Blogging doesn't have to be Madness

The terms “March” and “madness” might go together as well as basketball and the NCAA tournament, but that doesn’t mean the craziness has to filter over into your marketing efforts. Blogging is one of the best ways to regularly update your website content, which keeps your site attractive to search engines. With a regular content schedule and a few helpful tips, you can take the madness out of blogging and keep your website in front of the eyes of potential customers.

The best way to find success with your business blogging is to create a detailed content plan. Build a blogging calendar that spans at least three months, so you aren’t scrambling to decide on topics and keywords to use for your blogs. If you have a detailed marketing plan for a few months or a year, add the blog as a tool to help you achieve these goals. For example, if you are trying to increase sales for a certain product in Quarter 4, you can dedicate one or two blogs during that time to the product’s features. Your content plan can change if you have an important topic come up in the meantime but having this structure in place takes away a lot of the stress of keeping up with blogging.

Do Some Research

If you want to get the most out of each blog post, it’s important to spend some time doing research on keywords and keyword phrases that will help you gain some organic traffic to your website. Not only will this ensure that more people can find your site when they search for relevant keywords, but it will also give you more oomph for your paid advertising. When doing keyword research, be sure to consider:

• “Seed” keywords– These are the basic keywords that are descriptive of your industry. If you are a dentist, for example, these might include “dentist,” “teeth cleaning,” or “teeth whitening.” Think about how you would search for a company like yours and start from there.
• Competitor rankings– You can find out how your competitors are doing with these keywords by typing them into your favorite search engine and seeing where they show up on a search engine results page.
• Blog topics with keywords– Once you have some keywords in mind, you can use them around which to structure some new blogs.
• Old blogs– If you have already written some blogs, but haven’t spent time doing keyword research on them, you can always go back and optimize them with these new keywords to help your site’s SEO. Find places where it makes sense to add them and include links to relevant locations on your website that mention the keywords.

Delegate Your Blogging Tasks

A lot of people get overwhelmed with the idea of blogging because they think they need to do it all themselves. If you have someone on your team who enjoys writing, ask them if they would be interested in penning a few blogs for the company. You can also ask someone to help you with your keyword research (or hire a company that can optimize your website for you), find pictures for your blog, and post on your website. Your blog doesn’t have to be a one-person show; collaborating on the task helps you get a variety of different voices to share the message of your company.

Take Advantage of Meta Descriptions and Alt Tags

If you are going through the effort of creating a content calendar and producing blogs, you want to be sure to take advantage of every opportunity you have to impress search engines. Be sure to add a meta description and alt tags on any photos or media for every blog you post.

The meta description will go in the HTML section of your website and give both search engines and people using search engines an idea of what the page is about. Meta descriptions should be short and to the point and can include a keyword or two to give you another opportunity to use them. Alt tags are used to ensure your website is accessible and should include a brief description of what is happening in the image or media. For example, if you have a picture of a man playing fetch with a dog, your alt tag can be as simple as “man plays fetch with dog.

Get to Posting

The most important part of your blog planning is to post them. These blogs will not help your website ranking if they are still sitting in draft folders. Don’t overthink your blogs to the point where you hold off on posting them to make sure they are perfect. You can always go back and make edits later. Getting them posted means that they can start doing some work for you. Try to post regularly (at least once a month, but more often if possible). The consistent creation of new content will help your website earn some much-deserved internet cred, and it will give you a library of content that makes you look like thought leaders in your industry.

Consistent blogging is a great way to improve your website’s organic SEO and be sure that the right eyes are seeing your website at the right time. Stick to your blogging calendar and start to see quick improvements in your website’s rankability. If you need some guidance with your blogging, we can help!