You’ve got your business started, website up and running, and now it’s time to up your marketing strategy. Blogs are a fantastic way to organically increase your search engine rankings, credibility within your niche or industry, and authenticity or connection with your clients. Although it’s a relatively easy way to expand your business platform, many individuals and businesses don’t use their blog to its fullest potential.
The Content Strategists at Green Group Studio have already given you some great tips and tricks to writing copy for your website, but blogging is a whole different medium. While website copy is typically centered around informing customers about products or services, blogs are generally written in a more conversational tone and seek to inform users about how their problems can be solved based on the company’s offerings. This helps to draw potential customers to your website and makes them feel more comfortable with your brand. This unique ability to relate to customers is the true value of a company’s blog.
Know Your Audience
When starting any business, it is so important to know exactly who your target audience is and thereby who your company is marketing to. This same approach is extremely important when it comes to blogging. When you know who you’re writing for, it makes it easier to come up with a direction for your blog and ideas for relevant posts. A great way to keep your voice consistent in your blog posts while also effectively targeting your ideal audience is to create a fictional representation of who they are. Think about every aspect of this person, what they look like, their background, their daily routine etc. Your avatar should essentially be your ideal client, with all the wants, needs, and/or problems that your business addresses for them. If you write to this person every time you sit down to write a blog post, you’ll continuously find new ways to reach out to your target market.
Keep It Short and Simple
Today, people want what they want, when they want it. This has lead to the decrease in usage of printed newspapers, traditional television, and even movie theaters. However, there are effective ways to get around the short attention span of today’s younger population. Shorter paragraphs and sentences that include subheads make blogs easier to skim for specific information. Of course, this all depends on your target audience. While the older population or those who are looking for an educational resource generally won’t mind reading a longer blog post (like this one), younger audiences prefer more direct answers to their questions.
Include A Photo
People are automatically drawn to visuals, so adding a photo to your blog post will immediately attract more attention than a post with just text. In fact, posts with images get up to 94% more views than posts without and get shared far more often. Make sure your photo is a reflection of your post, too, meaning that it is a visual representation of the content.
Use Targeted Keywords
Targeted keywords will help to improve your SEO, making it easier for your current and potential customers to find your business. The key to using keywords correctly is to not over- or under-use them. Don’t throw a specific keyword around too often, because then it becomes obvious that you’re writing for a machine rather than people. Instead, use a variety of keywords associated with your topic, like bakery, cookies, and dessert. However, not using enough keywords can also harm your business by not allowing you to gain all of the benefits associated with organic SEO. Instead, there’s a sweet-spot that gets easier to find the more blogging experience you gain.
Guest Blogging
As great of an impact as having current and consistent posts on your own company’s blog can be for your SEO, guest blogging on other sites can be just as beneficial. Guest posting for other blogs can be slightly more time consuming, but will help to spread your company’s name and improve its credibility. The key for writing guest posts is to provide content that is aimed at genuinely improving the lives of the guest blog’s audience. The most important thing to look for when searching for a guest blog to write for is that they give credit to guest writers. If you aren’t allowed to link back to your own website, it’s not worth your time.
Blogging is so important when it comes to improving SEO, but is all too often overlooked. Creating a good blog with genuinely helpful information that also increases sales can be difficult, but with hard work and practice it gets easier and easier. Don’t have the time or the know-how to maintain your own blog? Call Green Group Studio at 561-594-7336 and ask about our content management services.
