How To Use Your Blog To Boost Your SEO Efforts

A lot of businesses that are investing in marketing these days probably have a blog. The amount that do has certainly grown over the last couple of years. However, although a lot of businesses will have a blog there are many that are desolate.

A large number of businesses still don't blog regularly or fully take advantage of their blog. Do you fall into this bracket? In this article, I explain how you can start using your blog more effectively to boost your SEO efforts, drive more traffic and get more conversions!

1) Each Post Should Target A Specific Audience

If you are a business owner you should know your customers and your ideal target market. However, many businesses don't actually have this information documented in the form of what we call a buyer persona. When you are thinking about your next blog post, look at your target market and ask yourself the below questions:

• Does what I am writing fit with their demographics?

• Does my blog post solve a specific challenge?

• Does my blog post talk about their pain points?

If you are really serious about improving your blogging efforts, you must nail this first part! Before even attempting to put pen to paper, map out who the article is going to be aimed at. Doing this allows you to create more focused content that delves into their specific needs or challenges and because it's more specific, it's also more personal. The result? It will perform far better.

2) Research Trending Topics & Keywords

As well as doing research on your target market for a specific blog post, it is also important to look into trending topics and keywords with lower competition. For researching trending topics in your industry here are a few ideas:

• Buzzsumo – This website is one of the best tools out there for finding popular content. Simply type in your desired keyword/topic and hit enter. It will bring up a list of content that has the most amount of shares. You have to sign up and pay to get full use out of this but you get 5 free searches a day!

• Google Trends – Another great place for trending topic research. You can enter a specific topic here also and it will show you how that has performed and whether or not searches for that topic are on an increase or decrease.

• Twitter Trends – Twitter is another great tool to use for finding trends! There are two ways to go about this here. The first one is called Moments and you can access this even if you don't have a Twitter account. Now if you have a Twitter account, you can log in and see personalised trends.

Writing a topic on something that is trending, if it is relevant to your target market could see your content go viral and attract an abundance of shares and views! The better it performs, the higher it will rank, driving more organic visits as well.

Here are a few tips for finding keywords:

• Google Keyword Planner – Do a search for your main topic and take a look at keywords that have a low search volume and are longer phrases (3 words or more). These are generally easier to rank for

• Answer The Public – This is a great tool for finding long tail keywords and it is simple! All you have to do is enter one main keyword/topic and it will show you lots of questions that are asked around that keyword/topic in the search engines

If you put the effort into researching your keywords for each article, your content will perform better organically and attract more visits!

For more information on long tail keywords, read this article: What is a Long Tail Keyword and Why Should I Care?

3) Optimise Your Content

The next step to boosting your SEO through your blog is to ensure each piece of content you publish is well optimised. Be certain to make sure your target keyword is in the title of the post, preferably at the front. Also, make sure the content is relevant to this keyword and it appears naturally throughout. Here are a few more tips for optimising your content:

• Make sure your URL structure is optimised and contains your keyword

• Add a featured image and optimise the Alt text. If you can add more than one image or other forms of media then this is great too but make sure they are also optimised

• The Meta description doesn't have to have the main keyword in but it sure won't have a negative impact as it will make it bold in the search results! Just be sure that your Meta description is to the point, catchy and makes someone want to click and find out more

4) Posting Quality Content On A Regular Basis

The key to boosting your SEO through your blog is not to blog spontaneously but blog consistently. You need to be churning out quality content on a regular basis. The more content the better in this case but quality still comes over quantity. So I’ll rephrase that to the more quality content the better! If you are serious about improving your business blogging then start with one article a week and go from there. It doesn't even have to be yourself that writes the articles, you could get your members of staff to chip in.

How JDR Can Help You

Here at JDR Group, we are an expert inbound marketing agency and are proud to be Platinum HubSpot partners. We have experience in blogging, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, PPC and more! Talk to a member of our experienced team today on 01332 343281 to find out more about how we can help you.