Blogging is a powerful tool for inbound and digital marketing for any business.
Consider this, companies that blog are shown to have 434% more indexed pages than businesses that don’t. Blogging will also get your business 97% more links to their site (a great way to increase traffic and search ranking). According to HubSpot, blogging is critical for organic search traffic, with benefits and results that grow over time. It can help with brand awareness and lead generation. A good blog provides critical information to customers and prospects and provides another way for your company to communicate with customers.
One key factor that many companies overlook in their rush to capitalize on the benefits of blogging is keywords. The SEO tools and keyword strategy you use in your blog are methods for driving search traffic. They are critical for securing a place on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
After all, your blog will do nothing for you if your customers and prospects can’t find it.
SEO and your Blog
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, are the tools and strategies you use to increase traffic to your website through organic traffic. According to the most recent data, there are 40,000 searches on Google a second, or more than 3.5 billion searches a day. Your business (any business) wants to be the answer at the end of some of those searches. That is the goal of your SEO strategy.
Search engines use small programs known as bots to catalog and index EVERYTHING on the internet. When a user initiates a search, the search engine will use the catalog to provide the user the best answers possible.
If you know the search terms (keywords) your target audience (prospects and customers) are using in their search, you can use them as you develop your blogging strategy. This is how you position your business as a destination that customers find when they do a search.
The question is, how do you identify those keywords?
Finding Keywords and Optimizing your SEO
There is a lot that goes into planning a successful blog for business, but keywords and SEO are a critical area that many businesses struggle with. Here are a few tips for identifying and targeting the right keywords for blogging.
Use your Buyer Personas
If you’ve set up buyer personas that you feel confident in, then you should have a good idea the questions the target audience have and the research they will be doing. These questions should be the basis of your keywords. It will be the phrases that provide the basis for your blogging and SEO.
For example, if you are a manufacturer and know your customers are concerned about quality, then look at the keywords around quality in manufacturing. If you are a financial company, then look at the question’s customers will have about finances.
The more you know about your buyer personas, the more insight you have about them, then the more effective your keyword strategy for blogging will be.
Ask your Contacts and Customers
It seems like a silly, easy-to-ignore tip, but you’d be surprised at how many sales and marketing teams forget to ask how a prospect (or customer) found your company. What search phrases did they use in their research?
Surveys are a great way to get critical information from buyers and prospects, but that’s not the only avenue for getting information on search terms. Talk to your customer service team about the phrases and questions your customers have. Take a member of your sales team out for lunch and ask about the words and phrases they hear from prospects.
Keep a running catalog of this insight, and start providing the answers to these questions (and search phrases) in your blog.
Do your Research
Before you start writing a blog, do a little online research on the topic. Look at the internet landscape and see what else is out there. Often you will find a gap in the material you can exploit in your blogging and SEO efforts.
For example, start doing your own search for the keywords you select and see what comes up. Identify where there are gaps or holes in the material. What information do you wish you found, but it just wasn’t out there? Maybe you are writing on the topic of asset tracking, but you are shocked to discover there isn’t anything on defining asset tracking for your industry.
Adjust your topic and rework your keywords and you’ll quickly find your blog climbing the SERP.
Utilize an Online Keyword Tool
There are plenty of powerful tools available for doing keyword research, and it’s silly not to use them. For example, we use the keyword tool in SEMRush here in the office. Moz’s Keyword Explorer is another great tool.
Google also has a few tools you can use in your keyword planning. Google Ads offers a keyword planner tool that can be used in blog planning. Want to get even more practical? Start typing a keyword phrase in a Google search and look at the suggested phrases Google provides you. Those are great targets for your blogging keywords.
There’s no reason to do the work alone when online tools like these are available to help.
Build off your Past Work
Eventually, you should have a solid body of work in your blogging library. This work can be used to build pillar pages and linked content – a convenient and complete online resource for your target audience. You can use your blogging, and keyword strategy to fill in the gaps in your work to have the most complete resource possible for your prospects and customers.
Select a topic for your pillar or resource page, then build a keyword cloud around the topic – all the search terms that relate to your topic. Your goal should be to complete the topic cloud to ensure your business has the best, most complete answer for the search engines and users.
Over time, as you work on building the page, you can refine your keywords using the other tips we have here. Eventually you’ll create an often-used internet destination for your target customers.
Launching your Keyword Strategy for Blogs
Blogging is a powerful tool for business, but it takes an effective and efficient keyword strategy to get the most from your blogging efforts.
If you have questions or want to learn more about how SEO and keyword research can drive more sales-ready customers to your website, then contact GO2 Partners today and set up a meeting with the digital marketing team. They can provide you not only the expertise to launch your blogging program off right, but the resources you need to sustain and grow the program over time.
Getting started can feel intimidating, but your business and marketing goals are much closer than you might think.
