DJ - Kaizen Digital

So, you’ve written a blog – great! Now what?

From the smallest sole trader businesses right up to the largest corporations, we are all guilty or occasionally creating content but then taking a back step when it comes to marketing and pushing that blog into the eyesight of our target readers. In fact, we often hear about businesses who create blogs purely for the purpose of SEO, with no real goals or CTAs attached to drive action from their readers and prospective customers.

But what if we told you that great content can not only boost your SEO, but can also attract the right people towards your website, encourage them to engage with you, and help convert visitors into customers if you are trying to sell something?

In this article, we share some top tips on how to make sure that people actually read your content – looking at the best ways to increase traffic and encourage the most productive action from each and every piece of content on your website.

The Power of a Great Piece of Content

A great piece of content can:

Let Google and other search engines know what your website/webpage is about, proving credibility and reliability.
Show users and prospective customers that you are knowledgeable and trustworthy.
Start conversations and encourage engagement.
Provide you with a landing page for campaigns or social posts.
Give you some leverage for email campaigns and social campaigns.
Support your SEO with keywords.

But in order to tick all of those boxes and ensure that every piece of content you upload adds value to your website and draws the right readers and potential customers, you first need to make sure that what you’re writing about is targeting the right audience in the right way.

Introducing our step by step guide to creating content which will benefit your business and/or online presence.

STEP ONE – Know your Audience

Whether you’re writing a blog to support a new product or service launch, to provide insight into a specific topic within your industry, or to share an opinion and start a conversation with your readers, knowing who you are talking to lies at the heart of every word on your webpage.

This includes knowing where your target audience spend their time online, so that you can target them and use those same platforms and channels to market your blog once it is complete – enticing the right people to engage in the right way with your content. You will find that the more you know about your audience, the easier it will be to write in a way that organically engages and entices them.

STEP TWO – Think about Keywords

Organic traffic is easily the best way to bring in new readers if your blog or website is fairly new, or if you are trying a new approach to content creation – mainly because focussing on organic traffic allows you to write and use keywords to connect with the kind of users who are searching for your industry and the keywords you prioritise. And the best way to gain organic traffic to your blog is to focus on identifying and using those keywords.

Keywords refer to the words and phrases that your audience will type into the search bar and that can bring them to your blog if you play your cards right (and use your keyword strategy correctly), so it’s important to think both big and small – with more generic industry-specific keywords, and more targeted niche ones as well.

TOP TIP: Think about problems that your audience might search for and how you and your blog can link. Factor the keywords relating to those problems into your blog and frame yourself as the best solution.

STEP THREE – Decide on a Perspective for your Blog

Once you know your audience, it will become easier to know how to approach each topic and new piece of content. The first thing to do in terms of perspective is to decide on an area of expertise that you and your blog will become known for – and then build on that, becoming a go-to resource for your target audience.

You can support this by using research and keyword tools to anticipate trending topics in your industry and write about them as part of a growing trend.

STEP FOUR – One vs. A Series

Before you start writing on a specific topic, consider if it will all fit nearly into one blog or if it could be better presented as a series. While this will inevitably take more time, it will also give you a lot more material to work with and implement into a marketing campaign, social media, and even a larger downloadable resource in the future.

STEP FIVE – Start Writing

Ready to go? Make sure that as you write your blog(s) you keep on track, refer back to your audience and what they are searching for, and implement those keywords effectively and productively.

Publishing and Promoting your Content

Once your blog or piece of content is complete, it’s time to publish and promote – and that means more work from your end in getting your blog link out among relevant communities, in the right industry groups, on your social media and email campaigns, and across your customer base.

If you decide to put some financial backing behind your blogs and content, then you can use PPC campaigns to build on the reach of your page. Alternatively, you can create some social media campaigns that are targeted towards your blog and promote these. Or you can keep it simple and throw your weight behind gaining an organic following – using the power of recommendation, sharing, and discussion to drive prospective readers towards your blog.

And remember, consistency is key – so don’t give up if your very first blog only draws in a handful of readers. Keep providing value and the followers and customers will come.

How many times have you visited or found yourself browsing a specific website, then spotted a link to another website or another webpage, clicked, and continued your journey there? Sometimes this link will take you to a different page on the same website, sometimes it will provide extra value by taking you offsite to another source of information, and sometimes it will change the course of your journey completely.

This is an example of link building, and when done right can benefit your SEO hugely.

The Benefits of link building for SEO

Before we get into how to build links for SEO, it first pays to understand the benefits and why links are so important. Links are one of the main criteria used by Google in ascertaining the quality of a webpage and its information. As such, every link you use should direct the user towards a reputable and high quality source which is entirely relevant to your own website and industry.

Some of the best ways of doing this include linking guest blogs written by you for other sites, and blogs written by other sites and individuals for you, bolstering each other’s position and credibility in the eyes of Google; and finding sources that supplement the information provided on your website. Crucially, every link you include in your website must directly take the user to a source of great value, with no dead pages and no redirections. This is one of the main reasons why digital marketers always recommend regular assessments of your site SEO, as this is the best way to establish any broken links that you may otherwise have missed.

If this all sounds a bit daunting, don’t worry. It’s time to introduce some of the best ways of building links for SEO.

How to build links for SEO

The best way of building links is through professional relationships and partnerships. This could mean that you partner with other relevant sources and create editorial content for each other, or it could be more of a PR exercise where you create content which recommends and guides your users to check out their content or products too.

TOP TIP: If you decide to do this, always ensure that a link clicked on your website opens a new window or a new tab, rather than simply taking the user away from your website completely. The former aids their journey without ending their experience on your website, while the latter is a sure fire way of ending the transaction instantly.

Let’s look at an example of valuable link building in action.

Imagine that you are a beauty brand looking to launch and sell a new product. As well as creating your own content and sharing it on you platforms, a partnership with a renowned beauty blogger who then writes a blog for your website means that both your followers and their network will likely check out your blog – helping to establish your brand by linking it to someone who people trust.

This is the value of link building: it widens the reach of your website and your brand, and when done right can help to establish you as a credible go-to in the industry

Our tips for building links for SEO

Establish long term partnerships with people in your industry. This means competitors, authority figures, customer facing and back end professionals. You never know when or where you might get some valuable support from – and a variety of different industry touchpoints can help to build some fruitful and effective links on your website.
Find out where your competitors are getting featured as guest bloggers and industry experts and get yourself on there too. There are tons of tools out there which can help you to discover where your competitors are getting their backlinks from, making it easy to follow their lead and bolster your own SEO.
Testimonials! These are so important, because if you review a big brand or a supplier you use and they decide to mention or share your review, you are getting free marketing and backlinks to your online presence without even trying.
If it fits with your brand, build a resources page and add all your favourite external sites and brands to it. This is a great way of implementing external links to your site without even really having to try and will likely lead to positive exchanges with other professionals who want to be featured on your page too. This also bolsters the user experience on your site as you make the customer journey super easy for them and provide even more value.
Build links into your content. This may seem like a simple one, but not every link has to have a dedicated CTA and bright coloured button. Some of the best links are those you embed into a piece of content, telling the user exactly which piece of information or statement the link is going to support.

The Takeaway

Link building is a way of showing your website to be full of value, authority, and credibility – and it all starts with the importance of working partnerships and industry relationships. By building external links into your own site, and getting your site mentioned and integrated into other reputable external sources, you continue to show Google that what you are sharing, selling, and/or offering is high in value and relevant to the target audience.

As part of an SEO strategy, link building is up there as one of the most important areas of focus.

SEO, known in the industry as Search Engine Optimisation, is one of those buzzwords thrown around by digital marketing experts as a service that they offer and can use to help your business drive more customers and make more money.

But what does it actually mean, and does SEO really work?

What is SEO?

SEO refers to the use of organic search results to drive a high number of the right customers through to your website. In short, it relies on the use of different content streams and sources to show Google and other search engines what you do and how you can help the end customer – so that they can, in turn, highlight your website on the results page of a relevant customer search.

Much of what we do for SEO is built around keywords and search terms, and this stems from research into the industry you operate in, and the kind of words being used by your competitors to drive traffic.

An effective SEO strategy looks at two different types of keyword for effectiveness:

Short-tail, generic keywords. For example, a jewellery brand could use terms like ‘jewellery’, ‘necklace’, ‘jewellery gift’, ‘gift for her’.
Long-tail, more targeted keywords. For example, that same brand will now use ‘jewellery maker in the UK’, ‘sapphire ring with diamonds’, etc. These are the keywords which are specific to what you sell and are the kinds of terms that customers search for when they know what they want.

How does SEO drive customers and sales?

The biggest focus of an SEO strategy is on driving high quality customers to your website, who are actually interested in your brand and your products, without you having to pay a penny to attract them. Paid ads are a whole other ballgame in the digital marketing sphere and have nothing to do with your SEO plans – so park those where they are and let’s talk more about keywords and optimising your search terms.

Search engines send crawlers out into the big wide world of the internet, every time a user makes a search. The results that they feed back to the user are based on the match those crawlers find between the search terms and high quality websites available – matching those crucial keywords, and any other credibility factors it can find quickly and easily.

It’s not all keywords when it comes to these search engines, with crawlers also looking at high quality links (both internal and external on your website), the quality of the user experience on your site, the content and context of the copy on your site, and even the positioning and formatting on the images and videos you include. But SEO is the main driving force in framing the way that Google sees your site, and the way that users find and interact with it – by optimising and fine tuning every element of the site from load times to content and the customer journey as a whole.

Does SEO really work?

This is the big question, and for the most part the answer is yes – provided you have a strategy in place and don’t just throw keywords around for fun. The first thing to realise is that Google algorithms change regularly and so your approach to SEO needs to be fluid, flexible, and adaptable at a moments notice. Having said that, having a high quality user experience which delivers on what you promise and is designed to provide solutions to users never goes out of style, and so provided that your website is authentic and safe to use, SEO is simply there to help you guide the right audience towards it.

One of the major misconceptions we see is the idea that SEO is a quick fix that you can implement overnight and instantly see results. This is not true. SEO is a long game solution to ensuring that your organic traffic is higher in both quantity and quality – which in turn leads to more website visitors, more customers, more sales, and more profit. And that’s just the top level wins. Some of the other benefits that businesses will recognise as they implement an effective SEO strategy include:

Keyword Growth – as your website grows and becomes more SEO-friendly, you will find that you rank more highly for better keywords. That is, more of the common search terms will be built into your SEO strategy, meaning you appear on more search results pages in a higher position, and attract more website visitors.
Traffic Growth. Not only will you see more website visitors, but you will find that these visitors are actively engaged with your website, your brand, and your product – which also means that you get…
Higher Quality Traffic. Genuine customers who are looking for what you can offer.

What do all these benefits prove? That once you start to build an SEO strategy in your digital marketing, your SEO possibilities and options will only serve to grow and develop even further. What better proof could you ask for to show that SEO really does work?!

The Takeaway

Provided you spend the time researching your place in the market and finding the right keywords for your SEO strategy, the question of whether SEO really works is all down to implementation and getting the buy in of your entire digital team. One of the easiest ways of ascertaining the best keywords is to use analytics and immerse yourself in research around your main competitors – what words are they bidding on, and how do they implement keywords across their website. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel – just finetune your own plan based on examples that are already working.

As time goes on, you will find that more doors are opened to your business and search engines becoming increasingly friendly towards you – all because of a little SEO focus that you can start right now.