Making your blog posts more relevant and effective will result in big payoffs for your business. These include driving more revenue and ranking higher on search engine results pages. Unfortunately, many businesses have lost sight of the reason for the blog. As a result, the blogs they post sometimes don’t align with the business. They serve no value to current or potential customers and confuse Google. These posts squander the opportunity to sell and are detrimental to SEO activity. This article will teach you two ways to make your blog posts more relevant and effective. You will better understand how to drive sales and rank higher on search page results. Plus, I share a real-world example of a blog gone sideways and an example of a properly written post.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Table of contents
Real World Experience
I recently picked up an SEO client in the real estate business whose website had a blog. Unfortunately, the business owner didn’t understand the purpose of a blog and wrote about topics that had no connection to real estate. One blog was about the importance of voting, and another was about hairstyle trends. When I asked the owner why she selected these topics, she said she was passionate about both and knew Google wanted fresh content published on her site. She didn’t think it mattered what it was. “Is that a problem?” she asked.
Relevant Blog Posts Stay Focused on the Business
Staying focused on your business is critically important. It’s the first thing you should remember when brainstorming blog post topics. You should only publish posts that focus on some area of your business. Writing about anything else is a waste of your time, won’t be of interest to your customers, and will lower your search rankings. Blogs should showcase your expertise and authority in your field. They should build trust with your customers and prospects. This is so important that expertise, authority, and trust contribute to your website’s quality score, which affects your rankings. Learn more about the importance of EAT on page 26 of the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines from Google, and by reading my article, If You’re Hungry for Higher Google Rankings, It’s time to EAT!.
Effective Blog Posts Contain Important Content
Important content serves two purposes. First, it presents information that is relevant to your website’s visitors. If you own a real estate company, your blog should be about the business of real estate. Visitors to your site will be interested in local market conditions, the buying and selling process, how to make your home more attractive to buyers, etc. Your blog should always serve your customers first and start with helpful information that is valuable to your visitors.
The second purpose is to sell your products and services. This should be done toward the end of the blog. A great example is a recent post from SEMRush, an online visibility company and content marketing platform. Their recent post, How to Spot and Fix Keyword Cannibalization, not only describes a problem that content creators face but also sells a SEMRush service designed to solve it.
The end of your blog should be a short, simple paragraph describing your company, links to your homepage, your services page that pertains to the blog subject, related articles you’ve published, and your contact information. If written properly, your visitors will finish reading your blog, having learned something valuable about your industry and that your company is in the consideration set for an upcoming purchase. You have demonstrated your expertise and authority in your industry and built trust in your customers and prospects.
How to Find Fresh Topics
Finding fresh blog topics can seem challenging, especially if you’ve been consistently publishing blog posts for several years. It may seem like you run out of things to write about. It’s a challenge most people face. Here are some tips for finding keeping your blog posts fresh.
- Business is always changing. Publishing articles about industry trends, year-end reviews, and new year outlooks is a great way to stay relevant to your readers.
- Your business is always evolving. As your business changes, keep your readers updated with new product or service announcements. This shows your expertise and authority are growing.
- Update older blog posts. Scour your older posts to ensure they are still accurate. If industry conditions have changed, or new government regulations force a change in procedure or policy, update the post and republish it. That way, all your posts are fresh and accurate.
- Use real-world experiences. You may run into a situation with a client that could apply to many companies. Use that experience as a teachable moment and turn it into a blog post. I created this article from an experience I recently had with a client and actually made it part of the article. People relate to real-world experiences, and they can create effective blog post topics.
Conclusion to Writing More Relevant and Effective Blog Posts
Making blog posts more relevant and effective accomplish two goals. First, they provide useful information to your customers and prospects. They establish your business expertise and industry authority. This will build trust in your business, which allows you to accomplish the second thing, which is to sell your products and services. All of this helps drive your revenue and improve your search rankings. Publishing content for any other reason is a waste of time and resources. Sand Key Ventures is in the business of writing blog posts. We can help you improve the quality of your posts and focus them on driving conversions.
Sand Key Ventures is a website company that focuses on user experience. We write blogs that establish our clients’ EAT and drive revenue. We also build new websites and provide SEO services to keep websites running clean and Google happy. Call us at 727-249-2749 to discuss what Sand Key Ventures can do for you. You can also send an email to michael@sandkeyventures.com. If you prefer to copy and paste the email link, here it is michael@sandkeyventures.com.
Thanks for your time, but now we’ve gotta run. We have websites to build and audit, blogs to write, eCommerce to manage, and photos to edit. Until next time, take care.