Blogging for SEO and brand identity
The primary reason for writing blog posts is to create web content that contains good search engine phrases, boosts your SEO results, and ultimately, your sales inquiries.
Whether you call it a 'Journal', ‘News’ or ‘Blog’, you can use these pages to curate useful, relevant content, and to introduce some brand culture, humour and personality into your website.
Start by asking ‘what are people searching for?’
Let’s assume your business does kitchen renovations. You may decide to target people who are searching for ‘kitchen design ideas’ in Google.
To make your blog post rank well in search results, make sure you:
- Use a title that includes your top search phrase
- Check this blog post to learn how to make your blog title really work for you – it contains links to lots of great advice on content creation
- Talk to your target audience - use the right language
- Create a blog URL that contains the search words
- Ensure the content of your blog post reads well and includes your primary search phrase
- Add your search phrases as tags on the blog post
- Add the search phrases in the meta text
- Use quality images that suit your article, and add the search phrases as alt text on the images
- Add links within the article that contain your search phrases
Before you publish your blog post:
- Check your spelling
- Tighten up your title
- See if there is an opportunity to add personality and punch
Leverage your blog content in other channels
Share your blog post on social media to proactively get it to your audience. Write a post or tweet that reiterates why the viewer would want to click, or which asks a question, like “Want to make sure your kitchen design ideas are up to date?”
You might want to create a dedicated ad group in your Google Ads campaign to drive visits to the post, to get new viewers into your site. You can use location targeting to ensure these people are within your service area.
Use the blog as content for your next email newsletter, by pasting the first paragraph or two into the newsletter and linking to your article – again, this will bring pre-qualified people to your site.
Finish with an invitation to talk about the service!