When creating a website, any marketing agency will recommend implementing heavy SEO to ensure quality organic traffic to your new site. Showing up on Google when searchers are looking for what your company offers is integral to success; this is no secret.
Not to point out the obvious, but do you take the same precaution of integrating SEO into your blogging as you do the creation of your overarching site? It might seem like a trivial tip, but let us outline why you should. Before you write your next blog post, ask yourself these questions:
What are your competitors writing?
It’s important to determine which marketing strategies are working for them and which aren’t producing any engagement. This can help you decide what kind of content your target audience is actually interested in reading. By reviewing what your competitors are writing on their blogs or industry education-related content, you can see holes or opportunities to write what your readers are looking for. By writing that content, you’re increasing the credibility and visibility for your brand, the topic, and the keywords you’re writing about.
Who are you writing for and what are they searching?
Ultimately you are working to drive traffic to your content, so you want it to be as relevant to your visitors as possible. When creating an SEO strategy for your blog you need to identify the audience you want to target and then research the key topics they are searching in the search engines. There are many ways of doing this, but one way is researching highly searched industry keywords using tools like the Google Keyword Planner Tool and Keyword.io. Then create content topics by combining trending questions in the industry from online forums, google auto-fill, or social media with keyword research for the most thorough results. This provides crucial audience data to determine the most discoverable topics and keywords for your blog posts.
What topics are trending in your industry space?
When brainstorming topics for your blog you need to be knowledgeable about what content is already being produced in your space. Don’t focus on copy only. What type of visual content do you need to offer in order to keep your audience engaged based on what your competitors are posting?
- Infographics
- Photography
- Video
- Gifs
- Case Studies
Tools like Buzzsumo provide insight into what topics and types of content styles are trending for your specific audience targets.
What social media channels should you be sharing on?
When looking at the most popular blogs in your industry you need to know things like: How often they are sharing on social media? Are there any topical themes? Do they have a newsletter? How frequent are they writing their own content?
Review all social media platforms below and determine what channels your blog posts have to be posted on. Where is there social media opportunity that has been missed by blog writers in your space?
- Snapchat
- Google+
- Medium
- Periscope
- YouTube
What links could play a role in the visibility of your blog?
Now there’s the infuriating task of getting your blog seen in the search results. Earning links through quality partnerships in your specified space can potentially push your content to the readers that matter. When you integrate a competitive link earning strategy with your blog you will need to develop a critical eye for link analysis, as well as determine what pieces of your content is relevant to your content partners. Open Site Explorer is a great tool for developing a list of sites that would be valuable for you to reach out to. A little PR can go a long way for your blog’s SEO if it’s done well.
Once you have determined the answers to these key questions:
Start with inputting the keywords you discovered in your research into the title tag and meta description of each specific blog post. Also naturally integrate them into your content, making sure not to interrupt the reader’s flow. The title tag of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page’s content. Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag. Meta descriptions provide just as much value as title tags for pages. They supply a platform of content that can be used to entice your audience in the search results. This tagline opportunity helps to promote your content to searchers and confirms if the content on the page is what they are looking for, which helps influence clicks. See example below.
Then after you have optimized your blog posts, manage their performance in Google Analytics. There is a content drilldown section in Analytics that allows you to breakdown blog posts. You can analyze topics by clicking on the blog page, which will then break up each post providing insight on the topics that are generating the most engagement for your blog.
Make sure to share each blog post at the optimal time for your specific audience on the channels that you discovered in your competitive analysis. SEO for blog writing requires constant creative research in order to truly reach your readers online. It’s helpful to set aside some time each week to keep up as content trends in every industry change fast. Key takeaway from this post: Know your readers.
As a digital marketing agency based in Raleigh, we want to lead the way for our company and our clients in providing top SEO. Walk West’s marketing team works to develop content plans for our clients’ blogs and social media that create lasting partnerships with their readers. This relationship is built by feeding site visitors topics they care about by strategically targeting and monitoring SEO.
