Corporate Branding
A blog is a great way to expand your brand’s presence across the web. It helps to build your brand’s voice, establish expertise in your industry, draws in traffic, and ultimately boosts your conversion rates. How do you produce results-driven content that is organically ranked, easily searchable, and continues to drive traffic to your blog? Consistency, consistency, consistency.
Quality over quantity though – post too often and your audience will become overwhelmed, engagement will drop, and traffic will drop. Use analytical data to find that comfort zone, that rhythm with your readers, and work to keep it. Whether you implement weekly calendar reminders, daily to-do lists, or email notifications, find what will work for you to develop a consistent posting schedule.
Remember, SEO content is geared specifically for ranking in search engines so more content means more for the search engines to crawl. Essentially, SEO optimization makes your site more visible to perusing eyes and also positions your site as a relevant answer to inquiries. Steady, well-produced content will also help set up your brand as an authoritative voice, a proven and reliable resource for customers and clients. Keep the following thoughts in mind as you work to create effective, reliable, and strategic blog content.
This tactic will allow you to respond to your target audience’s needs, remain relevant, and stand out as an established expert in your industry. Don’t just consider what your audience is searching for in search engines; consider your audience themselves. An SEO-optimized site is crafted for search engines and the people using these searching engines. Think about your target audience – What are their values? What are their interests? How can you provide value to their inquiries and experience?
Once you know your target audience well, it will be significantly easier to choose relevant, informative, and valuable topics to feature on your blog. Good, relatable topics that appeal to your readers will boost engagement and provide a great experience for your users. Research your most common visitors, examine what they’re looking for, what they’re asking, and before you know it you’ll be able to inform your readers by answering their questions and solving their problems.
Strong, accurate research around these selected topics will also help build trust with your readers. Your goal is to create content that ranks well organically in search engines and drives traffic to your site. When possible, develop content that will remain relevant and valuable over time so it continues to generate traffic long after publication. This type of content, known as evergreen content, is high-impact, in-depth content with a longer lifespan than trendy topics or clickbait. Search Engine Journal does an excellent job of explaining evergreen content and how to incorporate it into your existing blog.
Readers will be less attracted to cookie-cutter content that’s just recycled from other websites. Add a twist to your content to make standard topics seem fresh and new by including your personal opinions, your thoughts, and your voice. A post about current trends in digital marketing could also highlight how these strategies specifically helped grow your business.
Another tactic to engage readers is to include an actionable item in your posts like asking your readers to comment on a post, linking to another page on your site, or even sending them to another platform to view more of your products and content. The goal is to invite the reader to take the next step, leading them to ultimately sharing your content. Be thoughtful with your links though as you want to answer your readers’ questions without flooding their space with your personal promotion. Those much-needed “great ideas” can be hard to come by, so start your brainstorming with help from sites like HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator.
A first and very important step in creating successful, consistent blog content is thorough keyword research. Keywords help determine the type of traffic you get – choose keywords that are too broad and you risk attracting the wrong audience. Productive keyword research will ensure your blog remains SEO optimized and clinch the right target audience who will continue to come back to your site. When executing keyword research, don’t just contemplate what words correlate with your content, also think about your ideal target audience. What kind of content is this audience seeking? What language do they use in their searches? Are they searching for “digital marketing” or “affiliate marketing”?
One strategy to improve your keyword search game is to try using long-tail keywords. Singular word searches like “marketing” could get lost among competitors and can be excruciatingly vague. A better option that’s more like a long-tail keyword would be “marketing strategy” or even “best affiliate marketing fundamentals”. These longer phrases keep your content focused on specific goals related to your target audience.
Keywords also help define the pages of your site and you can use them as a basis for content strategy for your blog. The first inclination is to pump your blog and site full of keywords. The more the better right? Not exactly. Too many keywords is actually a red flag for search engines like Google, as it’s viewed as inauthentic and untrustworthy. Once selected, you can place the keywords in a title tag, headers, the body of the post, and in the meta description. For more great keyword resources and approaches, see Moz’s SEO Learning Center.
Producing consistent blog content can be time-consuming and requires discipline, but luckily, Bell+Ivy is available to help you with your brand’s digital marketing and personal branding. Whether your business is B2B, e-commerce, a small business, or a personal brand website, Bell+Ivy’s content research service will develop an analysis on quality, relevance, and goals for optimal performance. Your customized research plan will include researched queries in search engines and personality traits for your blog to help dictate your voice and tone for future posts.
