There is so much more to blogging than just trying to get a piece of content up on your website. Businesses tend to get wrapped up in meetings and are constantly on the go, which makes it difficult to really take the time to sit down, research the topic, and actually put in the effort to writing a successful blog for your website. While you may think that hurrying to get a blog post up will help your business, you are only hurting it and here’s why.
Curating a successful blog post takes time, and there are a lot of major details you may be missing out on that we want to make sure you are honing in on – which is why Beacon Media + Marketing is here to shift your focus and get the website traffic and SEO rankings your business should be receiving. In this blog, we are going to give you a breakdown of the top five principles every blog could use.
We can help you develop the perfect content strategy. Schedule a free consultation!
1. Structure and Format
The number one principle every blog should use is ensuring the content you write is well structured and you have a plan. Blog posts aren’t meant to just live and sit on your website. Instead, we want your audience to engage with the blog, read it, digest it, and have an experience. In order to do this, you must make sure your content has structure to it – meaning don’t scatter and jot down your thoughts just anywhere throughout the blog. Keeping your thoughts clear and organized will not only help the flow of content, but it will also help keep your brain focused.
Once you have your thoughts in line and you know exactly how you want your blog to sound, you can then begin shaping the content, making it engaging and compelling for your audience or users to read. Nailing the tone you want to use and understanding your messaging can really help achieve these goals. Do you want your blogs to be more on the professional side, focusing on statistics and reaching a more serious audience? Or do you want your blogs to have a friendly and fun, yet informative, tone? It all depends on the type of business you run or work for.
2. Relevant Subheadings
The next big item on the list of things you want to make sure you are including throughout your blog is relevant subheadings. You may be wondering why you would need subheadings – isn’t the point of a blog to just get information out? Wrong. Subheadings are extremely important and here’s why.
When you write a blog without subheadings, what do you see? A lengthy page with just a bunch of words on it. The reason behind subheadings is that they break up the page. When the user only sees a bunch of text with the same font throughout what they are attempting to read, it may be difficult to concentrate, or you may lose your place easily. When you incorporate subheadings, this gives the reader a chance to easily digest and navigate through the content they are reading, which will in turn result in better engagement and user experience.
Aside from breaking up the content throughout the page, they also allow readers to know what each section covers before reading it. This makes content “scannable” – so readers are able to scan through the content, while focusing on a part of the blog that has the information they’re looking for. Not to mention, all types of headings are a huge component for SEO ranking and keyword placement.
3. Calls to Action
This is an absolute MUST for any blog! Calls to action, often known as CTA’s, encourage the user to make a second click. A call-to-action is extremely powerful and can come in many different forms. You can have a CTA button towards the end of the blog, throughout the blog, at the very beginning of a blog, or wherever you see it fitting best.
The first step in deciding what call-to-action you want is figuring out what action it is you want your visitors or users to take. Do you want them to contact you? Do you want them to sign up for your mailing list? Monthly newsletters? Do you want them to purchase a specific product?
Understanding what your users are actively engaging with the most will help you determine what action you want them to take. Always think about the page path for your user and the overall goal. What is it that you want to obtain or achieve?
4. Internal Linking
Internal linking is because it gives you the chance to link to another piece of content to your website. For example, let’s say you are writing a blog about health and wellness, and you are addressing a mental health topic. What you can do is highlight the word “mental health” and insert a link that will take the user to a service page that has more information on mental health.
We recommend using at least three to five internal links on not only blogs but throughout the rest of your website as well. When the user sees something that is hyperlinked, chances are they will click on it and want to browse and engage more with the rest of your content, while also boosting your SEO.
5. Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are an important key feature that many people overlook. Most times, the platform you are using to create a website or write blog posts, service pages, or subpages, there is a section on the backend of your website where you can write a meta description or enter in a keyword that best reflects the topic you are addressing. Meta descriptions are important because they are the snippet Google displays on the search engine results page.
Meta descriptions have a big impact on your SEO and SERP rankings . Every time you create a new page or post in the backend of your website, you want to make sure you are inputting into the meta description section. When you do this, you are giving your website a chance to populate all over search engines, making your website or page rank higher than others. To improve click-through-rate, make sure your meta description is easily readable for all audiences, clear, and compelling.
A well-written meta description that gives readers a clear idea of what the page is about draws in more website visitors. If you do not write a meta description yourself, Google pulls an excerpt from your blog/web page, and it may not give searchers the best idea on what the blog is about.
Tackle Blogging from A Different Perspective
All in all, blogging can be a very crucial aspect in generating more website traffic, creating better user experiences, and bringing more business straight to your doorstep. At Beacon Media + Marketing we offer a blogging distribution package personalized just for you!
If you are looking for more than just a couple of blogs posted every month and want to go the extra mile in really boosting your SEO, we have just the solution you need. We will first optimize and produce high-quality blogs for your website and then we will work to repurpose this content and distribute it to other platforms.
Our content distribution package includes a video that is then published on our Beacon Media News YouTube Channel, a press release that will be reached by tons, and a spotlight feature on our Beacon Media News website. Give your content a purpose and invest in repurposing blog content that can be sought out by many other news outlets and sources to improve visibility.
Are you ready to take your blogging to the next level? Click here to get started!
