To run a successful blog, you need to be able to compete with the leading competitors in your industry. Generating leads, driving traffic, and increasing conversions are common goals among bloggers who want visibility. However, those goals are difficult to accomplish if your content marketing isn’t up to modern standards.
On average, companies that blog receive 55 percent more web traffic than those that don’t. Blogging is about more than showing off what you know. It’s also a great way to boost your rankings in SERPs and get noticed by search engines. That way, you show up on the first page of results and increase your chances of higher traffic.
Having a blog also helps to boost sales and improve brand awareness. For newer companies especially, blogging helps them stand out among their competitors. By offering value and understanding customers’ pain points, they’re able to reach their objectives and expand their business.
If you want to improve your blog content, here are four simple ways to get started.
Create Optimized Headlines
Your headline is the first thing people see when they encounter your blog post. If it isn’t relevant, doesn’t provide value, or doesn’t aim to solve a problem, it won’t attract attention. You need to create optimized headlines for each blog post to ensure your target audience sees them and they rank in search engines.
The most popular types of blog titles include:
- How-tos: Teaching your audience how to do something, similar to a tutorial.
- Listicles: Listing useful tools or techniques that can help your audience solve a problem.
- Numbers: Research shows that 36 percent of people prefer headlines that include numbers.
Your headline should tell users what they can expect if they click through to your post. It’s important to deliver on your promises. Promising to bring certain results and failing to follow through will hurt your credibility and fail to drive traffic to your blog. If you guarantee specific results, then users should be able to see those results by following your advice.
Write for Your Target Audience
Imagine trying to write a blog that covers several topics and niches. While some bloggers can succeed with a general blog, most cannot. People want tips and advice from experts in their field. With generalized posts, it’s challenging to cater to and satisfy a particular audience.
According to a recent survey, 58 percent of marketers agree that creating relevant content for your audience makes it most effective. You get the best results when you write with them in mind and aim to help them with their problems and provide solutions.
Writing content for your audience also helps you create relevant blog topics that cater to their interests. Failing to publish relevant content will result in low engagement rates and high bounce rates because you’re writing for anyone and everyone.
So, how do you know who your target audience is for sure? There are several ways to find out:
- Conduct surveys. To get the most accurate information, it’s best to speak directly to the source. If you have existing readers, it’s a great opportunity to send them a survey and collect direct feedback.
- Study your competitors’ audience. It doesn’t hurt to spy on your competitors to know what you should and shouldn’t do regarding your blog. Their blogs can give you insight into what your audience wants and what content they’re looking for so you can provide it for them.
- Review your website analytics. Your analytics gives you valuable information about where your audience hangs out on your website, which posts are most popular, and which ones don’t receive much attention. It’s easier to understand what your audience wants from your blog when you know how they spend their time on your website.
- Craft buyer personas. Buyer personas are profiles of your audience that outline their details, such as age, location, pain points, hobbies, and more. The more information you collect on your audience, the easier it is to create content they’ll love.
Make Relevant Product Suggestions
If you run an e-commerce store, your blog is the perfect place to promote your products and services. Blogging about your products introduces them to new users and helps them understand how it’s useful towards their needs. Making relevant product suggestions throughout your posts will increase sales and grow your customer base with ease.
The impact that blogging has on customers’ buying habits is huge. A whopping 60 percent of people purchase a product after reading a blog post about it. It’s easier to convince readers they need a product or service while they’re reading and researching about it.
This linen company makes a product suggestion for the best duvet cover for your bed. Instead of using loud promotional tactics, it gently highlights its own duvet products to show readers what to look for:
Leverage Visual Content
With such short attention spans, people need blogs to actively engage them and keep them interested as they scroll. Few people want to read paragraph after paragraph with nothing in between. For the highest chances of healthy traffic, it helps to switch up the type of content you include in your blog posts.
Including visual content, such as videos and infographics, helps guide readers through your article to the end. Posts with images receive 94 percent more views as opposed to those with no visuals, proving that readers need different mediums to stay engaged.
Along with better engagement, including visual content in your blog content improves site traffic. It’s easier to stand out from the crowd when you provide interesting, engaging visuals that excite your audience.
In this travel blog, the author includes pictures of the destination so readers get a clear idea of what the area is like:
Your Turn
With these simple tips, you’ll be able to improve your blog content in no time. Sometimes it’s the small changes that make the biggest difference. By writing for your target market, using various content types, and more, you’ll be able to engage your readers and keep them coming back. How will you improve your blog content?
Young Handsome Freelancer… -DepositPhotos
