Basics of setting up a WordPress website

Step 5 – Content Blogging

Know how to use your blog to create your own content marketing strategy. This does take time and a certain amount of dedication to achieve, however it is free to do and can become an efficient marketing strategy when used correctly. If Bill Gates recommended content then we should listen:

Bill Gates said: “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet.” 

Publish regularly

Publishing posts regularly will build your blog into a wonderful hive of content, bursting with your keywords and phrases that Google will reward you for. Posting regularly will also cover your day to day (or month to month) SEO needs. 

A blog a day would be fantastic and something we should all strive to do – bigger companies employ copywriters to publish several posts daily but for a small business, this just isn’t a realistic target. In the early days, aim to post a blog a month, the chances are it’ll take you a few days to create a post that you’re happy with but the more you write, the better and quicker you’ll become.

Remember: the more you post, the more content you have, and the more chance your site has of being found.

What to write

You should be writing timely, relevant, keyword rich content aimed at solving a problem that your ideal customer has. Simply cramming in keywords isn’t going to work.

Posting regular blog posts gives Google a chance to crawl your content and increase traffic. You can write about all sorts – pros and cons of products, product reviews, guest blogs. Content content content.

Who is your ideal customer?

The fundamental SEO requirement is that your content is geared towards your ideal customer so keep in mind what your target customer is searching for. The chances are you started your business to fill a void for yourself, therefore you’ll have a first hand experience of who your audience is and precisely what they search for – don’t forget this.

What is your audience looking for?

Understanding your ideal customer will help you to give them what they want, so think of subject areas that they are searching for, and are those that you might like to appear in, look for search terms that you can write a post around (see the dog food example below).

Think of the phrases that are being used, the language they use, their actual terminology, are there any slang words your niche customer uses? Look at how you can use those words and phrases in your content.

When should you publish?

The when to publish is actually secondary, because the important part of blogging is being consistent. To maximise results there may be a right day, or time of day to publish your posts and promote on social media, but as this part of the puzzle is unique for every audience, experimenting will nail it down for you. Once you do, set a schedule, put it in your diary and keep it up.

Where should you publish?

The basic answer is to publish on your blog and promote it from the social media channels your audience uses. However, modern marketing trends suggest publishing directly on those platforms is very effective. For example, a long post on LinkedIn or Facebook could reach a greater audience, they are platforms that are likely to load faster when reading on mobile device, and can provide detailed information on who is engaging with your content. It might make sense to you too, to post content direct to LinkedIn and Facebook, rather than trying to drive traffic back to a blog post. Just make sure that your call to action is always present and that it leads to the next step towards a sale on your site. Again, try it and see what happens.

Understand your keywords and phrases

Keywords and phrases must be relevant to the content on the post so you ought to research these to know the best keywords and phrases to use. Don’t use the same keywords on every post – maximise your opportunities by using different key phrases. 

Think about how you can niche it down, and don’t always go for the biggest traffic producing terms, look for the lesser searched for terms where there’s less competition for those keywords on Google. It is a case of testing and tweaking; all businesses and markets are different so try the lesser searched for keywords and see what happens.

Example 1

  • Product – Children’s Shoes (is a high competition keyword)
  • Niche it down – school shoes, ballet shoes, school pumps etc
  • Niche it further – children’s ballet shoes in Manchester.

Example 2

  • Product – Dog food
  • High competition keywords – dog food
  • Low competition keywords – foods bad for dogs

Tip – A quick look at the keyword planner on Google instantly suggests a potential blog post about a low competition key phrase titles “foods bad for dogs”. Get it written with your keywords and a call to action and get it published and shared to social media.

Keyword search tools:

Learn to speak Google

The “foods bad for dogs” example above illustrates what is meant by looking at the language used – us humans do not type into a Google search with the same language as we speak in. Think about this when targeting your keywords. A well positioned blog post targeting those searching the equivalent of “foods bad for dogs” may well get some well deserved traffic to your site.

Check out your competitors

Have a look at your competitors, visit their site and read their blog posts for inspiration. Don’t ever plagiarise but you can certainly look for ideas on what they’re blogging about and look for their key phrases, they’re easy to spot as they’re in the blog post title and will then be repeated within the post.

Action to take:

Create your own time machine document, start with the following SEO page:

  1. Write down your site name
  2. Write down your site description
  3. Make a list of what you know about your ideal customer
  4. Make a list of what your ideal customer likes to read about online
  5. List your top competitors & the keywords/phrases they use (look at their site name/description and phrases that appear in their blog posts)
  6. Your ideal top 5 key words (or phrases)

 

Having your own time machine document is really useful for you to refer back to and update.