Businesses that blog see 55% more visitors to their website than those that don’t!

With today’s digital environment being so ridiculously flooded with content that it rivals the River Nile, optimising your blog is the easiest way to ensure your content reaches more of the right people than your competitors.

Here are the 5, simplest and most effective ways to optimise your blog:

First and foremost, blogs should aim to educate! As the author, you are the expert people are seeking out. You should aim to answer your readers’ questions, or solve their never-ending list of problems. Put yourself in their shoes, what is it they hoping to getting out of reading your article?

 

1. Your Topic and Title

Your title should be focused on a specific issue relating to one topic, narrowing the scope of your blog post and delving deeper into the question at hand. You need to create a working title that will focus on one angle of your overall topic. Include a long-tail keyword in your title which fixes as a descriptor of your blog post. Create value for your post within your title which draws the reader in and entice them to click on and read your article. Will your reader understand exactly what they will be getting out of your post from the title?

Remember, Google only visibly shows 50-60 characters on the search page, so keep your titles short, but clear!

 

2. Format and Optimise your Blog Posts' Layout

White space is your friend!

By having white space that separates text, your article will look much more aesthetically appealing and less daunting to your reader. Even if your article has a lot of text, breaking it up makes it a whole lot easier for readers to focus on the content without being overwhelmed by a sea of continuous text. Subheadings, bullet points and bolding are sneaky little tricks that ensure the reader takes home the most important points of your post. Images are also great tools to break up text, convey the article's content and entice your visitors to read further. Lastly, but most important, optimise your post around your chosen long-tail keyword by incorporating it in the page title, URL, body of text, image alt-text and the headers.

Search engines are crazy smart! They recognise implemented keywords and their variations, so the more you integrate it within your article, the higher it will rank on the Google search page!

 

3. Promote your Business Offers within your Blog

This may be a no brainer, but a blog is meant to attract visitors around a certain topic and educate them, so promoting your business offers that aim to solve customer issues around these topics is a strategically vital move. Placing CTA’s throughout your blog post is a perfect way to promote business offers, but be careful not to be too pushy, no one likes flashing red lights beeping at you straight of the bat. As we all know how lazy people are and the likelihood of them reading the entire post is, well, let’s just say not too flash, CTA’s in the form of hyperlink text can be strategically placed half way through the article to entice readers to take further action. Finally, place a CTA at the end of the post to provide more of an offer around the same topic as the post for readers who want to learn more.

 

4. Promote your Blog Posts

Leverage your website to promote your blog by utilising a blog post side bar, displaying your most popular and newest blog posts. Also make sure to link internally related articles within your blog post so that readers’ searching for more information about the topic will be directed to older posts, leading to increased traffic on your blog and website. Remember to share your new and old (where relevant) blog posts on your social media streams, but make sure not to copy and paste the same caption across all social media

s, it comes across as lazy and is un-enticing for readers. Also, use EDM's, targeted to your buyer personas, to promote certain content to the right consumers.

 

5. Analyse the Performance of your Blog Posts

Implement blog metrics to track and analyse your blog posts. This way you can look at the number of views each blog post receives, filter your most popular topics, authors, or channel of promotion, and look at the click through rates of your CTA’s. In doing so, you will see which content readers gravitate to most, and will be able to generate strategically targeted future posts which resonate most with your readers.

 

And there you have it! With these 5 simple steps, you can easily optimize your blog in the most effective ways and begin attracting the right, new customers to your business.

 

If blogging is the key, then optimisation is the golden ticket!