As a small business, blogging on your website provides you with an opportunity to prove to Google and your consumers that you are a trustworthy and authoritative business in your industry. Although it may seem time-consuming, it is crucial to improve your company’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Succeeding Small is a small business digital marketing agency in Colorado Springs that specializes in SEO. As an expert in SEO, we specialize in assisting small businesses with improving their website traffic and content. At Succeeding Small, we are passionate about helping small businesses get the online visibility they deserve. Therefore, we want to share this list that we have developed to create quality blog posts for our clients.
1. Develop a Blog Outline
Prior to writing your post, it is important to make an outline of what you want to say. Blog posts can be extremely beneficial to your website because they allow both consumers and Google to understand what you do. This demonstrates that your company has E.A.T.
E.A.T. stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are important things to demonstrate to both your consumers and Google. Demonstrating that you have the expertise to be answering a question in a blog is powerful. As a small business, blogging is an easy way to attract consumers to your website and advance your ranks with Google.
2. Determine the Goal & Audience
After developing an outline of what the post is, it is important to determine the goal of the post. Are you answering a commonly asked question? Are you providing your consumers with a new resource? Are you explaining a process to your consumer? Are you informing your consumer of an industry secret? The list goes on forever and knowing this goal allows you to fully understand what you are providing your consumer.
Following the discovery of the goal of the post, determine who will read it. Understanding your audience will help you to adjust the tone of the post to both your business, your industry, and the demographic of your clientele. For example, if you have a very technical company like a solar company, the tone of your post will be drastically different than that of a photographer’s post.
3. Keyword & Competitor Research
The next step is the most time-consuming, but don’t fear, this is where your blog post has the opportunity to establish E.A.T. and to provide the readers with an answer to a question. Therefore, it is important to invest time in research. First, research the keywords that you want to implement in the blog post. These need to be words that will trigger the consumers to be interested in your post, as well as be something that people are searching for. When a consumer searches for your product, these keywords will tell Google that your post is important and can help them with their inquiry.
Following the keyword research, do a little recon and investigate what your competition is doing. Look at companies like yours in different states. Read through a few blog posts and get a feel for how these other companies are addressing the blog issues. Then ask yourself, “Can I do this better? Can I provide clients with more information or updated information?”
4. Write the Blog Post
Now that you have conducted the research required for a quality blog posts, it is time to write the post. Create a post that is well-written and includes the keywords naturally. We do not want to stuff the keywords in every sentence and make our blog post feel unnatural. Rather, we want to include keywords naturally through well-constructed and thought-out sentences.
5. Add Structure to Your Blog Post
You have now constructed a well-thought-out post that uses your keywords and provides value to your consumers more than your competitors’ content. That’s great, but you’re not quite done! Now we need to add some structure to your post to make it easy and fun to read. We will do this by using paragraphs and headers.
Paragraphs
It may sound silly, but reexamine your writing to ensure that you are using paragraphs properly. Does each paragraph have its own idea or subject? Can you derive the main idea from each paragraph? The paragraphs allow your consumers to quickly and easily find what they are looking for in the post. In addition to making your consumers happy, this will also allow Google to read your post quicker and more effectively.
Headings
Just as it is important to add paragraphs where they are needed, it is also important to add headers appropriately. This is a great opportunity to utilize the keywords and signals to Google and the users to indicate what the following paragraph will discuss. If you can, implement multiple heading types. For example, in this blog post, the Heading 1 (H1) is 10 Steps to Writing a Quality Blog Post. There are then ten Heading 2s (H2s) that explain the 10 tips. In tip 5 — “Add Structure to Your Blog Post” — I have included two Heading 3s (H3s), “Paragraphs” and “Headings.” These three heading types improve the overall readability of this post to allow the reader to skim through the headings quickly before reading the entire post.
6. Add Credible Resources
While we are still checking our content to make sure it is a quality piece of writing, we can additionally check if there is anywhere we can reference a credible source. This refers to finding spots in your post to link to regarding something that you quoted or researched while creating your blog.
7. Interlink Your Content
It is crucial that you link to past blog posts and relevant content. You can interlink blogs by linking from this blog to pages on your website and so on. This is important because links are how Google travels through your site and reads it. When scanning your site, Google will read until it hits a link. Then it will open that link and read it. After understanding the linked page, it will come back to your blog post and keep reading.
8. Have It Proofread
As always, it is smart to have someone that you trust to read through your post and check for grammar, accuracy, syntax, etc. Think of this as an insurance policy to make sure that you are producing good quality content for your website.
9. Track Its Progress
Following the posting of quality blog posts, it is important to remember that you can improve its ranking even after it is written and posted. The best way to do so is to track its progress using your favorite SEO tracking tool. Here at Succeeding Small, we use SEMrush to track all SEO metrics. For example, use metrics for the keywords that the post is ranking for and determine if there are any changes that need to be made in order to advance the post’s ranking.
10. Regularly Update
Lastly, it is important to regularly update blog posts to ensure that all the content they contain is accurate. This is especially important for posts containing data that are subject to change.
Writing Quality Content at Succeeding Small
As a small business, Succeeding Small understands that there is only so much time in a day. We also understand that SEO can sometimes be put on the back burner. This is why we provide our clients with affordable pricing and expert services to ensure that this essential piece of business is taken care of. SEO is becoming more and more prevalent in our world today as things continue to become digital. We are passionate about helping you break through and obtain the visibility you deserve as a small business. If you have any questions about quality blog posts or our services, or if you are ready to rank higher, please reach out and let Succeeding Small take the stress out of SEO.
