Writing the perfect blog is tricky, and navigating search engine optimization (SEO) tips and tricks are often confusing, but having a killer blog is imperative for business growth.
Alas matey, we are here to help clarify a lot of the information surrounding successful strategies that will help grow your blog and increase your overall traffic.
Let's take a look at the writing process for blogs and see exactly how you can optimize them.
First, the word SEO will be used a lot. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic results.
Tactics to do implement SEO include:
But you have to plan everything out. You don't build a house without a blueprint. In the same way, you don't blog without a blueprint either.
Let's take a look at what to focus on before you put those thoughts to the keyboard.
Before you ever sit down to pick a topic, you need to plan out your plan (so to speak).
In simple terms, what is your long-term content strategy (LTCS)?
Your performance will be best executed if you nail down what it is you want to cover in your blogs before you actually start writing.
In order to plan your LTCS, you need to perform two audits on your business (not the scary IRS kind).
Once you've done this, sit down with your marketing team and review everything that you have.
Where can you improve? What isn't being done? What are you spending too much time on? Take these answers and adapt your plan to have the best chart your course.
After planning your long-term strategy, you're able to strategize your blog content with Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages.
These two go hand in hand. A Topic Cluster is a group of interlinked web pages.
These clusters focus on a Pillar Page or Pillar Content, which is a topic that breaks into more specific topics.
Now that you've planned your LTCS and you've structured your Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages, you're able to move into pushing specifically focused topics.
Let's move into an example of blog planning using the fictitious tire company "Fire Tires".
As Fire Tires's Marketing Manager you utilize data on your sales, what the market is buying a lot of, and, with the above planning strategies, you plan your LTCS with emphasis on your Pillar Content options.
You decide to focus on the Pillar Page topic of Weather Proof tires. It's not too broad, but it's broad enough to write some great sub-content about.
After this, you could then split your related content into blogs like "Different Types of Car Tires" and "5 Signs Your Car Needs Weather-Proof Tires".
From there, you move into the next stage, the blog!
During The Blog
Now its time to really flex your writing chops.
Remember those tactics mentioned earlier? Here's where they really come into play!
Start by brainstorming on your subtopic and make it into a story.
For example, this blog does that by walking you through the story of writing a blog.
We start from the before, then we move through the blogging process, and *spoiler alert* we finish up the journey with a kick-ass blog.
Another solid tip is to write in your own style!
It helps to write with a personal flair to produce the most personable, relatable, and humanlike stories. No one want's to read a dissertation when buying tires.
cohesive, and relevant content on your topic of choice.
As you write your well-structured blog use those tactics we mentioned earlier. This helps make the story to be more cohesive and reader-friendly.
Any good blogger or marketing team knows that your blog is never truly "finished". We tricked you and we are sorry, but it's true!
Personally, PHNX21Creative Agency has an LTCS focus on re-optimizing our previous blogs, a strategy we modeled after Inbound Marketing titan, HubSpot.
To get the most out of your blogs you should plan on analyzing your content performance data and see where improvements need to be made.
What are the most productive characteristics of your best-performing blogs? Have you adjusted the characteristics of your worst-performing blogs to mirror these tactics?
And after finishing, but prior to publishing, review it all!
This makes sure your blog is following the best SEO strategies.
Try these tactics out. See what works for you, and invest in the overall quality of your blogs.
You'll see the growth, and be able to continue growing your blog and awareness!
If writing blogs that kick butt is your goal you should have a game plan.
Before writing, set out a great plan to guide your writing towards a specific goal.
Once you get to the blog, use long tail keywords, buyers personas, hyper/back-linking, and calls to action (to name just the 4 major tips) to help get your content found.
And afterwards, revise and re-optimize. SEO is a never-ending process, but the success is felt best when you continually improve and build upon what you already have.
With this information, go out and start writing epic blogs that grow your blog traffic and reach your awareness goals!
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