Blogging is one of the best ways to increase your site’s visibility in search engines, as well as turn new website views into potential leads. An informative, frequently updated blog not only helps your customer along their purchase journey by giving them new information, helping answer their questions, and moving them towards your product or service, but it also helps with SEO: each blog update shows Google (and other search engines) that your site is active and up-to-date and provides an opportunity to make your site visible for new keywords and search terms. But how do you find a good blog topic for your website? How do you find a relevant topic that helps your SEO?
Integrating Keywords Into Your Blog Helps Drive traffic
Keywords are the words and terms that people type into their search bar when using a search engine, and are one of the keys to driving search traffic to your website. A good blog topic will be one that allows you to integrate the keywords and search terms for which you want to “be found.” That is, if you want your website to show up in searches for certain terms, you want to work those terms into your web copy. But be warned: long gone are the days when you could just “keyword stuff” your website; nowadays Google and other big search engines prioritize natural, conversational writing that’s meaningful to consumers.
For this reason, blogging–which allows you to write in-depth about topics of your choosing–is a useful opportunity to make these keywords “fit” into your copy when they may not naturally do so on other parts of your website. This is especially true with medium- and long-tail keywords (more specific keywords and phrases that may not be broadly searched, but see great returns from those who do search for them), which can be otherwise difficult to write in naturally. For example, an ice cream shop in Hopkins might want to capture summer event traffic, and a blog post titled “Fun things to do in Hopkins this summer” that includes a list of cool events could allow the shop to rank more highly for search terms it previously didn’t show up under.
Understand Your Audience so You Can Predict Their Behavior
It may make us sound like a broken record, but “understanding your audience” is such a powerful piece of advice that it can’t be overlooked for any aspect of marketing and business development. Between Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, website info, and more, you should be able to come up with a pretty solid profile of who your customers are–or, if you’re just starting out, a little research will help you figure out a profile of who you want your customers to be (or who they’re most likely to be). If your customers are primarily American artists and craft-makers age 65+, they probably aren’t going to be clicking on a blog post about macroeconomic data trends in Croatia, even if you (somehow) use all the right keywords to make that blog show up in their searches. “What are my customers interested in?” sounds like the obvious starting point for figuring out your blog topics, and well, that’s because it is.
Answer Questions Your Customers Are Asking
Building a customer profile and using that to create topics is a great place to begin, but even that requires a level of prediction that can’t guarantee interest. An even safer bet is to find the exact questions your customers are asking, and write blog topics that answer your customers’ questions. This doesn’t even need to be a massive, systematic research assignment–odds are, you as a small business owner already have a good idea of the types of questions your customers are asking. If you don’t, you likely have a staff that does. Do you have a customer service rep who reads all the inbound email inquiries? Do you have a salesperson who’s on the ground dealing with customers day-in and day-out? Do you see certain topics on forums for your industry or service popping up frequently? These are all great sources to mine for blog topics relevant to your customer. And once you have them on your website, answering their questions builds trust and helps lead them further down that sales pipeline (especially if you showcase your product or service as part of the solution).
Is Trend-Chasing Such a Bad Thing?
While blog posts aren’t ephemeral and do stick around unless you actively delete them, maintaining a regular and frequent blogging schedule means you can address trending topics and hopefully capture some attention before they fade into the background. Google Trends is a helpful platform for determining what topics and search terms are big at the moment, and is especially useful because it also shows more granular data–where in the world a topic is trending, interest over time (so you can see if it’s past its peak), etc.
Of course, always be mindful of what you know about your audience. Just because there exists a huge audience for a particular topic, it doesn’t mean that this audience is made of the right people for your product or service. But where Google Trends are helpful is when you notice an overlap in the Venn diagram: if there’s a popular, trending topic that’s also relevant to your audience, then jump on that for a blog topic and try to capture that lightning!
Watch Your Blog Performance and Pay Attention to What Works (and Doesn’t)
An eye towards data and performance is what helps separate businesses with great marketing from organizations that may be leaving sales on the table. The first step is always to get started, even if your strategy isn’t perfect, but once you have some blog posts on your site, start paying attention to traffic numbers–are certain posts getting more views and clicks? Are certain posts leading more people to explore the rest of your site or generate more leads? Are certain posts getting linked to by other reputable websites? As you look at this data, you’ll (hopefully) be able to see trends about what topics work best for your business, and you can begin to refine future topics to replicate those results.
Blogging is a reliable way to improve your site’s SEO, but it also takes dedication, research and writing skills, and a good bit of creativity. Fortunately, Skol Marketing can handle all your digital business marketing needs, including making sure your website’s blogs are perfectly targeted towards your audience. If you’d prefer one-on-one guidance or would like to discuss how our assistance can help you improve your search rankings, please don’t hesitate to contact the local SEO experts at Skol Marketing.
