Blogging – it can be hard to find time in our day to day business to sit down and write content for our blog (yep, even we struggle at times too!) Blogging is one of the most effective ways to market and convert to sales and the best part, it’s free!!!
I recently intercepted an email from Ellice (one of our amazingly talented Mediamojo team members), outlining how to effectively structure blog content for maximum effect. Ellice’s instructions provide a clear guide on what’s important when putting together a blog post and what aspects you should focus on in order for it to attract traffic to your site.
As a general rule, “something is always better than nothing,” but if you follow these basic instructions when putting together your next post, you’ll start to see some benefits.
Hahahaha – look at me go, I write a couple of short introduction paragraphs, plagiarise my staff’s intellect and presto! I’ve got an informative and helpful blog post that can help change your business for the better. This just goes to show inspiration for your next post can come from anywhere!
Here’s what Ellice wrote – (this has been edited to protect the innocent)…
Short and sweet posts are great for social media but if you truly want to boost your website traffic with a strong focus on particular keywords and keyphrases, each blog post/news story will benefit from including much lengthier content.
Here’s my tips for creating a blog post that will help increase your rankings;
Keyword research
Keyword research is the first step in SEO copywriting and an essential part of any successful SEO strategy.
To get started, you need to decide what keywords you’d like to be found for before you start writing content. Try to think like your customer. Research words they’d use to find your business. Then when you write, use these exact terms in your content so you start ranking for them.
Once you have these worked out, create a specific story around one keyword in order to write the post.
Content:
- Include your keyword in your main heading/s (preferably at the start), then again in your intro paragraph and multiple times throughout your copy (without overdoing it or what’s known as ‘keyword stuffing’)
- Start with an introduction and end with a conclusion – its basic storytelling 101
- Use short sentences and paragraphs – include headings, lists or dot points to break up text (remember the average attention span is around 8 secs – so you’re probably just about ready to give up reading this but stay with me…)
- Use original content – its ok to look up other posts for inspiration but avoid copy/pasting big slabs of text.
- Focus on what makes your business unique and different from other companies
- Include links (both internal and external) – link to existing pages on your site as well as other websites that are relevant or that promote your product/services.
- And don’t forget a call to action – after someone reads your post, what would you like them to do?
Images:
- Use relevant images to give examples and break up text.
- Include and image title and ‘Alt text’ (which is basically explaining what this image is to someone who can’t see it).
Once you have your blog post sorted, you can grab snippets to share on your social channels and direct readers back to your post – always be thinking about driving traffic back to your website.
The first few posts might be a bit of a challenge but if you follow this basic structure, it will hopefully make the process a little easier each time.
There you go, some awesome tips on how to properly structure your blog posts – thanks Ellice.
So, what’s stopping you? Put aside some time each week to start adding new content to your site.
What’s that? You don’t have a blog in your website! Give us a call, we’ll get you up and running in no time.
Happy blogging everyone!
