10 Keys to Managing Your Blog For Maximum Value – The Basics
One of the cruelest lies in marketing is that simply posting content to your blog will help your SEO.
The truth is that if you don’t have a robust blogging strategy you are likely wasting your time and getting nothing for it other than a few random clicks per month to your site from SEO.
In this post, let’s have a quick look at the 10 elements you need to make your blog successful.
The Basics:
- Solving a Challenge. Write great posts that show how to solve a problem or capitalizing on an opportunity for your potential clients. By educating your audience you instantly earn credibility with them and become a logical choice when they need what you offer.
- Engaging with Visitors. Make sure to have an engagement and conversion strategy. Provide your visitors with opportunities to engage further on your site or take actions like subscribing to your newsletter. Also, be sure that when someone lands on your blog post that it’s clear what it is your company actually offers that’s relevant to the topic they are reading about.
- Promoting your posts. Sadly, if you don’t promote your posts, nobody will ever see them. Make sure to put them in your newsletter, post links in your Socials and consider paid promotion to strategic audiences through Social. As well, you’ll want to engage in a strategic and responsible link building strategy in order to get traffic and boost your site Authority.
- Basic On-Site Linking. Make sure to link to other relevant posts as well as services you offer that are relevant to your post. This helps SEO as well as engagement and conversion on your website.
- Incorporate Keyword Research. We recommend prioritizing your customer needs (what problems do they want to solve?) ahead of simply finding topics with the most search volume. That said, when you post you should at least make sure to do the research to uncover the language that searchers are using when they are looking for the type of content you’re providing.
Advanced Topics
- Consider a Full Thought Leadership Strategy. Going beyond simple posts, consider looking at an entire strategy to become known as a leading thinker in what you’re posting about. Typically you’ll want to:
- Identify an audience where there would be a ton of value in becoming a leading expert.
- Consider what content will be most important to them (and write it!).
- Be strategic on reaching that audience. This will likely involve paid promotion (Meta for consumers, Linkedin for business) and even things like speaking engagements, trade shows, etc.
- Category and Tag Strategy. By using categories and tags in your posts, you can create automatic topic groupings and have links automatically created you can use to send people to those groupings. For instance, if you have multiple services you can create categories or tags for each service and be able to link to a group of service posts right from that service page (or even embed a linked list of those posts right on the service page).
- Custom Category Page Strategy. Most folks don’t know that most website platforms allow you to create custom Category and/or Tag pages. By creating a custom page you can add custom meta titles/descriptions, add keyword rich headlines and add static, optimized text to the page, all of which is fantastic for your page and site SEO.
- Site Wide Strategy. Once you’re getting blog traffic you’ll want to look at and organize all elements so that your posts align with you most important business goals, you’re doing relevant keyword research to identify opportunities in your market, your posts are inter-connected in in topic clusters, your pages are all optimized. In short, you’ll want to take everything we’re discussing here and put it in an organized overall strategy.
- Pillar Strategy for SEO. If you’re driving value through your blogging and are want to take things to the next level, consider launching a Pillar Strategy in your blog. A pillar strategy is an advanced topic organization approach that leverages Categories and/or Tags and can help drive dramatically better SEO results.
