Most websites have a blog added to them. However, many companies don’t actually write blog posts – they just don’t have time. They are too busy with all the other “day-to-day stuff”, working in their business rather than on their business. So more often than not, you could open a business blog and the most recent post was a couple of years ago! Perhaps, in cases like this, your developer should remove the date section – this doesn’t look great. How to write an effective blog post to get you found online is one of the hardest things to do, but regular posting is a good thing for your business and you should allocate some time for this when you can. Or delegate the job!
And if you think you don’t need a blog, then you obviously don’t need any more work!
What Sort of Blog Are You Writing?
Are you writing about an industry update in your line of business? Perhaps some team news. A help blog. You could be writing a relevant piece about the business you offer. Or maybe you are writing a “marketing” blog post that could hopefully attract new customers to your website, by finding you through the title of your post. Any of these are great and all help to keep showing Google or other search engines that you have something relevant to say.
Do Your Research
Have a think about your title. If it is just a newsy post then you could make it fun or chatty. If it is a helpful or marketing blog post, however, then you should do some research about the sort of title that people may be searching for on the internet. And once you have decided on the sort of title you want to use, make that search online yourself. How many results show up on Google? Honestly, the internet is saturated with so much now that most blog post titles could be up against over 100 million results. What a nightmare to try and compete!
Use a Long-Tailed Keyword as Your Title
A long-tailed keyword is more like a sentence. When writing your post don’t just use a short and punchy title, unless you are happy for it not to be found organically. Go for something a bit longer. For instance, the post “How to write an effective blog post” had 236,000,000 results on Google. By adding in “How to write an effective marketing blog post” it actually went up to 1,890,000,000 and then “How to write an effective blog post to get you found online” dropped down to 818,000,000. This is still a massive figure but our industry is just full of this type of post. In your industry, you may be a little more niche and get achieve a far better result than this. So for this article, we went with “How to write an effective blog post”, which was weirdly the lowest of all of them.
The Text Itself
Think about your text. Perhaps write the summary of your subheaders within it first, so you can ensure you have covered everything you want to say. That way, it really makes it easier, as you have a template to work towards.
Now what you need to do is ensure that search engines know that your title is relevant to your text. So this is what you need to talk about.
- Aim to hit a word count of around 600, more is better so long as the content is still of a high quality.
- Include your title, if you can, within the first paragraph of your text, to tell Google this is what you are talking about.
- Then use similar or the same keywords throughout, not spamming it though, but making it relevant.
- Link to internal pages or posts within your website.
- Link to external websites as well! Believe it or not, this can help.
- Add relevant images and perhaps video if you have it.
- Try and provide a summary at the end, to make it clear to Google or other search engines what the post has been about.
- Keep your sentences relatively short, as well as your paragraphs.
- Use bullet points where necessary!!
- Try and use your main title within a subheader somewhere within the post, if relevant.
- And then read the next paragraph below for next steps!
Marketing Your Blog Post
- Make sure your URL is matching your post title.
- Include the title in your SEO title.
- Write a well-written meta description that has the title within the first section of it, as well as your company name and a fuller description of your post.
- Title your images with something relevant as well.
- Share your blog post on your social media platforms.
- If you are a local business, then you may want to share to local groups on Facebook! It is free after all.
Add a Good Call To Action
Always add some form of call to action to your post. Why else would you want to write something, if not to get people to contact you? A button is great to get people to click on it. Or adding a link to your telephone number, contact form or email address are all great ideas too. You want people to read your post and think “yes they are the people I want to work with!”
We hope this has given you some good pointers on how to write an effective blog post to get you found online. It is tough to find the time. It is also tough to find the inspiration! But allocate yourself some time each week or perhaps each month and once you have decided on what you want to talk about, then follow the points above and just write it so people can understand what you are talking about!
Good luck!