If you have a company blog but are not paying attention to SEO, you’re missing a golden opportunity to bring high-quality traffic to your website and improve lead generation. Here are important professional SEO tips sure to improve the ROI of your blog.
- Use blog posts to optimize for long-tail keywords not covered on your main website, especially keywords with a high-buying intent, such as “long term health care insurance benefits”, or “long term health care insurance providers”, or “long term health care insurance benefits for millennials”.
- Add conversion elements to your blog post template. If a reader is excited about your blog post on long-term health care insurance, display an inquiry form, your phone number, and perhaps a link to the associated service page on your website, in the template footer and/or sidebar.
- Blog post titles should include target keywords, but also be appealing to human readers. Blending the two purposes can be challenging; a helpful tool is the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer, which enables you to play around with wording to find the right combination.
- For SEO and a lot of other reasons, publishing high-quality content is imperative. Google’s algorithm has improved its ability to identify and reward original, meaningful and authoritative content — and of course your human blog readers are after the same thing. With that in mind, your blog authors should be identified by name, and have bios on each post or a separate page that establishes their credibility.
- Another important but overlooked element of content quality is editing. Blog posts riddled with grammatical errors, spelling errors, incomprehensible sentences and no clear points will get a big thumbs-down from Google, and even more important, from your customers and potential customers. Have posts edited for meaning and proofread for accuracy prior to publishing. For much more insight, check out this detailed article I wrote for Smashing Magazine.
- Evergreen blog posts — especially useful posts that address topics of continual concern — serve SEO purposes very well because they attract high-quality inbound links. After publishing an evergreen post, let influential social media participants and bloggers in your niche know about it; if they like it, they may link to it on their blogs and websites. And not only will the links help boost your SEO, they will attract new, relevant traffic to your blog.
- If you publish an infographic on your blog (a great idea, by the way), include the embed code at the bottom of the post, and make sure the embed code links to either the blog post or a relevant product/service page on your main website. Blogs and websites in your niche can grab the embed code and thus easily reproduce your infographic — again giving you high-quality links and new relevant traffic.
- Invite influential bloggers in your niche and related niches to be guest authors on your blog. Such authors will enhance the quality and authority of your blog content, which Google will notice. And yet again, guest authors will promote their guest posts, showering you with new links and new traffic. The key is to invite authors selectively: make sure they are credible, have credible websites, and are skilled in their specialty and as writers.
- If your blog has been around for a long time, chances are you have old blog posts that are hopelessly out of date or no longer relevant to your business and/or blog theme. Removing these posts will strengthen the relevance of your overall blog content and most likely improve its overall organic visibility. Strong blog posts in the archive that have grown a bit dusty can be updated and re-shared on social media — a relatively easy way to attract new readers, links and social shares.
- If you have an active off-site publishing effort underway as part of your SEO or branding campaign, posts from your blog can be VERY useful for linking purposes. Many off-site publishers are unwilling to include links to company website product/service pages in guest post bodies or bios, as they are deemed to be (and often are) too self-promotional. Blog posts tend to be more informational and less “market-y” than standard website content, and thus more acceptable to publishers rightfully concerned about maintaining the integrity of their content.
Need Help With Your Company Blog?
If you’d like to ratchet up the SEO power of your company blog but need help, please contact us! Finding the right keywords, developing a detailed content plan, producing content and marketing content all take a lot of time and expertise. We do it every day, and would love an opportunity to learn more about your blogging objectives and see if we can lend a hand.