Lockdown Marketing Tips: Write Blogs, Part 2

Yesterday, we started discussing the importance of article writing to boost your SEO and SERP rankings, and increase your standing in the market place. Today we continue with this topic by giving you specific tips on what, and how, to write these articles. 

How should you do it?

We often are asked by our clients ‘how’ to write articles – but we know they mean, ‘what should I write about?’ The first place you should start is keyword research, which we’ve written about in detail here. These are the key topics you want to educate your audience on, because these are the main products or services you'll offer. And you want to build up your keyword density across your website. What do you want your audience to know about? Can you give some hints and tips? What’s going on in your industry that you can share your own thoughts and opinions on?

Secondly, use your customer-facing staff to give you your topics. What questions are they are asked regularly? Ask your sales team what they’d love their customers to know. What are your Customer Service Team’s FAQs? These are often the topics people are Googling, and therefore you want your website to appear in the answers to these questions.

Plan out topics in advance, and if you can, write a few at a time. Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will take the time you allocate for it – so if you’ve given yourself an hour to write one article, it’s probably possible to write two in that time! Once you have the topics planned out, and time scheduled in to write them, you’ll know how often you need to sit and write to have a whole month’s worth of content.

A good few pointers on how to write the article itself:

• Put internal links in your blogs to encourage people to look at your services/products around your website.

• It’s easy for people to read if paragraphs are short, with clear sub headings or sections.

• Adding lists with bullet points, or numbers, also makes it easy for people to take on board information.

It is probably helpful at this stage to point out what you should not blog about. Casual updates, non-professional content and photographs are not for your blog. They can work well on social media, and can increase engagement in the right way. But concentrate on the above as best practise and bear in mind that what you are building is an archive of useful material. For it to be 'useful', it needs to be relevant to your customers.

What should do when you’ve finished writing?

Now you’ve written your articles, it’s important that you share it with your audience! Publish the article on the blog section on your website. It is usually a good idea to include a relevant photograph or image to draw attention to it. And, if your website platform allows, publish a short meta description to increase your click-through rate to allow more people to read your articles.

Share it on your social media pages – this allows you to remain front of mind with all your customers; remember, these are the people that have chosen to follow you. Again, having a relevant image will more likely catch the attention of your audience.

You can also send links to your articles to clients in an email – it’s a great way to keep in touch with them, especially during lockdown, and they will often value the insight you can share with them.

Something that’s not often discussed, but is a great tip, is that it is ok to re-share your old articles on social media. The engagement rate on social media is low, at between 0.5 – 2%. This means only a small percentage of your audience see your updates every time you share them. So it makes sense to look back at any old articles you may have written, check that they’re still relevant, and share them again. This is something you can do regularly once you have built up an archive of useful content.

And if this all sounds too much, we can help you. Simply give us a call email us and we’ll get back to you within 12 hours.