Blogs to boost SEO

Transcript

In this episode, we’re going to be talking about blogs to boost website traffic and SEM.
So it’s Chelsea and James here. And we’re having a conversation about how to use blogs to effectively boost your website traffic and to help with your SEO. And this is, this is a question we get asked a lot, isn’t it? James?
It is. It’s a funny topic, really, because everybody when they want, when they have a website wants a news page. And 90% of people never put anything on it, or they start putting something on it, and you go back to it a few years later. And He literally says, you know, this is our Christmas opening hours 2015. And it’s been abandoned. But really, the point of having in the first place wasn’t even necessarily just to share news, it’s to give the website a space to put more content that’s relevant to keywords that maybe they can’t fit into every other page. So you know, for example, if you’re a b2b business, and you’ve got lots of things to talk about, and lots of things that you want to get found in SEO for the blog, is actually a great place to be able to create content that fills it with that kind of sort of keyword rich content that Google will pick up on and start reading the text of just from your experience, Chelsea, what kind of blog content have we written for clients, that would actually help their SEO.
So the way I like to look at it is, you kind of have your branded keywords that you’d want on the main pages of your website, and they would be things that you want people to find your brand for. Whereas like, the ones that we use for blogs are kind of topical and more of those informative, engaging ones. So um, you know, like, when people type into Google, and what does this mean, or how to do something, they’re really good topics for blogs. And there’s some really useful tools out there as well to help you to figure out what people are actually searching for that is around your subject area. And that’s the sort of that’s the sort of place I’d start really when thinking about the type of content that we can do for clients. And so I think just off the top of my head, some recent ones that we’ve done, we’ve got some got some clients in the E commerce in the E commerce sector within sales and processes that they’ve done in place. And they wanted to talk about the sale a bit more, and really ramped that up. So we created a blog about the kind of processes that they have behind their sale and how the sale came about. Kind of like opening hours during the sale, things like that, just so we can, we can talk about it a little bit more for them. And because the sale that they actually do is an annual event as well, it will work for their SEO, because it’s going to be something that’s repeated, and people will start to affiliate that with them. And other topics as well more informative ones. So recipes that people can make for some of our clients as well and topics around how products actually work, what to use them with how to get the most use out of them. And then with those, I think for E commerce clients, it’s really good because you can actually get the key word and use a keyword as the name of the product. And so people who were searching for that product have something not only to kind of like, inform them about the product, and to kind of nurture that sale along. But also it kind of boosts the rankings upon Google for that sort of product type. So for example, how x you can talk about how your how x is like the best.
That’s interesting. So in terms of how people find the right keywords to put into their blogs, and is it something that they can do themselves and their website? Or is it something that they would need external tools to be able to help them to do?
I always say use external tools, because even though you can get some limited data with what you’re being farmed for on Google Analytics, it literally just is that like what you are currently being found for. It doesn’t give you any kind of feature options of things that you could possibly be fine found for. What I would do is and there’s like a few tools, some with the SEO kind of SEO service that we use for our clients, and also just some free ones as well that you can use where you can actually type in like a topic. So for example, one for us would be I know SEO optimization, and it will come up With the the most popular content that other people have written around it, so you can see what is currently ranking well and what people are engaging with. We there’s other tools as well, that show you all of the things that people are searching to do. So, for example, with going back to SEO optimization, and some of them will be, what is SEO optimization? Why is SEO optimization important? And it always gives you like a title as well for your blog, especially when you do it that way, because you’re directly answering the search query that people are putting into Google. So it can be that simple.
So another interesting thing around the sort of these Why, what questions in terms of blog copy? And obviously, everyone nowadays has seen sort of these voice assistants things like Siri on iPhones and Alexa, things like that. And these typically work through people querying them by saying a phrase like that. So for example, how do I do SEO? And if you can incorporate some of those, why, what where, how phrases into your website, blog copy, then actually, that is a really good way of getting found on voice search, because we search actually looks for those particular phrases individually as well. Another way around, and getting that content into your website is typically around having an FAQ section, which you can expand on questions and answers, which again, give you a good place to put in additional content that maybe isn’t relevant to your main product or service pages. But it gives you a scope to be able to fill your site with content that keyword rich, addresses a user an audience need in terms of answering frequently asked questions, but also has the sub benefit of being found on Google as well. So just sort of a last point on this really, Chelsea? What once you’ve got your blog, on your website, and it’s all keyword rich? And what should you do with it, then, like, where should you push it out? And yeah, how do you make the most out of the time and effort that you’ve put into writing it?
Um, I’d say distribution can be quite a big topic, and that we can talk about and different ways that you can distribute and blogs that you write and is it best to put it on your website or kind of aggregator website as well. And kind of like the pros and cons of doing this. But if we’re talking about just putting it on our website, and the first place I would go to is socials, because the amount of reach that you can get, especially if you kind of have a really kind of robust hashtag, structure on there as well. That’s definitely the first place I go to just for the publicity as well as getting something out there on your own socials and keeping that content schedule in line. And other places as well. So like industry aggregators that you could potentially share them to, if you have partners that you you’ve partnered with in the past, and they don’t mind sharing your blogs for you to newspapers as well, like if you can kind of get things out there. What I would say is, so if there are going to be multiple blog posts, that all link back to your website, but they’re actually situated on another service, there, you’re going to have to tweak some of the keywords so that you’re not actually having two pages fighting for the same position on Google. Because that could be quite problematic, and it will diminish the reach of both of them.
Yeah, so that was what was historically called duplicate content. Within websites, where we used to find this quite a lot where, for example, you’ve got an e commerce website that selling products, but they take the exact same product description from the manufacturer or from another ecommerce website. in Google’s eyes, everybody’s essentially trying to compete for exactly the same keywords there. And it’s only really then down on the domain authority of the website, in terms of how it ranks them. So it’s not an ideal way really of focusing on your SEO, we always recommend that people have unique content on the site. So whilst it’s quite lengthy and time consuming to make it is really worthwhile having unique product descriptions, service pages, and blog posts so that even if you are using it on multiple websites, you do think about tweaking it so that it’s slightly different from site to site. And that’ll actually give you the most reach for the same value pretty much. So yeah, so thanks for that. Chelsea and it was really interesting. If anyone’s got any questions around how they can use blogs better on their website, drop us an email at Hello at so marketing.com