than five words (we love long-tail key phrases, as they are easier to rank for). We love Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest key phrase tool to find key phrases. You’ll want to select the key phrases of a high search volume and low competition, as these are easier to rank for.
3. Include Plenty of Links
A great way to build SEO is internal and external linking. Whether you’re referencing older blogs, a specific service, or your contact page, you’ll want to link directly to that word. Avoid using click-bait language like “click here,” as Google reads this as inauthentic. For external linking, you’ll want to link to any outside companies or websites that you reference,
For example, if I am referring to Neil Patel’s key phrase research tool, I would link: “ https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/ ” to the word key phrase research tool – like this: keyphrase research tool. The more internal and external links you have, the better!
4. Generate More Traffic
What’s the point of blogging, if you’re not sharing this content with your audience? Increase coverage by sharing your blogs on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Be sure to also include blog links on your monthly newsletter or marketing emails. You’ll expose your blog to more users, ensure adequate coverage is achieved, and increase website visitors.
Concerned about the number of blogs you are producing each month? Recycle your blog content into social media posts! Just because you wrote a blog a year ago, doesn’t mean it’s completely irrelevant. Before you reshare, you’ll want to review the content to make sure all information is up to date, and still relevant to your audience. Remember – you want to create value for your audience, so think of helpful tips or strategies within your blogs, to repurpose into social media content.
5. Update Outdated Content on Old Blogs
Expanding on the point above, whether you repurpose your blogs or not, you should make a point to regularly update content on outdated blogs. Whether this is a statistic or an outdated tip that no longer applies, you’ll want to make sure your website only contains accurate content. You don’t want a potential client to read a blog that contains outdated or inaccurate information, so make sure you give potential clients no reason to not trust your business.
Wrapping up, you’ll want to keep these five tips in mind when trying to build your website’s SEO. Although SEO can be tricky to build over time, it is essentially free advertising to your business and will increase client trust. Through consistent blogging, following SEO-friendly content practices like the use of H1 and H1 tags, internal and external linking, and choosing the right key phrases, your blog will gradually pick up more traffic.
