Incorporating blog content into your website can be a great way to establish your expertise, showcase your brand, and attract new visitors. One of the common concerns that stops business owners from blogging is not knowing what to say at all, much less knowing what to say that will be enticing to the audience. Let’s fix that. Today, we’ll talk about creating highly searchable blog content.
Blog content can make an impact on your website for a variety of reasons. For those who wander onto your website looking to be convinced and build trust in you, blogs can both position you as an authority in what you do and give them a sense of what it is like to do business with you. Blogs can help you justify the value of your services or overcome sales objections before your lead has even made them. Blogs allow you to harness your voice and truly speak to your audience. (If you want more insight on the value of blogs, read here).
Blogs allow you to harness your voice and truly speak to your audience. #blog #blogs #blogging #marketing #smallbusiness #smallbiz #smb #business #biztips
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Another advantage with a blog is that it gives a structure to your website that allows you to focus on micro-topics and set keyword phrases for each one. The more people you get to visit these blogs, the higher they will rank in a search, the more searchable they will become. This could be the entry point for new visitors to discover your website and your offerings.
With all that said, the idea of blogging is often stressful for small business marketers who have a million other things to do. If you are like many of the business owners I talk to, you may feel that you just don’t know what to say.
We can kill two birds with one stone here. How do you come up with ideas of what to say AND create blog content that will be highly searchable?
I am a big believer in working backwards to create blog content.
I am a big believer in working backwards to create blog content. #blog #blogs #blogging #marketing #smallbusiness #smallbiz #smb #business #biztips
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Start with search terms. What is your audience looking up? Make a list of the major terms you know they are searching. Pain Points. Solution names. Don’t just think about the industry terms you use, but the language you think they would use in their questions. You can also expand your list by looking at the different products or services you offer. Is there one that lends itself to completely different search terms? Yet, another way to expand the list is to put target markets on your list. Would someone include a label that describes who they are in their search term to find more precise results?
You don’t have to make this list pretty. Don’t disrupt your list building by trying to make all the language perfect. Just start by brainstorming this list and make it as lengthy as you can.
Build your blog titles. Now that you have a list of search terms, stretch them into blog titles. Don’t focus on creating the content yet. All you have to do in this step is to turn each search term on your list into a short title for a blog. You can make them “how to” or “what to” titles. You can throw a number in the title: “5 Ways/Steps/Ideas to ________________.” You can tell them “why” something is important. There is a variety of structures you can play with to mix up your blog titles. Keep the search term from your list intact in the blog title. As you do that, you will be building blog titles that map to topics people are likely to search.
Create blog content. Now that you have your blog titles, you know exactly what topics to cover. This helps take the mystery and writer’s block out of the equation. With the blog titles in hand, you know that the copy for any given blog should be in service of that topic. Of course, blogs can be text-based copy, but they can also be videos, photos, poems, or any other format. So, once you decide what form your blogs will take, you can either start tackling the blog content one at a time as deadlines approach or you can take a day to draft a number of blogs.
The beauty of this approach is two-fold. First, you answer the question of what to say before you sit down to create your content, which should minimize the blinking cursor effect if you worry that you will succumb to writer’s block. Second, you know that the content you are creating is based on topics that real people will research, questions that real customers want answered, and will better highlight the services or products you provide in the process.
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