Top 5 Tips to Blog Right for Your Business

Behind every great SEO strategy stands a great blog.

Blogs. They’re a funny concept.

Everyone with a website knows they’re important, but many still aren’t aware of exactly why blogging is important. Or how detrimental they can be when their blogs lack execution.

Whether you have a blog or you’re thinking about introducing one, it’s vital that you blog right, and know what it takes to do so.

It’s a commitment, but it’s one that will pay off, particularly for any business looking to up their marketing game.

Our top 5 tips to maintain a quality blog

1. As soon as you blog once, you’ve got to keep it going.

We’re going in strong here to begin with, this is a big point. I would even say this is in our top 3!

Starting a blog is like having a pet. It must be fed regularly, loved and adored. There is nothing worse than having an inactive blog which hasn’t had a post since July 2011. That doesn’t mean you need to post every passing minute, but you need to keep it active.

Although you should post regularly, there needs to be a balance between posting regularly and posting something worthwhile. Blogging for the sake of it is meaningless and your users will see straight through it.

It’s about building value for your website and your brand.

2. Think about your target audience, recognise their needs.

Imagine yourself as a customer, what would you want to know about your business or industry? You’re an industry expert, so you’ll have a good idea of what your customers need.

This is the issue with some blogs, there’s too much self-promotion going on. Your blog isn’t an area of the website to promote yourself and write content to optimise your site. Your blog should provide valuable information to your users. Sure, you can show off your brand’s personality through the language or imagery you use.

3. Structure your blog posts.

Blogs take time to develop. Writing them often seems like a work in progress, in the fact you pick a broad subject and work on finding a specific topic to focus on for the blog post. But something which you need to confirm before you get ahead of yourself and start typing away is the structure and format of your blogs.

Your blog post format can be as creative as you wish. A distinctive format would be a great idea!

The typical structure, which I think works well is:

• A catchy title.
• A one-line statement: this line needs to ensure they read on – it’s make or break whether a user reads on or not.
• Introduce your blog – set the scene.
• Subheading – begin writing your blog; it’s time to expand on your catchy title, one-line statement and introduction.

Your content should be structured with headings and concise paragraphs. It’s important to write in a way that is easily digestible – for users on a desktop, tablet or mobile.

You’ve got your catchy title, intriguing one-liner, introduction, concise content, now what?

You end the blog – you can do so with a final thought or summary, or a call to action.

4. Edit and proofread your blogs carefully.

Writing the blog is just a small part of the job. Much like writing a book actually, the ‘writing’ part is easy.

The biggest challenge of writing both a book and a blog is editing it afterwards. Revisiting your writing can seem like a chore, but it’s so important. When we write, we typically type what comes to our head – there’s no structure to it. Once you review the work, you can move paragraphs around, delete useless pieces of information and correct spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Sometimes what you write can sound great. Other times, it can just sound like random thoughts splattered onto a page.

In fact, editing is THE most important step to your blog writing. 

5. Optimise your content and share on social.

Yes, I know I said not to use your blog to optimise your website, but you can still optimise it – just don’t go overboard!

Optimisation though is not a simple process. Many people are still under the illusion that to optimise you must cram in all the keywords you wish for your website to rank for. This is not the case.

To really optimise your website, you just need to make sure that the copy you have written is useful to your target consumer. Will the user reading it want to stay, finish reading the blog and then find out more about your business?

Here are some quick-fire tips on how to optimise your blog:

Focus more on what you’re writing, rather than adding your keywords multiple times.

Google is advance, write naturally and it will pick up relevant keywords within the text.

Make sure to add a page title and meta description to your blog.

Although not a major ranking factor in Google’s search results, it could be the difference between a user clicking through to your blog or not. Meta description lengths have been expanded. They used to be 150-160 characters but now you can write up to 320 characters.

Don’t force your target SEO keyword into the title.

If clear opportunities present themselves to add in keywords or semantic keywords, then do so.

Anchor texts (links in your text) are an important ranking factor.

Don’t be afraid to link internally back to other relevant pages on your website, or somebody else’s site too. Everyone focuses on getting links to their own site, but it’s just as important that you link out to reliable sources too.

You’ve written a blog and you’re happy. Now what?

Once you’re happy with your blog, it’s time to share it on social media.

What’s the point in having a blog if no one is reading it?