Writing a Website Blog to Increase Engagement and Traffic

If you are wanting to increase traffic to your website, and keep users on-site for longer, then it’s important to deliver content that connects with the audience, and works for SEO.

Here are 20 top tips on how to prepare and write a blog that will help you to achieve both these goals:

1. Identify who is your target audience and what they are interested in.
2. Consider how you want to come across – the blog could be instructional, informative, conversational, newsworthy, authoritative, controversial, educational, friendly, witty.
3. Check out some competitor blogs and see what they are writing about.
4. Get some inspiration for blog titles by typing keywords into Google search that are important to your business.
5. Write a list of topics that you feel are relevant and will be of interest to your audience.
6. Write a list of important keywords that are relevant to the topic and can be included in the blog.
7. Expand your list of topics to create titles for each blog – make sure its unique. You won’t earn any Google brownie points for using blog topic titles that are already ranking.
8. Structure your blog – add a headline, sub-titles. Create an outline and add in key elements you want to include in list format. Ensure you include your important keywords in headlines, sub-titles and through the content, but be careful to ensure it reads well and doesn’t come across as spammy. Google will not rank low quality content.
9. Consider how much content you can write on the chosen subject. Longer blogs do tend to rank better, so try to work towards at least 1500 words if you can. Pad out your outline and list of key elements to produce a comprehensive article.
10. Getting the right tone of voice – your written tone influences your brand voice, which can impact how people perceive your brand. Keep on-brand, be informative, and always ensure the content is grammatically correct.
11. Write for voice search users – these are users who search for content using virtual assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant. You need to be writing in the third person, so someone listening can connect with, and understand, your content if it is being read aloud.
12. Proof your article 3 times and check carefully for grammatical errors. Also check you have included important keywords.
13. Create the meta tags – insert an optimised meta title and meta description. Both need to contain your most important keyword to help the content rank.
14. Include a header image, and if possible, include images through the post. Videos and infographics are also good to include. Before uploading your media, rename the file to include your important keywords. Also make sure you add in image ALT text, and a title and description for the media. Again, include your important keyword where you can.
15. Add internal links in the body content to your own web pages, as well as any third party site that the user may wish to visit to gain further information. Consider creating text links on important keywords to enhance SEO.
16. Take authorship of your content and build yourself a reputation as an expert in your field. Be bold and let people know you are the author of this content. Add an author bio to your website blog and link to the bio through structured data article schema. It helps to gain trust from your audience and also with Google.
17. Schedule, post and share, share, share! People need to know your blog is live. Share it on all your social channels, and you can also utilise the content further by creating social posts using excerpts of the content. This will give the article some longevity in social feeds and will help to drive more traffic to the blog. If you have a customer email database, send customers a taster of your new article – build a connection with them and motivate them to click through to read the full article.
18. Submit your blog to Google Blogsearch, Plazoo, Tumblr, RSS Feed Directories, Bookmarking Sites, Infographic Submission sites, if you have an infographic to share.
19. Promote your brand through Guest blogging – you can reach a larger online audience by writing articles for third party sites. Choose high authority sites only. This is a fantastic way to increase traffic and readership, but you can also insert backlinks through the content to your own web pages, which is great for SEO as it helps to enhance your overall domain authority and trust. Do not submit a blog as a guest article if you already have posted it on your own website.
20. Do it all over again – every week, every 2 weeks or monthly. Posting regular blog content will help stimulate searchbots to crawl the site more often. The more frequently they parse the site and find fresh content, the more often they will come back for more and this is what will get your blog pages more visibility in Google search indexes.

What is key to all of this, is that writing a blog becomes part of your regular task list. There is little value in putting time and effort into a couple of posts and then stopping. Schedule time in to keep your blog active and engaging with your audience, and you will reap the rewards.

Whizz Marketing is a leading SEO agency in Hampshire. We do lots of blog writing for our clients, across multiple sectors. If you need some support in writing regular blog articles, please get in touch. Alternatively get further info at https://whizzmarketing.co.uk/services/marketing/content-marketing/