Blogging is one of the most effective and modernised ways to drive traffic to your website, regardless of the nature of your business and website. Blogging works not only because it aids your SEO marketing campaign, but also because a company written and unique blog will help to humanise your brand, allowing consumers to relate.
Blogging half-heartedly will likely prove to be ineffective and essentially a waste of company time. For the most significant impact, your blog writing must be of a high-quality, useful for your audience and posted regularly to ensure your website doesn’t appear neglected.
Accomplished on-site blogs or engaging posting on external blog websites can generate inbound links to your website tenfold, and website blogs specifically will produce more pages for Google and other search engines to index, and also heighten keyword and long-tail phrase usage on your website, both of which can enhance your search engine rankings.
But, after you create a blog, what are the best ways to make sure your blog continually drives traffic to your website?
- Selecting the biggest impact keywords and phrases
Carrying out thorough keyword research before you write your post is one of the most important components of a successful SEO blog.
Writing a blog post that is generously filled (but not overcrowded) with keywords and long tail phrases that have high significance to your product, service or business, you are increasing your organic keyword density, improving your search engine rankings and therefore attracting higher volumes of traffic to your website.
Google Analytics and Keyword Planner are two online tools that will help you analyse your current website traffic to see what keywords are leading people to your website, and to also identify the keywords that have the highest number of Google searches per month that you can include in your content for the largest impact.
A number of blogging platforms also have a function that allows you to enter a number of keywords that are relevant to your blog post, without the need to try and squash them all into your blog post and accidentally over saturating the post with keywords.
- Publishing content on a consistent basis
For your business to experience the full benefits of blogging, you must try to post superior quality as often as possible. Posting in high frequencies is much more realistic for some businesses than others. Two posts per day are achievable for some, whereas once a week is far more logical for others. The frequency at which a business should post is often debated, but to show reliability and dedication, once weekly should always be your minimum.
Repeatedly publishing blog posts also means the number of indexed pages will be constantly increasing and you will be creating a number of trustworthy entry routes to your main website.
- Encourage consumer engagement on your blog
Brand and consumer engagement has never been more crucial than today and instigating conversation and interaction on your blog will only work in your favour. Communication with readers of your blog can be prompted in a number of simple ways, including interactive polls and surveys, responding to comments or the slightly more complex addition of a guestbook or a forum.
A routine posting schedule for your blogging platforms will allow regular readers or customers to know when they can visit your blog and read your latest edition. This will prompt more consistent engagement and thus bringing your blog to the attention of a wider audience, particularly if readers have the capacity to share the post across their social media profiles.
If you are unable to post unique content for whatever reason, built in guest books or interactive forums will produce user generated content which will still be acknowledged as fresh content by search engines, helping to increase traffic.
- Show and tell what your business can do
Loyal and returning customers are wonderful for any business and you should always make every effort to maintain and enhance these customer relationships. However, to take your business to the next level and keep your web traffic on the incline, you will need a steady influx of new visitors as well as returning.
Finding informative and useful information about a product or service will undoubtedly heavily influence where a consumer will make a purchase, your blog can be this space! A blog can include ‘How-To’ guides, reviews, detailed product descriptions that can’t be included on your website or can be used as an online portfolio or gallery.
People like to know EXACTLY what they are buying and it has been proven that products with multiple high-quality photos see higher numbers of sales. Not only will product descriptions, photos, instructions and reviews act as useful resources, they are again a great way of consistently adding fresh content and creating more pages to search engines to index.
- Video, video, video
Even today, many brands overlook video because it seems time consuming or just not that important, but video is fast becoming a necessity for a successful brand.
Recent surveys have found that 80 percent of consumers prefer to watch videos than read a written post and video interactions also outperform all other content posted on social media platforms.
If you have a video on your blog highlighting the functionality of your service or product, you are guaranteed a higher click through rate to the product or service in question, resulting in higher web traffic and increased conversions.