Marketing your business through a blog is the norm in today’s business world and all businesses do it from the small one-man bands to the international conglomerates and blogging for business has become a billion-dollar industry.
There are millions of blog articles posted every day and searches through google, bing etc…etc run into billions every day, so your potential reach is unlimited if your SEO is up to scratch, and your article is targeted correctly.
HOW TO WRITE THAT KILLER ARTICLE
When writing content for a business or a specific service or product you must keep this in mind that you are writing this article to market a business not how you see it, but how this business wants to be seen. This is very important and is essential to the success of your article and the marketing strategy. Your client is the boss, and you would normally follow their instructions, but if you feel that something they want including in the article would detract from the message you are trying to relay to the reader, then you must communicate this to the client, suggest edits/amendments to that part, or remove it altogether, after all, you are the expert, and that is why they hired you.
RESEARCH IS KEY
You would not buy a product or use a service that you did not know anything about it, so on that basis, you would not even contemplate writing about a topic you knew nothing about, and that is why research is key, find out about everything you can about the project you are about to undertake, DETAILS ARE IMPORTANT. Take lots of notes and reference points, make sure all your info is accurate, and double-check everything with your client, this can be tedious but it is a must-do.
GET YOUR TITLES AND HEADLINES RIGHT
The secret of a good article is a great title, make your title attention-grabbing, make the reader want to read your article because of your title, make them interested in what you have to say. The problem with titles is that they can be really boring because it doesn’t tell you anything, or you have seen this title a million times before, so why would the reader want to read it again, writing a title is like fishing, you have to hook the reader and capture their interest. GIVE YOUR TITLES A LOT OF THOUGHT.
CONTENT
Content is king and that’s what it is all about. Writing great content in your body text is essential to everything you are doing with your project, and is the meat and veg of your article. Your article has to be interesting, informative, descriptive, and error-free. Your article should be broken up into small sections to make it easier for the reader to read and digest. Your article should have good sentence structure and your grammar is at a high professional standard, after all, you are representing someone else’s business and that should be your overriding priority.
Research the content that you want to write, put it down in a rough draft, and make amendments were necessary. Do not settle for “ It will do” GET IT RIGHT
YOUR SEO IS IMPORTANT
Your SEO is the engine room of any article, you want your post to rank as high as possible in your search engine like Google, so in order for this to happen, there is certain processes you have to undertake to make the SEO processes you do work for you, and they are,
- RESEARCH
Research is arguably the most boring part of SEO for many, but I personally love it. You have to embrace the research part to get a feel of what you are up against and what you will be doing. Your whole SEO strategy will depend on your depth of understanding so DO NOT ever skip the research phase.
Market Research
The market research gives you a feel of the whole landscape. Chances are, you will be working on a more specific website. By doing market research, you open your mind to what’s out there, what they are doing, what’s working for them and so on. Look around, vertically and horizontally. The information you learn here will come in handy when you start creating your SEO plan and link building strategy.
Niche Research
It’s time to niche it down. Who are you going up against directly? What’s the overall state of the niche when it comes to SEO? What types of results is Google showing you when you search? Local? Maps? Mostly Yelp? Does video dominate? Are news sites being shown? Knowing these will help you prioritize what you need to do to get visibility as soon as possible.
Competitor Research
Who are your direct competitors? What are they doing? How aggro are they? Compile your direct competitors. Search using the keywords you are targeting on Google and list down all your competitors. Compile their link profiles, identify which site is getting the most links, note down the link types they have and what their audiences are sharing.
Keyword Research
Now that you have done your competitor research, you can use the data for this phase. You’ll be able to see the keywords they are ranking for based on the anchor text from their links and you can use tools like SEMRush to find out what other keywords they are ranking for or bidding for. Compile those keywords and add your target keywords into a list. Whip out Google’s Keyword Planner, paste the keywords in and watch the magic happen. You’ll get a ton of suggestions you would have never thought of in the first place.
Data Gathering
Now, it’s time to start compiling the data you’ve researched and gather some actual stats about your website. Compile the initial keywords and backlinks you’ve acquired from the research you’ve done above. Put them into organized lists. You also need to answer things like: What’s the current status of your website vs your competitors? How optimized are their websites? How many links do they have now? You need to activate Google Analytics so you can get data about the site you are working on. You need to crawl the site you are working so you can have the data by the time you get to the on-page SEO phase.
Check for crawl errors
Check for penalties check if the sitemap has been submitted already check HTML improvements needed check for broken linksGrab all the data you can and fix them now or until you get to the on-page SEO phase.
