Do you sometimes feel like there’s a magic formula to blogging that everyone else knows apart from you? Do you feel like your blog is an online ghost town despite your best efforts? Are you wondering whether blogging is really for you?

In my recent article about why your business needs a blog, we looked at the many benefits of blogging for business.

As we saw, it:

• Builds your reputation and showcases your expertise
• Improves the user experience
• Boosts your SEO
• Brings in more organic traffic
• Amplifies your reach on social media
• Helps you capitalise on long-tail keyword searches

Of course, many of these benefits depend on creating the kind of blog posts that your audience want to read and are excited to share with their own networks.

Is there some secret formula?

Is there really such a thing as the perfect blog post?

Well, perfection looks different to everyone, doesn’t it? So, I’m not really sure that the perfect blog post exists.

However, great blog posts do share common features that can make the difference between content that gathers tumbleweed on your website and content that keeps being talked about, shared, quoted and brings many of those all-important benefits listed above.

In this guide, I’ve put together the features that I think guarantee attention-grabbing articles on your blog.

Single focus for clarity

Each and every article published on your blog should have a single focus rather than being about multiple topics.

When people search for information online, they tend to have a specific need or query in mind. Having clicked on a link in the search results, they expect to land on a page that will answer that specific need.

By making sure that all of your blog posts have a single focus, you can show readers at a glance that a piece of content will give them the information they’re looking for.

Also, a single focus means that you won’t have to go into competition with other blogs you’ve written using the same keywords.

And Google won’t have to look at a blog post about multiple topics and try to work out which is the most important.

The need for a single focus is why I am writing this series of articles about blogging. It enables me to write content about the benefits of blogging, then separate content about the anatomy of a great blog post, then content about promoting your blog and so on.

Someone wanting to read about promoting their blog, for example, may already know about the benefits of blogging so they won’t want to hunt through a huge article to get to the information they need about promotional tactics.

A single focus keeps things simple for the reader.

Main (H1) heading that grabs attention

About eight out of 10 people read a headline, whereas two out of 10 read the rest of the article.

Knowing this, it’s clear that a blog article’s headline needs to stand out from all of the other headlines people see in a day by grabbing attention.

There are many different styles of headline that could work well with your audience, so I’ve added links to some resources at the bottom of this section.

My advice is to experiment with different headlines and to keep an eye on the performance metrics in Google Analytics, Google Search Console and on social media as this will help you to build up a picture about the headlines that resonate with your audience.

In his Definitive Guide to Writing a Headline That Doesn’t Suck, Neil Patel says he tends to favour a three-part headline that begins with a ‘tutorial style’ intro, e.g. ‘How to…’ This is because ‘How to’ blogs ‘clearly dominate’ his blog in terms of shares.

Patel’s three-part headline format breaks down into:

• Intro (tutorial style)
• Outcome (what the audience wants to achieve)
• Audience (who the article is written for/how the audience perceives themselves)

Here’s an example:

How to / do SEO / for a ‘tiny’ website that doesn’t have any visitors or money

(Tutorial) / (Outcome) / (Who the article is for)

List style posts, questions and headlines that shock all work well too.

Above all, a great headline should:

1. Promise something the reader will get from reading – i.e. offer a specific outcome
2. Provide specifics – numbers and stats work well
3. Create intrigue or curiosity

Keep in mind

If you have a WordPress website and you use the excellent Yoast SEO plugin, it likes to see the focus keywords as near to the beginning of the headline as possible, reflecting the fact that this is where people look first on a web page.

It isn’t essential but it can be worth experimenting with putting the topic of your blog as near to the beginning of the headline as possible to let visitors know that they’re in the right place.

Certainly, your headings should be as clear as possible.

While you want to create some mystery or intrigue, you don’t want the headline to confuse the audience by making them guess what the article is about.

Great resources for headline help

If you’re struggling to come up with a compelling headline, why not take a look at the following resources?

• What does a great, clickable headline look like?, guest blog for SEO+
• The definitive guide to writing a headline that doesn’t suck, Neil Patel
• Magnetic headlines, Copyblogger
• 58+ headline formulas, The Blog Marketing Academy
• Portent Content Idea Generator
• Hubspot Blog Ideas Generator

The hook that draws the audience in

The first sentence of any blog article is arguably the most important sentence in your entire blog. It has to draw people on to the second sentence and so on.

One of the most powerful ways to grab the attention of your readers from the outset is to open a blog article with a story.

Why is this?

Well, the human brain is hardwired to learn from stories.

Long before we had the written word, human beings used spoken stories to share their knowledge or warn people against danger. This drive to package information in a narrative continues to this day and is at the heart of human language.

Scientific evidence proves how our brains respond to stories – amazingly, they act as if we are living the story ourselves. Evidence shows elevated heart rates, sweating, a faster pulse and even higher levels of oxytocin being released into the body.

It’s also been proven that we can retain information for longer and more accurately if it’s given to us in the form of a story.

The London School of Economics, for example, found that an average of 5-10% of people can retain statistics if they hear them. This increases to 25% of people if the stat is accompanied by a picture. However, retention jumps to a remarkable 65-70% when statistics are shared in a story.

An article from Buffer shows that, using split tests to determine the results, nearly 300% more people read all the way to the bottom of a blog that started with a story compared to the people who saw the version that didn’t begin with a story.

Storytelling techniques to open an article

It’s definitely worth experimenting with telling a story to introduce a blog article. Some popular techniques that work well include:

1. Repeat a conversation – tell your audience about a conversation you had or a situation that occurred and how it relates to the topic of the article
2. Use a metaphor (or make one up if you have to) – e.g. you could talk about going on a picnic and how the view to your right was sunny and the view to your left cloudy and then use this to introduce a blog about choosing your perspective in life or realising that other people choose which perspective to share with you
3. Use emotions – share how you felt about something with your audience or talk to them about how they might feel, e.g. a parenting blog about helping a baby settle at night might open with a story about the exhaustion and frustration of sitting up all night with a crying baby
4. Connect your opening to a story people already know – e.g. an article about winning a contract as a freelance designer could tell a David and Goliath-type story about going up against a big design agency
5. Use a picture and talk about what’s happening in the picture or the emotions the picture evokes

More resources

If you need some inspiration for how to write the intro to your next blog, you might find these resources helpful:

• 10 brilliant examples of how to open your blog post with a bang, Michael D Pollock
• Storytelling in blog posts: How to add sparkle and delight readers, Enchanting Marketing
• The Ultimate Guide to Storytelling, HubSpot

Sub-headings that keep people reading

As we’ve mentioned above, most people skim read a blog rather than reading it in full.

Their eyes will scan over the page looking for visual clues that stand out to explain what the article is about.

The eye is drawn to headings, images, different font styles (such as text in bold, italics or bullet points) and sub-headings.

In fact, sub-headings are the perfect way to break up your content and highlight what each section is about. This gives readers a good overview of the article and lets them hone in on sections that are of particular interest.

Again, if you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin, it recommends a maximum of 300 words of body copy between sub-headings but preferably less.

Your sub-headings will help to draw people from one section of your blog to another, encouraging them to read the entire article.

After you’ve written a new blog article, scan through yourself and see whether the sub-headings highlight the overarching gist of the piece.

Yoast recommends using your main focus keyword and/or related words and phrases in your sub-headings.

I wouldn’t be too prescriptive about this though; the most important thing is to write compelling sub-headings that invite people to keep reading.

Something I find works well is to put functional sub-headings in as placeholders when you’re writing the first draft of a blog and then go back to review them during the final editing stages.

As with your main heading, your subtitles need to offer the promise of something or create intrigue.

What do we mean by H1, H2, H3 headings, etc.?

As you’re probably aware, search engines need help understanding the content of a web page. With headings, we give them a special tag – i.e. <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc. – to identify which pieces of copy represent headings.

A web page or blog article should only ever have one H1 tag per page.

This tells the search engines what the main title of your page is – and therefore, the topic the content will cover. This is important as it will help search engines to rank your article in response to relevant search topics.

The H2 tag relates to your top-level sub-headings within an article. In this guide, for example, I’ve given H2 tags to the sub-headings that begin each new section.

In turn, the H3 tag relates to your sub-sub-headings (like the one I’ve used in this section). You could use H4 headings and so on too, although there’s usually no reason to do this.

Compelling content

It probably goes without saying that a blog needs to offer compelling content to keep people reading.

But how do you create compelling content?

After all, what one person finds absolutely riveting could send someone else to sleep!

The key here is to always write with your target audience or so-called ‘ideal’ customers in mind.

Who are the people reading your blog?

What do they want to know?

What keeps them awake at night?

What information are they desperately searching for right now?

What can you share that they’ll find valuable?

If you can keep these questions front of mind, your blog articles should attract plenty of engagement.

An easy-to-scan layout

I’ve already mentioned several times that blog articles need to be easy to scan to keep people interested.

It’s important to bear this in mind as you write an article.

Think about ways that you can create interest and pull out key points from your content in a visually engaging manner.

The following pointers work well:

• Use numbered or bullet pointed lists to highlight key points in your blog (like I’m doing here!)
• Make important text stand out in bold, italics or by highlighting it

Use a block quote format to make important quotes stand out from the rest of the content

• Only ever left-align your text as justified text that lines up to the left and right of the screen is too hard to scan
• Keep your paragraphs short – it’s much easier to read an article if there are lots of lines breaks and short paragraphs
• Use images (more about this below)
• Use sub-headings (see above)

The perfect word count

If you do a Google search for the ‘ideal blog post length’, you’ll see a whole host of advice on page one of your search alone, before you’ve even clicked on any links!

Answers vary from 1,600 words or 1,760 words to 2,400 words right down to 300 words.

So, who’s right?

In my opinion, there is no such thing as the ‘perfect’ word count for a blog (check out this Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin about why ‘the perfect blog post length and publishing frequency is B?!!$#÷x’).

In my experience, very short 300-word blogs are unlikely to make much impact with an audience, unless you’ve already built up a strong following who value every contribution from you, large or small.

It’s also hard for search engines to rank 300-word blogs because there’s not a lot of content to decipher and return in search results.

Personally, I choose to write and share longer articles like this one. It’s important for me to provide value to my audience and I want the content I share to be packed full of practical advice about SEO.

Thinking about how I interact with blogs written by other people, I’m far more likely to share content that’s in-depth and written with a specific target audience in mind.

I think it reflects well on me to pass on well-researched knowledge to my audience, even if the credit goes to someone else. My hope is that other people will share my content in the same way, recognising the research and experience that goes into each article.

With this in mind, an article should be as long as it needs to be to communicate the information you want to share.

Images that reflect the core topic of your blog

Stats show that articles that include images get 94% more views than articles without.

The advice in this section applies to all images used in a blog post, including the featured image (see below).

The images you include in an article should complement the blog topic. Images that show what you’re talking about are great – ideally, someone who’s skimming through the article will be able to get a sense of what it’s about from the images alone.

Images are also a fantastic way to break up blocks of copy to make an article easier to skim read.

You don’t have to be too literal with the images you choose. If you can’t find the perfect picture, you could choose something more conceptual instead.

As you’re likely to be blogging quite often, you probably won’t have the budget to pay for images for every post.

There are some great sites featuring free stock images contributed by aspiring and existing photographers under the Creative Commons license.

All you have to do is check that the photographer has given permission for you to use the image commercially and under what terms. For example, you might have to credit the photographer on your blog or, if you can use a picture without credit, you might not be allowed to adapt it in any way.

There are several different license options so it’s always best to check the terms listed with your chosen image.

The following sites usually offer free, royalty-free images that you can use and even adapt for commercial purposes:

• Pixabay
• Morguefile
• Unsplash
• io
• Pexels
• Burst (by Shopify) – mix of free and paid-for images
• Reshot
• Foodies Feed – food-related images
• Gratisography
• PicJumbo

Optimising your images

When using images for your blog, it’s helpful to make sure that they’re optimised from an SEO perspective. To do this:

• Save the image with a filename that includes the focus keyword for your blog – this is another reason why relevant images are important as the filename should reflect the subject of the image.
• Make sure your images are the right size and file type to load quickly – you don’t want huge images slowing down page load speeds.
• Give each image an ‘alt tag’ – Google can’t understand images and visually impaired readers may struggle to see them; the alt tag is a way of describing the image to search engines and for accessibility purposes. This is a great place to include the focus keyword for your blog. However, you shouldn’t stuff keywords into the tag in an attempt to game Google. Instead, try to give a simple description of the image.

A striking featured image

If your blog is on WordPress, then you have the option to add a ‘Featured Image’ to each published article. This is the image that will appear alongside your headline/URL on social media so it’s a good idea to give it some thought.

Most social media platforms have preferred dimensions for images but can automatically resize as long as the aspect ratio of the image is suitable. The best featured image sizes are:

• Horizontal: 1024 x 512
• Portrait: 800 x 1200

Portrait images are primarily for Pinterest as the other platforms use horizontal images.

Think about where your blogs are most likely to be found and where your audience spends most of its time online. If Pinterest is your main social media platform, go for portrait images. Otherwise, horizontal images are probably better.

Internal links that tie related content together

Ideally, your blog won’t be working in insolation on your website.

You probably have a series of core topics that you write about in some way, including blogs about sub-topics under each umbrella.

If you haven’t heard of the ‘hub and spoke model’, you might want to check out my recent blog about the benefits of blogging and how to get started.

Best practice is to include links in your blogs to articles on related topics. This enables the reader to go off at a tangent or read deeper into a topic if they want to.

As well as improving the user experience, linking content together is great for your SEO too. If you can encourage people to read deeper into your site beyond the first page they landed on, this will lower your bounce rate and improve the dwell time (i.e. the average length of each visit) on your site.

It will also spread the so-called ‘link juice’ coming in from external links to your site.

What do I mean by this?

Well, one of the signals that Google uses to decide where to rank a web page is the number and quality of ‘backlinks’ coming from a third party site to the page. This is the ‘link juice’ or ‘link authority’ flowing into a web page.

However, the link juice doesn’t stop when it arrives on a page. If you imagine every link on a page as a straw or tube, the links also allow the link juice to flow to the pages they connect. This increases the link authority on all of the linked to pages.

Using the ‘hub and spoke’ model, link juice can come into any of the spoke articles, flow back to the main ‘hub’ article and out to the rest of the spokes.

My advice is to link to other blog articles or service pages on your website rather than linking to top-level pages like your Home page or Contact page. Internal links should be about expanding the information available to the reader.

If your blog is on WordPress, the link creator (above) will bring up a list of articles you might want to link to. There’s also a search facility that you can use if you can’t remember whether you have blogs on a specific topic.

External links

Every blog you write should ideally include some links to external sources too. This is beneficial in a couple of ways.

If you can back-up any claims you make or statistics you cite in your blogs with a link to supporting evidence or the original source, it shows that your content has been properly researched and can be trusted. This is important for building your expertise, authority and trust (EAT).

Also, if high authority websites become aware that you’re linking to them or even mentioning them in your content, they may decide to link back to your article.

This is a fantastic way of earning a backlink from a site trusted by Google. It’s a massive vote of confidence in your content that can improve the page and domain authority of your blog.

General link advice

Both your internal and external links help to tell search engines what each blog article is about. They also make it easy for readers to broaden and deepen their knowledge without having to do loads of searches and research themselves.

Just remember that, when you include links to external sites in a blog, you should make sure that the link opens in a new window, while the original tab on your website remains open too. Otherwise, you risk encouraging people to navigate away from your site before they’ve read an article in full or looked at any more of your content.

There is no perfect number of internal or external links in a blog.

The Yoast SEO plugin always recommends that you feature at least one of each. The best approach is to provide a link when it makes sense. If you can back up a point with a source then, great – link to it.

If you have written more about a specific topic in another article, let people know with a link. Best practice revolves around doing everything you can to improve the user experience.

A clear call to action

Having kept your audience enthralled with your great content, it’s important that you tell them what you want them to do before they navigate away from the article and, consequently, your website.

This is where the call to action comes in.

Of course, different calls to action work for different audiences. They will also depend on your overarching goals for your website and your wider business.

• Do you want people to sign up to your mailing list?

If so, you might offer a free downloadable guide, worksheet or checklist.

• Do you want people to sign on for a free trial?

If you do, the end of your blog is the ideal place to tell them about it.

• Or do you want people to follow you on social media?

In this case, ask them to hit the social share buttons (more about this below).

The key here is to be as clear as possible about what you want the reader to do next and how they will benefit by following the call to action.

You may need to experiment with different calls to action to see which ones work best for your audience.

Unique meta data that invites people to click through to your site

Google uses the meta data for a web page to help it understand what the content is about and return the page in relevant searches.

The meta title and meta description are the short pieces of information we see about a web page in search results.

For example, here is how a searcher would see the meta title and description for the SEO+ Home page:

Every blog you publish should have a compelling title tag and meta description. This should tell people what the page is about but also act as a call to action, inviting them to click through to your website.

If you don’t add a meta description to a web page, Google will probably just pull out the first lines of text from the page, whether or not they work as a call to action.

You can find more advice about creating clickable meta date in my On-page SEO Guide.

A relevant URL

When creating the URL for a blog article, my advice is to keep it short, sweet and relevant.

Again, think about the single focus of the article – this would make a great URL.

Too often, I see blog articles that have been published without any thought going into the URL. This can make the address very long.

For example, an overly long URL might be: example.com/The-Definitive-Guide-to-Writing-a-Headline-That-Doesn’t-Suck.

While, yes, this reflects the title of the article, people wouldn’t necessarily know to search for this.

A better URL would be example.com/write-better-headlines – after all, ‘write better headlines’ is likely to be the exact search term someone would use if they want to learn to write better headlines.

With a short, clear URL, people can even guess the address for themselves without finding it in searches.

For example, someone might ask themselves, has Hazel at SEO+ published a guide to on-page SEO? They could then type in seo-plus.co.uk/on-page-seo-guide and land straight on the information they’re looking for.

Make each article easy to share

Although your SEO efforts should help to bring in traffic to your blog via Google, social media offers the greatest potential for new readers.

Ideally, you want to create such great content that people feel compelled to share it with their own networks and audiences.

To achieve this though, you need to make it as easy as possible to share your content.

There are a number of ways you can do this:

• Add social sharing buttons to all of your blog posts – if you have a WordPress site, there are loads of plugins for this (I love Social Warfare)
• Pull out key quotes from your blogs and make them tweetable (Click to Tweet is a popular WordPress plugin)
• Feature links to your social media pages on the header or footer of your website and/or in any author information you provide about yourself at the end of a blog post

Great blog posts: A quick recap

I hope this guide has inspired you to wow your audience with your next blog. Here’s a quick recap of the must-have points great blog posts should include:

While I wish I could give you a magic formula, these pointers are as close as I can get without knowing your audience.

My advice is that you keep an eye on the metrics for your blog over the coming months (and beyond) as this will help you to build up a picture of what works best for your target clients.

If you keep them at the heart of your blog, you can’t go far wrong.

In my next blog, I’ll be talking about how you can find ideas for your blog content and how to set up an editorial calendar. Make sure you check back regularly.

In the meantime, why not ask me your blogging questions in the comments below or join the SEO Value Facebook group where the topic of blogging comes up a lot?

If you found this article helpful, I’d love it if you could share it – thank you.

There are many reasons why your business needs a blog. In fact, it’s such an important topic that I’m planning for this to be the first in a series of articles about business blogging.

In this first article, we’re going to look at the many benefits of blogging, both from a marketing and SEO standpoint, and explore how you can get started.

What is a blog?

A blog is essentially an online journal or diary that is located on a website (the name is a shortened version of ‘weblog’). In the earlier days of the internet, blogs often reflected the personal musings of an individual or group of writers.

Over time, businesses have adopted the use of blogs too, writing informational articles and opinion pieces aimed at their audiences.

Typically, the articles published on a blog will appear in reverse chronological order. They may also be sorted by categories.

What are the benefits of blogging?

If you don’t currently have a blog, what’s holding you back?

Maybe you’re worried that you don’t have the time to maintain a blog. Maybe you’re not sure how to get started. Maybe it seems like a big financial commitment (it doesn’t have to be) or maybe you just can’t see how it could help your business right now.

Here are some quick stats that might swing you towards the benefits of blogging:

• 70% of consumers would rather learn about a company from a blog than from an advert
• 77% of internet users read blogs regularly – it’s almost expected that a business will have a blog
• 55% of marketers say that blogging is their top inbound marketing priority
• 72% of online marketers say content creation is their most effective SEO tactic
• B2B marketers that blog get 67% more leads than those who don’t

Some of these stats are pretty powerful but if you’re still not convinced, let’s look at some of the benefits in more detail.

Business blogging:

• Builds your reputation and showcases your expertise

The main pages on your website, such as the Home, About and Service pages, necessarily provide potential customers with an overview of what your business offers.

Your blog, however, gives you the opportunity to delve deeper into the topics and issues that matter to your audience.

You can talk about individual aspects of the big subjects that concern your customers, helping people to increase their knowledge and insights, with you taking the role of teacher or mentor.

This is a powerful way to showcase your expertise and grow your reputation within your industry.

Over time, people will start to see you as an expert source. This should attract more links and mentions (more about this below), which should increase the domain authority (DA) assigned to your website.

In turn, Google is keen to return high domain sites in searches, so you should see your page rankings increase.

• Improves the user experience (DA)

Through your blog, you can provide visitors to your site with content of true value. You can answer their questions, help them solve a pressing problem, inspire them to do something they enjoy – the outcomes will depend on your business.

The common thread is that blogging enriches the user experience. You can help to give your customers a feel for what it’s like to work with you and let your personality shine out from the pages.

Also, through your blogs, you can tie related content together with internal links. This will make your site easier to navigate to a deeper level and help Google understand more about what you offer.

• Boosts your SEO

Recent blogging stats show that companies that blog attract 97% more links to their website from third party sites.

In Google’s eyes, each one of these links represents a vote of confidence from the external site. They’re essentially saying, “This content is so good and/or relevant to my audience that I’m prepared to link to it”.

Also, each time you create a new blog post, it’s a new page for Google to crawl, index and return in search results. Websites with a blog are estimated to have 434% more indexed pages than those without a blog.

Essentially, each new article represents another opportunity for new customers to find your business.

Blogs can help your SEO efforts in other ways too.

A long-form article like this one keeps people on your website for longer, thereby increasing the average ‘dwell’ time (i.e. how long people stay per session).

In addition, by linking related content together, you can encourage people to visit multiple pages in a single visit, which brings down the bounce rate associated with your site (i.e. the percentage of people who leave after only looking at one page).

Both metrics are key signals to Google that you’re providing high quality, engaging content that is highly relevant to particular search queries.

• More organic traffic

With more pages of your website for Google to index or for your audience to share on social media, as well as higher dwell times, lower bounce rates and great DA, you should start to notice more organic traffic coming to your site.

This is traffic that hasn’t been brought in through pay per click (PPC) advertising.

Stats shows that companies that blog receive 55% more visitors to their website than companies that don’t blog.

• Amplifies your reach on social media

Blogging is a fantastic way to amplify your reach on social media. Each time someone shares one of your articles with their network, it’s an opportunity for your business to be discovered by more people. This is ideal for building brand awareness.

• Helps you capitalise on long-tail keyword searches

As you may know, long-tail keyword searches are longer, more specific searches that people make online.

For example, instead of searching something fairly generic like ‘wedding dress’, a long-tail keyword search might be ‘1920s vintage wedding dresses near me’ or ‘art deco wedding dress for sale’.

As we can see, this gives a much clearer view of what content the searcher would like to find. Long-tail keywords tend to be less competitive than shorter keywords and phrases but they can also be higher converting because the searcher has been more precise about what they’re looking for.

According to Neil Patel, long-tail keywords make up 70% of all searches and they are a hugely important source of organic traffic.

Your blog is the perfect place on your website to target some of the long-tail keywords that your visitors use. It’s worth having a look in Google Search Console for long-tail phrases people have used to find you.

Also, a top tip is to check out the ‘People also ask’ and ‘Searches related to…’ sections on a search results page as this will flag up common search queries related to the topic you entered.

For example, if I type in something as broad as ‘SEO’ in Google (a keyword that’s very competitive), I can see that:

And that related searches include:

This instantly gives me four or five different potential topics/titles for a blog aimed at capturing traffic for those long-tail searches.

Fresh, high-quality content

Of course, all of the benefits outlined above depend on you providing fresh, high-quality content that’s unique to your business.

Spammy, keyword-heavy and poorly thought-out blogs can harm your SEO, whereas useful, engaging content helps your SEO efforts and gives potential customers a reason to keep coming back to your site.

Many of today’s bloggers have abandoned multiple short posts a week in favour of one or two in-depth posts like this one per month. This is because of the value that in-depth, well-researched content can give to visitors.

Your blogging strategy

Back in 2019, I was delighted to feature a guest blog from Marie Belsten about 10 steps to a successful blogging strategy. It’s well worth a read.

The key points are listed below:

1. Define your blog’s purpose

Before you start blogging, it’s important to define exactly what you want your blog to help you achieve.

Do you want to increase brand awareness? Do you want to be known as an expert in a particular field/subject?

Or do you want your blog to help you grow your mailing list, attract new customers, persuade investors or build loyalty among your existing customers?

Having a clear understanding of your goals will help you to create content that supports these aims.

2. Know your audience

It’s essential to know who you are writing your blog for; this will help you to come up with topics that resonate with your audience.

You’ll need to think about the group of readers that your blog could help the most. These are people who will love and value your knowledge and want to hear more from you.

With my own blog, I always write with the small business owner in mind; someone who may currently tackle their own SEO or be thinking about outsourcing. I think about practical advice and steps they can take that will make a difference, such as advice about on- and off-page SEO or why content marketing is so important.

3. Set your budget

You will need to decide how much time and budget you can allocate to blogging. Are you going to write and promote yourself/in-house or outsource it?

Figures show that the average blog takes three and a half hours to write but longer articles and guides can demand nearer eight hours of research and writing time.

Once a blog is published, you will need to promote it on social media and in your e-newsletter, as just a couple of examples. This takes time too.

Currently, 64% of companies/marketers outsource their blog writing to experienced copywriters.

Whether you decide to do this or write yourself depends on where you feel your energies are best spent within your business.

If you love blogging and have the time, then you may benefit from being completely hands-on. However, if a blank page fills you with dread or you’re already pressed for time, it might make sense to delegate your blog to someone else. We now have a Monthly Blog Package, which will give you all the benefits of blogging without the extra workload and pressure.

4. Audit your competitors’ blogs

Although I think it’s important that you don’t get too bogged down by what your competitors are doing, it pays to keep an eye on their blogs and wider conversations happening in your industry.

The chances are that your potential customers may be reading these too.

Auditing your competitors’ blogs is a great way to spot gaps in the information available to your audience or to pinpoint how you could put a fresh spin on a familiar topic. You can add deeper insights or talk from the unique perspective your knowledge and experience has given you.

5. Begin to define what sort of content you will create

Below, we’ll be looking at what to blog about in much more detail. This will need to be part of your overall blogging strategy but it’s so important that it’s worthy of its own section.

This is where the purpose of your blog and the needs of your audience come together.

Imagine, for example, that you run a business as an organic baby food supplier. Customers can order complete meals from you for next day delivery. You want your blog to show the benefits of healthy, organic meals for babies and encourage people to trust the high standards and nutritional value of the foods you offer.

Your audience want to know things like ‘is organic baby food safe, ‘what are the best foods for baby weaning’ or ‘what is the best brand of organic baby food’ and so on.

As well as written articles, your audience might want to see feeding charts, weaning guides, videos, or recipes on your blog.

This overview means that you can start to map out the core topics covered by your blog and then the kind of content that would fit the needs of your audience.

6. How you’re going to promote your blog

It isn’t enough to write a blog, hit publish and wait for the audience to roll in. You will need to let people know that it’s there.

There are many ways to achieve this.

A good start is to share your blog on your social media platforms. You can also turn quotes and highlights from an article into posts and statuses.

Be sure to add social media sharing buttons to each blog article (there are some fantastic plugins for this if you have a WordPress site – I love Social Warfare) as this allows people who like your content to quickly share it with their social networks.

If you have an e-newsletter, you can also share your new blogs in this.

Note: I’m planning to write a separate article in this series about promoting your blog, so keep an eye out for that soon!

7. Create a schedule

As much as possible, it’s a good idea to follow a publishing schedule for your blog. Whether you decide to publish new content once a month or multiple times a week, your audience will appreciate being able to anticipate when they’ll hear from you.

If you disappear for an extended period of time, you run the risk of losing the audience you’ve built up, so try to commit to a schedule that feels maintainable and realistic.

Your schedule will need to include time for tasks such as:

• Keyword research
• Writing the first draft
• Editing
• Finding images to use with your article
• Uploading the blog to your website
• Adding meta data, images, etc.
• Sharing your blog on social media
• Sending out your e-newsletter
• Tracking the blog’s performance

As we’ve already seen above, you may decide to outsource some of these tasks. If you do, you will need to identify who is doing what and when it needs to be done by to keep your schedule on track.

8. Track your blog’s performance

You will want to keep an eye on how the articles on your blog are performing. You can use various metrics to help you understand this, including data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, your email marketing software and whichever social media platforms you use.

Over time, tracking how each article performs can help you answer questions such as:

• Which topics attract the most engagement from my customers?
• What do people want to know more about?
• What type of content do my customers want?
• Which topics get very little engagement?
• What days/times are best for posting?
• What length of blogs do my audience like the most?

The more you know about your audience’s interests and behaviour around your blogs, the more you can refine your content so that it meets their needs.

You can find more advice about your blogging strategy in my blogging tips for beginners.

What to blog about

As we mentioned above, you will need to decide what you want to blog about and how best to structure your blog.

Your articles will probably fall under a handful of overarching topics or categories.

For example, the SEO+ blog generally covers content about SEO, social media, content marketing, and analytics.

What would those broad topics be for you?

Under each of those broad topics though, you will find yourself writing articles covering all sorts of sub-topics (and sub-topics within those).

With the SEO category on my own blog, for example, there are blogs about on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. Then there are also more focused topics within that, such as articles about attracting backlinks, guest blogging, Schema, product descriptions and more.

The aim is to give your audience a general expectation of what your content will offer and then dive deeper into different aspects.

The ‘hub and spoke’ model

I personally like the ‘hub and spoke’ model for structuring a blog.

Using this approach, you identify a handful of main content categories or topics that your blog will cover. These are your ‘hubs’.

You will then need to create a piece of in-depth, cornerstone content for each hub. On my SEO+ blog, some examples of my hub articles are:

• On-page SEO: The complete guide
• Off-page SEO: The complete guide
• Technical SEO: A beginner’s guide

Where the ‘hub and spoke’ model of blogging stands out is in how related content is linked together.

Essentially, each hub has multiple ‘spokes’ coming off of it. These are articles about sub-topics that fit in the overarching hub.

Using my On-page SEO complete guide as an example, this features links to the following spoke articles:

• Keyword research guide
• Google EAT algorithm guide
• Google’s Featured Snippets
• Optimising the non-text elements of a web page
• Schema made easy – beginner’s guide
• Internal linking cheat sheet
• Improving your website’s quality score
• Free SEO checklist

The idea with this approach is to ensure that the hub article includes links to all of the spoke articles and that each spoke article includes a link back to the hub.

By linking all of the related content together, the intention is for link juice to flow freely to and from the hub and spokes. If, for example, Google starts to rank a hub article more highly, the spoke articles should see an increase in rankings too, by association.

Equally, if a spoke article achieves better rankings, this can feed through to the hub and other connected spokes.

The ’hub and spoke’ model offers a great UX too because it ties all related content together, enabling people to read to a depth that suits their needs.

In my experience, the best approach is to create a category for each hub, then within this category write a piece of cornerstone content. Once this is in place, you can start to produce the spoke articles, which share the same category but then have different, more article-specific tags applied to help people find relevant content.

I would suggest that you have a maximum of eight to ten categories and corresponding hub articles on your website. The rest of your blog content should be sub-topic – i.e. spoke – articles.

Potential platforms for your blog

Now you know more about the benefits of blogging and how you might want to structure your content, the next big decision is what platform to use to publish your blog.

Broadly speaking, you can choose whether to publish a blog on your own website (if you have one) or whether you want your blog to be a separate entity published elsewhere on the web.

This decision may come down to whether you already have a website or are planning to create one.

When blogs first rose to popularity, the latter approach was common, with people using blogging platforms such as Tumblr to share their thoughts with the world. In fact, of the 600 million blogs estimated to be on the web, 488.1 million of them are on Tumblr (actually Tumblr itself puts the figure closer to 502 million!)

From a business perspective, I would always recommend hosting your blog on your own website. Many of the benefits we discussed at the start of this article are based on your blog being an integral part of your site.

So, which platforms are available?

According to Creative Bloq, the best free or inexpensive blogging platforms right now are:

• WordPress

WordPress is the world’s fastest-growing blogging platform; approximately, 78 million posts are published on it every month.

In fact, a quick visit to wordpress.com tells us that 37% of the web is now built on WordPress. It’s the platform I use for my own website and blog.

The success of WordPress comes down to its great mix of power, customisation and usability. As well as a staggering amount of themes and templates, there are also countless plugins to help you tailor your website and blog to meet your needs.

• Wix

Wix is a drag-and-drop website builder that offers over 500 designer-made templates. You can create a basic website and blog with a free account or upgrade to one of the paid plans for more functionality.

• Tumblr

We briefly touched on Tumblr above. It’s a mix between a blogging platform and a social media newsfeed where you can share your own content as well as content you enjoy from other users.

• Blogger

Blogger has been a popular blogging site since 1999. Simply give your blog a title and pick a theme and you can start creating and publishing content to your Blogger domain.

• Medium

Medium is a rapidly growing publishing platform where you can create and publish fresh content or syndicate your existing content from your website-based blog. You can publish for free, grow your audience, and even be paid for your content based on its popularity.

• Joomla

Joomla is an open source software content management system that can be used to create a website and/or blog of any kind. Like WordPress, it’s self-hosted, which means you will need a domain name and website hosting.

• Yola

Yola offers a fast and easy way to build a simple website that works well on all devices. The free plan limits you to two websites with two pages but for less than a fiver a month, you can build up to five sites, each with 1,000 pages.

• HubPages

HubPages is a network of sites that lets you share your writing with a large online community. You can publish original articles directly on to HubPages to build your audience or syndicate (republish) your existing content from your blog.

• Contentful

Contentful represents a different approach to blogging. It provides a single content management system where you can create, store, edit and manage your content but then publish it on multiple different platforms in different formats now and in the future.

• io

If you’re a fan of writing in Evernote rather than using Microsoft Word, for example, then you might find Postach.io helpful. Using this platform, you can connect a notebook from Evernote and tag a note as ‘published’ to make it public. You can then customise the appearance.

• Squarespace

Although not mentioned on Creative Bloq’s list of blogging platforms, Squarespace is worth a mention. You can use this platform to create a website and/or blog from beautiful professional designs.

Setting up a blog

The actual mechanics of setting up a blog will depend on your chosen platform. Each one will walk you through the process. For example, here’s a blog start-up guide from WordPress: https://www.wpbeginner.com/start-a-wordpress-blog/

Regardless of platform, it’s important to think about some of the following issues before you get started:

• Your blog’s name

If your blog is on your business website, you may not need to give it a name. However, if you do need a name for your blog, it’s best to pick something descriptive that will resonate with your target audience and give some insight into what the content will be about.

• Registration and hosting

Again, this will depend on the platform you choose but, if you want your blog to be on your business website, you may need to find and register a suitable domain name and set up hosting (if you don’t already have an existing site).

• What your blog will look like

Your blog should feel as though it’s part of your business. This means reflecting the brand look, feel and tone in your articles, from the colours you use to the pictures you choose.

• Blog comments

Have a think about whether you want to offer the option for people to comment on your blogs. Comments from your audience can be a fantastic way to start a conversation and build an engaged community if you take the time to respond.

However, the comments section of a blog can often get spammed with people trying to post backlinks to their own sites, so it’s crucial that you manage the comments and filter out any spam.

If you choose a platform like WordPress, there are some helpful spam filter plugins.

Over to you

Hopefully, I’ve managed to persuade you that blogging makes great business sense.

While it can be hard – although not impossible – to directly monetise your blog with methods such as advertising revenue and affiliate marketing, it’s a fantastic way to connect with your potential customers and build your authority and reputation.

If you’re struggling to find the time to write your blog posts, we can help you; we now have a Monthly Blog Package, which will give you all the benefits of blogging without the extra workload and pressure. Our team of professional copywriters here at SEO+ can take care of everything you need to have a thriving business blog that will engage your customers and accelerate your business growth.

In my next blog, I’ll be walking you through the anatomy of a great blog post so you know how to make sure as many people read your content as possible. I’ll be tackling issues such as headings, word count, meta data, images and more, so do make sure that you check back regularly.

In the meantime, why not ask me your blogging questions in the comments below or join the SEO Value Facebook group where the topic of blogging comes up a lot?

If you found this article helpful, I’d love it if you could share it – thank you.

Updated: May 2020

‘Content Marketing’ is one of those terms that pops up all the time but do you know what it means and how it relates to SEO?

How important is content marketing to your business? Is it one of your priorities or do you overlook it because it sounds too tedious, too far out of your comfort zone or maybe something that you just don’t need to do?

Well, if you want to market yourself online effectively (and if you have a business, it’s a pretty crucial step these days), then it’s time to get busy. Content Marketing is your friend and you need to become besties with it to increase your reach, build your audience and drive your sales.

What is content marketing?

The Content marketing Institute in America defines content marketing as

“…a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

That sums it up in a straight-laced kind of way. In simpler terms, what it means for you, is:

• To know exactly what your product or service does or offers
• To know who your target audience is (i.e. the specific people you want to reach out to)
• To create, post and share your useful content (we’ll look at different types of content later)

Which, in turn, will:

• Raise brand awareness
• Build trust in your reputation as an expert
• Attract more visitors to your website
• Create more conversions (i.e. more customer enquiries or sales)
• Increase your sales and your revenue
• Create a sense of community around your brand

Ultimately, content is anything that communicates a message to your audience. The key to good content marketing is creating and sharing content that’s incredibly relevant and useful to the people you want to reach.

Get this right and not only will individuals love what you’re sharing but they’ll also start talking about what you have to say with their networks (on- and offline). This is an amazing way to market your products or services without icky ‘cold’ outbound marketing tactics. In fact, content is the very lifeblood of inbound marketing.

Content marketing and SEO

How does content marketing affect SEO?

Honestly, the list is so huge, it would be impossible to cover everything in this article.

With focus on any relevant SEO keywords and searched terms, your content will appear in people’s search results and drive more traffic to your website.

The higher up Google’s search results you appear, the more it suggests to both existing and potential customers that you know what you’re talking about and are an expert in what you do.

If people click through from a high ranking in Google to great quality, unique content, this will reinforce that perception.

Combined, all these things give customers confidence in you. They promote trust and loyalty, so they feel ready to use your services or buy your product, rather than a competitor’s.

With your expert content, you’re not only giving authority, your website is also gaining authority – from the people who are reading, liking and sharing it and looking to you for expertise and answers to their problems.

Your content is the single best way to attract links and mentions from third parties; again, both positive signs to Google that you’re an authority in your field.

The more content you have, the more it gives search engines to crawl, and it helps them to build up a clearer picture about what your company does and who it serves. You will have more chances to target a wider variety of long-tail keywords and phrases related to your business, meaning that your web pages will show up in a wider variety of searches reaching a greater number of people.

The bottom line is that without content, search engines would have nothing to optimise for search engines. Equally, every single search that’s made is a search for content.

What types of content marketing should you use?

Anything you post online is a form of content marketing, so everything has to be of relevance in some way. And ‘content’ can take many forms, so you’ll need to find which ones work for you as well as your audience.

You could stick to some of the more tried and tested types, or change tack and try something different. It will take some time to drill down to what works best, whether it’s for you, or more importantly, your customers, but here’s a list of the most common forms of content marketing:

1. Blog posts

Probably at the top of any ‘to do’ list of content marketing, blogs should be the first thing to post on your site. Blogging allows you to write, in as many words as you want, about any relevant topic to promote yourself and your business.

That’s not to say that your blogs should be a relentless sales pitch. In fact, sales talk should be kept to a minimum. Instead, you want people who read your blog to think, “Wow, if they give this much knowledge and value for free, imagine how much more I would get as a paying customer!”

Get your approach right and blogs are one of most powerful content types to turn readers into customers.

Regular blogging of useful and original content that includes SEO keywords can build up a reserve of knowledge on your site for your customers. This reinforces your expertise and your brand and makes you more visible on any Google searches. And with 60% of business marketers saying that regular blogging is one of their main content marketing priorities , you can see how much importance blogs receive.

While we’re on the subject of blogs, a handy tip is to always include internal links to related content in your articles. This ties topics together for readers, as well as encouraging them to spend longer on your site and read a greater number of web pages – both two signals to Google that you’re providing high quality content that deserves better rankings.

The flip side to blogs for your own site is a guest blog for someone else’s site. If you’re invited (or offer) to write a guest blog, this gives you a fantastic opportunity to get your content in front of a whole new audience and widen your online reach.

You can even syndicate your existing content to third party content syndication sites to reach new audiences and further boost brand awareness and authority.

2. Images

No one likes to read blogs or any other online content in one solid block of copy. Your readers will very soon lose interest if it looks like too much effort to get to the end. Instead, text should be easy to skim read so that visitors can assess what it’s about at a glance.

Images are a great way to break things up and make content more interesting for your readers.

Hubspot claim that content that includes relevant images or visuals can get 94% more views than content that doesn’t. Put that together with content that includes your SEO keywords and you’re onto a winning strategy.

You should optimise your images as well so they include your keyword(s), alt text and a description so they add to your SEO arsenal.

Images are a useful addition to your web content in more ways than one – they can help explain an idea, get your point across or serve as a natural ‘end point’ to a section of your content.

3. Infographics

Infographics are a powerful visual content type that can work well for most businesses.

Why are infographics so successful in content marketing? Search Engine Journal suggest that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual and 40% of people respond better to a visual than they do to plain text.

Using infographics can be a good way to cut down on your written content if you need to. As they’re virtually self-contained, you may need little dialogue beyond a brief explanation. This makes them perfect for sharing across social media such as Twitter and Pinterest.

If you’ve got stats or data that are genuinely helpful to your cause, then infographics will get technical or detailed information across in one bite-sized, easily understood graphic.

4. Video

Recognised as a slice of content marketing that can increase conversions by 80% on your landing page, videos should definitely be included in your marketing strategy.

Stats show that a massive 64-85% of users are more likely to make a purchase after viewing a video online and a whopping 92% of people who watch online videos share them across social media. So, if building your audience on solid ground is your aim, online video is the game.

There are no rules as to what your video could or should include, but timing is key. For the best results, your video length should be somewhere between 30 and 120 seconds. This makes it easy to watch in its entirety and easily shareable on social media.

Again, any content should be of value to your audience, so videos are ideal for a business overview, how-to guides, testimonials or just an introduction to your brand story.

5. Podcasts

Podcasts are all the rage right now. These online audio broadcasts offer the perfect way for busy people to access information about their favourite topics, even when they’re on the go.

People listen to podcasts while they’re relaxing at home, doing the housework or cooking, as well as on the school run or their daily commute, or while out jogging or working out.

There are currently more than 850,000 active podcasts to choose from and more than 30 million episodes. A staggering 82.4% of podcast listeners spend more than seven hours a week listening to podcasts.

Podcasts offer you a different way to reach your audience and provide a high level of convenience. People who may not have time to watch a video or read a blog may well opt to listen to a podcast at the same time as doing something else.

Many businesses record weekly podcasts featuring interviews, insights, education, news round ups, etc.

What could your podcast be about?

6. Social media content

Any content you post on your business’s social media profiles/pages falls under the heading of content marketing.

You can use social media to share images, branded memes, blogs, text statuses/tweets, videos, infographics, podcasts, quizzes and more.

Again, you should be constantly asking, “What does my audience want to see? What will they find helpful and of value?”

Everything that you share on social media should be on-brand. Even if it doesn’t say your business name anywhere, it should look like the content all comes from the same source, reflecting the values at the heart of your business.

If you choose to share content from other sources, it should still be in keeping with your brand rather than sharing unrelated content for sharing’s sake.

7. Paid/sponsored ads

It could also be argued that some paid or sponsored ads representing your business fall under the heading of content marketing too.

Again, your ads should resonate with your target audience and lead them to a landing page on your website, for example, that has genuine value to the people you want to reach.

8. Product descriptions

Every piece of content that you write and publish counts as marketing, and this includes product or service descriptions.

Just like your blog and all the other forms of content listed above, these should be written to appeal to your target audience, giving them all the information they need to decide whether your products or services meet their specific need.

The best product descriptions are those that reflect the overall business brand, communicate value and answer customers’ questions before they’ve even thought to ask them.

9. Other content types

We’ve only just scratched the surface of types of content that you could use to strengthen your marketing and your online presence.

You might also want to consider ebooks, case studies, webinars, e-newsletters, product guides, how-to guides, testimonials, games, demo videos and special offers as just a few examples.

Developing your content marketing strategy

Before you can decide what content you want to create to market your business, you’ll need to map out your content marketing strategy.

Many businesses create content on an ad hoc basis with no real sense of where it fits in and what it’s meant to achieve. This makes it hard to measure how effective it is and whether it’s giving you a decent return on your investment (ROI).

With this is mind, it’s essential to create a carefully thought out content marketing strategy covering the following points:

1. Your goals

What are your overall goals for your business? Do you have goals mapped out for the next 12 months, five years and ten years, for example?

Above all, your content should serve your overarching goals for your business, as well as some shorter-term goals.

Do you want to grow brand awareness by a certain percentage? Do you want to make 25% more sales this year than last year? Do you want to set up a reward scheme for your loyal customers?

Your goals will help you pinpoint the most appropriate and effective forms of content for your purpose.

For example, to grow brand awareness, you might decide to blog more regularly, create branded images and stories for Instagram, publish an ebook, or video your brand story. Whereas, to increase sales, you might write a new FAQs page on your website, video product walkthroughs or add manuals to your product descriptions.

It’s always a good idea to make your goals SMART as you’re more likely to see them through. This means ensuring they’re:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

In other words, instead of a ‘fluffy’ broad goal like, “I want to raise brand awareness”, a SMART goal would be, “Over the next 12 weeks, I want to raise brand awareness in order to attract 100 more followers on Instagram. I will do this by creating branded images, testimonials and a video of the story behind my business”.

2. The data you plan to monitor

It’s important to track how your content is performing so that you can build up a more accurate picture of what your customers respond to (and what they don’t).

This will also help you to determine whether you’re spending your content marketing budget in the most effective way.

Once you know your goals, you will have a better idea about what data to track to measure them.

For example, if you have brand awareness goals, you might want to track your number of social media followers across all the platforms you use, subscription/mailing list sign-ups or online mentions.

If, though, your goals are around growing brand loyalty, you might want to measure your percentage of repeat customers, online reviews or referrals.

3. The customer journey

As we’ve talked about above, the type of content you create will depend on your goals and your audience.

There’s something else to consider too. Every customer goes through a journey that starts the moment they become aware of your business for the first time and continues (potentially, for years) long after they’ve made their first purchase.

Broadly speaking, the journey covers four main phases: Discovery/Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, and Retention/Loyalty.

Along this journey, there are multiple points where you can help to grow the relationship between a potential customer and your business. But different content is appropriate for different stages of this journey.

For example, a lot of content obviously sits in the Discovery phase: blogs, guides, ebooks, webinars, videos, podcasts, and email newsletters can all be used to help potential customers discover your business.

But there are plenty of content options for the later stages in the customer journey too; case studies, demos and product guides are perfect for people in the Consideration stage, where potential customers are weighing up their choices of what to buy.

As we can see, while planning your content marketing strategy, you’ll need to pinpoint, not only how content fits with your goals, but also where it sits on the client journey.

4. The types of content you plan to create

Having considered points 1-3, your next task is to drill down to the types of content you want to produce.

Remember, the key here is to provide content that reflects your brand consistently and that offers genuine value to your customers.

You’ll need to think about:

• What your target audience needs from you
• Why they’re looking for from your products/services
• How you can help them to overcome a problem or achieve an aspiration
• What they will be looking for at each stage in the customer journey and how you can give it to them

Armed with this information, you can begin to draw up an editorial calendar for your content, so you know what to produce, when and why.

5. How you plan to share your content

Your website and various social media platforms each suit different types of content. Therefore, your content marketing strategy will need to include how and where you plan to distribute your content, based on where you know your audience will be.

6. Your budget

You will need to set your content marketing budget based on various factors. Who will create your content? Will it be done in-house or outsourced? Will you be running ads? Will you be paying to boost the visibility of social media posts?

If you have a limited budget or you’ll be creating the content yourself and you’re short on time, think about how you can create ‘evergreen’ content, i.e. stuff that won’t go out of date or need regularly updating.

For example, an on-page SEO guide would have a much longer shelf life than a blog making SEO predictions for the next six months. Yes, both articles would have value but I would probably get more long-term mileage out of the less time-sensitive guide.

7. Who will create, review and revise

With your content marketing strategy complete, all that remains is to confirm who will be creating each piece of content, your editorial calendar, who will be tracking its performance (and how) and what you will do with this information, i.e. how you will revise and refine what you create.

Do you have existing content?

If yours is an established business and you’ve already created content in the past, it’s worth carrying out a content audit.

This will help you to spot:

• Content that your audience loves
• Gaps in your content
• Content that needs updating, deleting or rewriting
• SEO issues/weaknesses/areas for improvement
• Internal linking opportunities
• Duplicate or thin content

It could be that you already have some fantastic content at your disposal. A content audit can help you ensure that you’re using it to its full potential.

There are always ways to get more mileage out of your existing content. This will help you to make the most of your budget and tap into longer-term benefits of content marketing.

The cornerstone of any hardworking website

As we’ve seen, content marketing is the cornerstone of any hardworking website.

By creating quality and genuinely useful content for your audience, whichever methods you choose, it’s the best way to get that all-important traffic to your website. An increase in your visits won’t happen immediately but, by using these tactics, you’ll gain traction over a period of months and your rankings will improve considerably.

What areas of content marketing do you think will work best for you? If you’ve already used some of them, which ones gave you the stats you were looking for? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.