65% of businesses admitted that they find it hard to produce engaging content. Content creation, specifically blog post creation, is the lifeline of your brand’s content marketing strategy. Without blog posts, it will be hard for your brand to succeed in attaining a good spot in your SERP ranking. Hubspot itself pointed out that marketers who are consistently publishing blog posts on their websites are 13 times more likely to enjoy a positive ROI on their content marketing efforts.
Creating blog posts that are SEO-friendly helps you drive organic traffic to your site. Putting up content about 1,500 words with the right keywords and the right density will help you edge out your competitors. Truth is, this process is not entirely as easy as it sounds. Conducting keyword research to find the best long-tail and short-tail search queries is a crucial step – creating compelling content is another one.
Recent statistics unveiled that marketers who blog consistently get 126% more leads than those who don’t. This makes blogging an inbound marketing strategy that catapults your business – both in the SERP and in your business ROI. We want you to get the most out of your content marketing efforts – here’s how.
1. Know What Makes a “Winning” Blog Post
A well-planned blog post could get all the traffic it needs and even go viral. This can generate thousands of referral visitors with similar interests to your blog. You can receive a huge amount of traffic and get a solid search engine ranking if you put up content that educates your readers and keeps them consuming content.
It is a little-known fact that 78% of your consumers trust your brand if you create more customised content. This makes an intimate connection with you and your followers. With content that educates your audience, you are able to give your brand the credibility it needs. Once your readers feel like your brand deserves their trust, you take them one step ahead of the funnel, making the ‘buying trigger’ easier to pull.
In order to come up with blog posts that address their curiosity and presents them with a viable solution to their problem, using customer pain points works better than highlighting your brand’s USP. If you want more loyal visitors to come back to your blog, start by identifying the problems your customers are facing. Your blog now serves as their guide to knowing what their possible options are, and your brand is the solution.
2. Understand the Best Practices of On-Page SEO
HubSpot found out on their 2018 survey that 61% of marketers admitted that improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their utmost inbound marketing priority. This only proves that generating blog posts that possess the right keywords lead to more efficiency.
Using keywords in a readable method works best for your readers. Remember to not to overdo the act of using keywords, otherwise the so-called “keyword stuffing” method will make your blog posts sound erratic and dysfunctional. Also, you could get penalised by search engines, deeming it as black-hat SEO.
3. Create Content That Provides Intrinsic Value for Your Readers
In order for you to come up with sensible content, you have to keep in mind what your readers are searching for. Out of a thousand articles online, they might be tired of reading the same repetitive generic content. If your blog post offers something new for them to learn, you get a reputation for educating them.
HubSpot’s 2016 survey found out that 43% of people skim blog posts. This is where content marketing plays its part, to give people the idea that their problem could be solved by reading through all the parts of your published content. Meanwhile, 97% of marketers use prescriptive content. Prescriptive content, as the collective term suggests, outlines a formula for the readers to attain success.
For you to succeed in producing valuable content, create a sound content calendar about what you want to be published. Address your consumer’s pain points and point them in the right direction. Create an attention-grabbing headline, about 6 words, to capture their interests. Start with related statistics or a question that might pop in your reader’s head. For our social team here at Search Insights, these are our bread and butter.
4. Use the AIDA Formula to Capture Your Audience Interest
AIDA formula, a copywriting principle, helps you understand what your audience wants to see from your blogs. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action- a formula to increase your conversions and guide your buyers along the customer experience funnel.
To be able to grab your customer’s attention, having your content nail the meta title with organic keyword phrases counts as the first strategy. HubSpot itself, claims that titles possessing 6-13 words attract the highest and the most consistent amount of traffic. The headline itself plays a huge part in attracting readers to that point that 73% of buying decisions are made just from the title of your blog post.
Another headline element you should consider is adding an odd number in it. Researchers discovered that odd numbers receive 36% more engagement and 22% more clicks than even numbers. While there is no scientific explanation for why people favor headlines with odd numbers, it might be the next big content marketing hack you’ll benefit from.
If your headline captures the attention and presents them the solution, what else is not to read from your blog?
5. Take Advantage of Inbound Links
Link building is the backbone of search engine optimization. This strategy supports every other SEO tactic to ensure that your website stays relevant to Google’s ever-evolving algorithms. Moz itself found out that credible and quality incoming links still dictate approximately 20.94% of what ranks in the SERP and what gets toppled.
Other bloggers get to monetize their blogs through link juicing. But, even if you are having a hard time to come up with content ideas, you might want to encourage other bloggers to write for your website as a guest post. When guest posting is done correctly, external link building will be able to boost your rankings pretty quickly. In fact, this strategy is known as some of the best practices in inbound marketing that 50% of SEO gurus do it.
Utilize the broken link strategy to promote your blog posts. Broken links no longer give any value to the existing page. Once you’ve written a relevant blog post, you can find links that are non-existent and request to replace it with the link to your own content.
Using tools such as brokenlinkcheck.com helps you find the URL for the sites you might want to post your link on. You can easily spot sites and resources of your same niche containing broken links. Once you’ve find one, you’ll have to email them and inform that you would like your link to be placed there.
It would be simplest to contact the blog owners and give them the notification about the dead link. You can also point them to your site to show them how relevant your content is. Keep in mind to focus on building authority links in a natural way, you can always participate in guest blogging platforms and distribute it across other sites like Slideshare.net, scribd.com, docstoc.com and the like. This way, Google can see that your content is valuable, and that more people deserve to see it in the first page of their search results.
Final Takeaways
Ending up on the first page of Google rankings is a huge break for your content marketing. The lifeline of your organic traffic starts from promoting content and exploring the possibilities of expanding its reach. With the right white-hat SEO practices, the accurate use of long-tail keywords, the right link building methods and the power of relevant content, it is possible to rank on the top 10 of the search results page.
For tailored assistance for your brand, contact us today for a free consultation with our experienced SEO specialists.