So you want to start a blog? Great! Here are some best practices to get it up and running and keeping it on schedule.
Blogging is a great way to generate traffic to your site. Blogging also requires time, effort, and attention to keep it from getting stale.
How Will Blogging Help My Business?
From an SEO standpoint, a blog will help elevate your main (Pillar) services and products through internal linking to that page from the blog post. This helps visitors take a deeper dive into your site who are in the middle of the sales funnel learn more about how you can help them.
From a business standpoint, a blog will help you connect with potential clients, elevate you to a thought leader in your industry, and showcase your company.
All of these are beneficial to your business.
Blogging Best Practices
Here are some tips to help you blog better!
What Does Your Schedule Look Like?
Blogging takes time and effort. How many posts can you or your team produce in a month? Creating a content calendar is a great way to lay out your blogging schedule for the next year. You can put out as much or as little content as you want, but consistency is key. It is suggested to start small and build from there. It looks better to visitors to show an increase in content instead of a decrease. Start with one post a month or quarter and see how it goes.
What Pages Do you Want Your Blog to Support?
Determine what lead-generating pages you want to link to from your blog post. This can be any number of pages, but each page will need content created. If you want to increase the page authority for 4 pages, you will need to create multiple pieces of content for each page throughout the year. The schedule for this could be every month you create a piece of content for each of the four pages in rotation, creating a weekly blog.
Who Are You Trying to Reach?
Have an idea of who you are trying to connect with and write for them. The content you might want to create may not align with what potential customers want to read. This is where keyword research comes in handy, it tells you what people are typing into the search engines to find the content they want.
Research Keywords
This is a very important step. Once you know what pages you want your blogging efforts to support, it's time to do keyword research (READ: Short-Tail vs. Long-Tail Keywords). By knowing the focus keywords for your Pillar Page (the service or product page you want to increase page authority for) you will have an easier time bringing in traffic and rankings by creating content to support that main keyword.
Using the focus keyword for the Pillar Page, you (or our SEO Experts) can uncover common questions people have about that topic. These questions are what real people are asking and want answers for. These are perfect for your blog post topics (or FAQ section on the Pillar page).
With the example above for 4 Pillar pages, you would be answering 12 questions per Pillar Page a year x 4 (this is why knowing your blogging capacity is important!).
>> Our SEO Experts can help you with keyword research, learn more about Industrial Marketing's Services and reach out to your Strategy Coach for a quote!
Create a Content Calendar
This can be a simple spreadsheet or a dedicated calendar in Google or Outlook. Using the researched keywords you can plug them into the calendar so you know what you'll be writing next and when to post it. This is a great technique to make sure you are rotating topics if you are linking to various Pillar pages.
Write Your Content
Now that you know the keywords you want to rank for with your blog, it's time to write your content. The long-tail keyword should be used in your article title, as an H2 tag, a couple of times within the body of text, as a link to the Pillar page it's supporting, within the Title Tag and Meta Description, in the alt tag on any images in the post, and within the post's URL.
Content should be written in a natural way for your audience. Stay on topic (if you find another topic while you're writing, it could be its own blog post!) and be informative.
Bonus points if you reference and link to a study on a reputable and authoritative site, which helps increase your credibility by providing supporting educational resources (not competitors of course).
Add Images
This will help break up the text for a better user experience as well as provide an image for Google to possibly include in the search engine results page (SERP). Using Yoast or Rankmath you can add additional Schema images for different social media platforms; this image will be included whenever you or someone shares your post!
Use Categories and Tags Appropriately
Using Categories and Tags helps create user-friendly navigation for people visiting your blog.
Categories indicate the genre of your post and are used broadly to group posts together while Tags indicate specific topics, like an index. You should keep your list of Categories small and expand with Tags.
Using the example of Vacuum Metalizing, you might use the following Categories:
- Coating
- Plating
- Support
And you might use the following Tags:
- ESD Shielding
- RFI Shielding
- Plastic Chrome
- EMI Coating and Shielding
- Prototyping
Promotion and Engagement
Once you have your blog post written it's time to share your content! Including links in an email blast to prompt people to visit your website and share across your social media to increase your brand awareness and traffic.
If you want Industrial Marketing to help you with your blogging, reach out to your Strategy Coach to get a quote! Check out Industrial Marketing's Services to see how we can help you.
