Get to know the strategic elements of effective blogs

When businesses and organizations decide to start up their own search engine optimization or content marketing campaign, it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed by the whole process at first. Not only is it necessary to work on website development before any marketing can take place, but you also have to decide if you want to focus on search engine optimization or on content marketing, on social media marketing or on email marketing.

There are so many different ways to run an online marketing campaign these days that it can be tough to figure out what you’re doing right — and what you’re doing wrong. One of the most common components of content marketing that businesses decide to do themselves is to run their own blog. Unbeknownst to many business owners, blogging really is hard work and it takes up a lot of time. When you aren’t doing it correctly, it doesn’t provide much of a return on your investment, either!

Watch for common mistakes!

So with that in mind, here are some of the most common mistakes that business owners make in their blogs:

1. Writing blog topics that aren’t contributing to a bigger goal – It’s important to have a plan in mind before you start writing blogs; this will help decide what types of blogs to write and how to distribute them. A blog optimized for social media sharing may not be the best blog for a keyword-focused SEO campaign.
2. The writing is too formal and unnatural – Blogging is a way of building your organization’s brand and encouraging readers to connect with you. Your writing should sound more informal in a blog post than it would sound in a newsletter or official email.
3. Using too many or not enough pictures – It’s usually not a good idea to fill your pages with pictures and videos, mostly because it will slow down the load time of your pages. But if you don’t have any graphics on your blog post pages, you might not be getting much traffic. Visuals really do matter here: it only takes visitors about 50 milliseconds to form an opinion about your business based on your website, and the average site visitor only reads about one-quarter of the written content on any given page.
4. The posts aren’t actually encouraging audience engagement – This is a big part of content marketing — or it should be, at least. If you want to focus on drumming up local business, you’ll want to encourage people to leave reviews (because positive reviews convince seven out of 10 customers to trust a local business) and you’ll want to encourage your readers to engage with your posts online by commenting, sharing, and re-posting.

Navigating the fine line between purely commercial an informational blog posts

Successful SEO needs to not only entertain readers but also needs to push them to act. It’s a fine line between Purely Commercial and Informational Blog Posts, of course. If your content is too marketing-oriented, readers will be turned off; after all, if they wanted to be sold something they’d buy a sales catalog. At the same time, if the content is too academic and dry, they may be satisfied with what they read, but may not take the necessary steps to purchase a product.

All of this begs the question: how can you navigate this balance between marketing and informative content?

At the most basic level, you have two choices from a strategic perspective. The first is to keep your “marketing” and “informative” blog posts separate. So, for example, 50% of your posts can be about specific products, while 50% can be informational in nature.

The second option is to combine the two into a single post. This may be a bit more difficult, but from a viewer’s perspective, it has a more compelling effect. As a simple example, let’s say you’re an independent bookstore. You post a review on a new book and just so happen to provide a link to where you can purchase that book. Voila – the post is both informational and commercial.

Things can get trickier for other types of businesses, but the point remains the same: readers respond better to these hybrid posts and are more inclined to make purchases, all while optimizing your SEO efforts. And if you’re looking for SEO in Miami in particular, we can help.

What if you published compelling content and nobody’s reading?

Even if you have just a cursory understanding of search engine optimization (SEO), you’re probably well aware that – to belabor an over-used phrase – “content is king.” No one will visit your site for a sustained time period unless you have compelling content. And the good news is, whether you realize it or not, you actually have compelling content.

After all, you work closely with customers and clients every day. You know their concerns, interests, and behaviors. Clearly this information can be effectively parlayed so that other clients and would-be clients can respond to it.

But even that isn’t enough. After all, you need people to get to your site in the first place. You need a user-friendly web design so that the content (for another over-used industry term) “jumps off the page.” And you need to make sure the content itself is attuned to data-driven keywords.

No matter where you are on this spectrum – whether you need help with content or are looking for SEO-friendly website designers in Miami, we can help.