Blogging and your long term Content Marketing strategy

To be successful as a blogger and make it work from an SEO perspective, you need to post something regularly. And by regularly we mean at least once a week. This may seem excessive and difficult to maintain as you might not think you can find things to talk about as often as this. But if you can do it, it will pay dividends.

Blogging and the search engines

Every time a new blog post appears on your website, it adds another URL for Google to crawl and index, which will eventually add to the authority of your site. Google – and the other search engines – love shiny new content and provided it’s well written and relevant, new blogs will give the search engines something new to get intimate with.

Each new blog post adds new keywords to your domain name which may not be anywhere else on your website or in your existing blog posts. And the more keywords you have, the more likely you are to appear in peoples’ searches. This helps ranking and brings in more customers.  When you think about keywords to include in blog posts, don’t forget about long-tail keywords. These are phrases internet users typically look for, and are usually questions such as “How do I …” or “What is the best way to…” so writing blogs as guides or information pieces can help you get found.

Blogging and Conversions

.

Most people (over 97%) who visit your site will not be looking to buy right now. Some are researching, some are bored, some came across your site by accident. But of those 97% –  up to two thirds are potential future customers. Blogging gives you a way to start developing a relationship with them, so when they ARE ready to buy – they buy from you.

It’s worth remembering not everyone who reads your blog posts will be ready to buy from you at that time. But they might bookmark your site, sign up for your newsletter or simply make a note of who you are and come back to you in the future. And if they see your blog’s got regular content on it, they will try you for another service.

Blogging and Social Media

Regular blogging gives you something to talk about on social media. Putting the link to your blog on Twitter and Facebook gives you ready-made quality content to share, and will drive your engagement levels. This will get you lots of new followers.

Blogging is all about establishing you as an expert and authority in your industry. Doing it regularly does this with both customers and search engines. Being seen as an authority brings you new customers and boosts your SEO rankings.

How much is too much?

It’s not possible to blog too often. Once per week is really the minimum benchmark to aim for, the recommendation is actually 2 posts per week minimum. And here’s a word of warning: don’t expect to see ROI from your first post. You’ll get visitors for sure, but as mentioned above, it’s unlikely those early visitors will be ready to do business just because you’ve written a blog post about something. You should work towards establishing yourself as a blogger and think about long term goals over 12, 18, 24 months.

So get blogging and post something as often as you can. It will take a little while to gain some traction, but the results will be worth it.

 What will your next blog post be about?

How do you come up with titles and topics? What motivates you to write a new post? What results have you seen and what metrics do you use to measure success?

For your next post target some longtail keywords and let us know if it works for you.

If you’d like to receive more hints and tips about blogging, sign up for our newsletter: