Though things have changed since the early days of blogging, effective blog posts still contribute towards any successful digital marketing campaign - with 80% of bloggers reporting that blogging drives results.
In a nutshell, your blog serves the purpose of creating a relationship between your business and its audience. It can also provide knowledge on relevant topics, increase engagement and traffic to your website, build your brand and create a community. If done correctly, your blog posts can help create a thriving foundation for corresponding social media platforms.
YES! Blogging helps boost SEO quality by positioning your website as a relevant answer to your customers' questions. Blog posts that use a variety of on-page SEO tactics can give you more opportunities to rank in search engines and make your site more appealing to visitors.
The techniques used to do this are not altogether different from those you'd use to optimize the content on other parts of your website. The chief difference is that when you're working on a blog, you're explicitly using SEO to support an ongoing long-form content strategy. That means developing in-depth, informative, and relevant content that aligns with your audience's needs and search intent.
Building on the SEO tactics you may already use, there are other smart and effective things that you should be doing after you publish a blog post.
Copy editing is the process of taking raw material to improve the formatting, style, and accuracy of the text. It might seem like an obvious one, but it is very commonly overlooked. You may think that you are fairly thorough with the whole proofreading game and that you are being diligent about catching spelling/grammar mistakes, but you should always have a second pair of eyes look it over. Let’s face it - there is nothing more annoying than finding out there’s an obvious error when someone sends you a Tweet about it!
Proofreading tips:
The key here is to share all of your blog content across the social platforms you are active on - so you can drive the most possible traffic back to your website.
Your email subscribers are your core people, and they want to know what you are writing about. Why not tell them about your next blog in your newsletter? If you don’t have an email newsletter (you should), you can also use a brief “teaser email” that entices your subscribers to click through to your blog and share the post with their friends. This can get the ball rolling so that even people outside of your email list can find your post.
If you publish a lot of blog content that continues to attract clicks and shares over time, you can leverage those older posts to drive traffic to your newer ones. Simply go back through your most popular posts and find ways to incorporate links to the posts you have just published. Not only does this increase direct traffic, but it also establishes a strong SEO framework for your website.
You should never publish a blog post and then leave it to die. Anything you write that is longer than 800-1000 words can easily be repurposed into another format for additional value.
Tips for repurposing your content:
While repurposing takes time, the benefit is that you already have the core subject matter developed. This streamlines the process and allows you to maximize your effort.
If you want to get as many readers as possible over to your blog, you have to help it rise in Google’s ranks by providing some hard evidence to show Google that your post is worthy of their elusive page one. You will specifically need to get backlinks from high-quality sources in your niche. This shows search engines that your post is also high-quality by association.
Your blog analytics will tell you a lot about where your traffic is coming from, how many page views you’re getting and how long readers are actually staying on the page, etc. Google Analytics can be used to inform you about what has and has not done well. This way when preparing content for future blog posts, you have the information to shape and mold it accordingly.
The fact of the matter is, blogging is not just about writing and publishing articles regularly. There are many important tasks you need to perform after your blog post is finished. However, by doing so, your articles will get more traffic and your website will grow much faster. Perfect!