So often companies have a blog on their website, but aren’t taking full advantage of what it can do for them. Blogs are one of the top ways to increase traffic to your site, educate customers, build a loyal following, nurture leads and gain better SEO ranks.
If your company has a blog and wants to start using it to its fullest potential, here are some of our top tips for getting the most out of your company blog:
- Use between 400 to 1200 words. Anything beyond tends to lose the reader’s attention and a minimum of 400 words gives Google plenty to index. And blogs should take about 5 minutes to read through.
- Use 2 to 5 images. Long text paragraphs can be sore on the eyes and people process visuals faster than reading text. Images are a nice way of breaking up the monotony.
- Link to your other relevant articles in your blog. Related topics keep the reader clicking through your content and engaged on your website. These are called internal links and make up a small fraction of your SEO rating.
- Use outbound links. Google also likes when websites link outside of their own site. Sounds counter productive, but it builds credibility.
- Give users the option to comment. Adding a comments feature to your blog invites readers to interact with your content and give insightful feedback.
- Post social sharing widgets on the blog article. This way, your content can quickly and easily be shared and with a greater reach than before. In addition to the usual platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, don’t forget to include Stumble Upon and Tumblr. You can also consider embedding a Click to Tweet button for impactful sentences that deserve a shout out and set you up as experts in your field.
- Be sure you’re blasting your blog posts on social media as a way to get traffic back to your site. When doing so, take advantage of peak traffic and post accordingly. For example, Facebook sees peak traffic Tuesdays and Thursdays between 1p and 3pm. Posting during these times should gain you maximum exposure. We like to use a social media content scheduler like Buffer to pre-plan and blast our posts for the week. But remember to be active and engage with others on social media and not to allow a scheduler to become a substitute for engagement.
- Post your blog images on Pinterest and use the image as a link back to your site. Then when your image gets repinned by someone, it’s creating new links and helping your SEO. Creative and original photos with memes written over them can quickly become viral content.
- Send your blog article out to your company e-newsletter mailing list. Include only teaser text with a link to continue reading the full article to drive traffic back to the company site.
- Include an author bio with thumbnail photo as a way to relate person to person instead of corporation to person. We already know that personalized content and custom photos increase conversion rate so use every lit bit to make that happen. You can invite several employees to blog on the company site and give them a sense of investment in the company and pride in published work.
- Offer a search bar for easy to find content and make it obvious.
- Categorize your blog articles under topics or series. Giving them tags will help the reader stay on topic when browsing through and makes locating content simple. You may even consider having a series that includes part 1 through 3 for prolonged reader engagement.
- Use an SEO plugin like Yoast. It will prompt you for meta descriptions, header titles, images, links and keywords and helps ensure your blog gets the best rankings possible.
Got any tips of your own that have helped your company blog? We welcome your comments below.
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