If you are sick of your blog or if it isn’t performing as it was or should be, then we have some great advice for you! The first thing to note: it’s not as hard as you think. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a very real and sometimes scary thing, but Plum is here to help. In this post you can find some great tips & tricks that will help turn your tired and sad blog into a traffic generating knowledge base.
GET STARTED
There is no time like the present, so stop crying over your old blog and start fixing things!
1. Talk to your customers
Talking to your blog readers, customers, leads, your cousins friend and even the mailman can have extreme benefits for your business. When talking to your customers you want to find out as much as you can about them to make sure you are providing great content that they actually want. You also want to speak in a voice they understand and deliver through a medium they will appreciate.
Note: This can also help transform an average business into an extraordinary one if you apply this to every department of your company (sales, marketing, customer service, HR etc.).
2. (Carefully) Choose your medium
Once you have talked to your readers/customers and you know what type of content you will provide for them you should carefully figure out how you will deliver the content. The goal here is to revamp your blog so presenting the content on your blog is a no-brainer. Once you figure out what you will post about, you need to think about the best delivery method for it. You can create a video for it, create an ebook, run a contest or maybe even a podcast. Everybody digests content different and all content should be delivered different. Do some research before writing that 2,000 word post that a simple infographic could replace.
3. Consistency is key
Probably the biggest piece of advice you should take from this post is that consistency is key when blogging. Your goal should not be – “To create a great blog post” it should be “To create a vast amount of great blog posts”. Find a schedule that works best for your readers (not you*) and stick with it. As readers we want to find a home for our information and if you can create a reliable, trustworthy and consistent home for content then you will win!
Note*: The reason your schedule does not matter is because you can use your blogging platform to schedule posts for the week, month or even the year. So you could sit down for one day a week and schedule your posts for the entire week. But you already knew that!
4. The other key is keywords
Properly using keywords in your blog posts will return great SEO benefits for the post and your blog in general. You can find some great resources on using keywords to help promote blog posts all around the web. Here are a few off hand:
- https://www.getspokal.com/do-you-make-these-5-common-mistakes-using-keywords-in-your-blog/
- https://theblogpress.com/blog/keywords-101-what-are-keywords-and-why-do-they-matter-video/
- https://www.wordstream.com/seo-keyword
5. Link, link, link and then link again
When creating your content you should always look to provide links within your post, like we did above. There are two types of links you want to focus on – inbound and outbound. Inbound links are ones that link back to content within your blog, website or other platform that your company runs (think social media). If you mentioned something relevant to your content in a previous post, then use this oppurtunity to link back to it in your new post.
The other type of link is an outbound link. This is pretty self explanatory, you want to link to a website that is not your own. You want to be sure to link to other trusted sources of information relevant to your content so readers will feel comfortable following those links. They will appreciate you for it!
6. Meta-Data
Another great way to increase traffic to your newly transformed blog and posts is to properly use meta-data to include keywords and special information relevant to your company, blog and content. In short meta-data is information about your page that (sometimes) can not be seen by the average person. For a simple crash course in meta-data and how to implement easy changes right now visit:
7. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Hopefully you already live by the three R’s at home and in the office, so why not try it on your blog?
- Reduce – Cut down on the time you spend mind-mapping new content, researching and writing by using bits and pieces of old content.
- Reuse – Take valuable information from a post you previously published and rework it by adding new information or fresh statistics.
- Recycle – Find a popular post from way back when and reblog it as “Did you miss this”, “Don’t forget” or any other headline from your swipe file.
This technique can also help you create both outbound and inbound links.
