24 Oct 2016

Strategically using a blog for SEO

When working with clients we often see a company blog either being written sporadically about news or current events, or not being used at all. If this is the case for your business then you’re missing a massive opportunity to create highly targeted traffic to your website. With a small amount of careful planning you can use a blog to strategically attract new visitors to your website and in turn extend your reach to new customers.

Here’s the theory…

If you look at web traffic analytics, the majority of websites tend to have a small number of pages getting the most traffic on the website (usually the home page, contact, services or product pages). These most popular pages should be optimised for your main search engine key phrases. Now if you explore a range of key phrases that your customers will be searching for to find your products and services then you will probably find that you will have a very large list of relevant key phrases. To optimise your main pages for all of these key phrases would be impossible. That’s where a well-planned blog comes in.

Each blog article is specifically written and optimised around one of these key phrases. Typically your key phrases and blog articles become more and more niche and specific. Each blog article therefore targeting a specific audience or customer requirement.

In time when looking at your web traffic analytics you will still notice a small number of pages getting the most of the web traffic, but with a well-planned blog you will notice that each blog article is getting a small yet significant amount of traffic. As your blog grows, this traffic for each blog article will grow and in turn if all blog article traffic were combined you can sometimes even exceed the traffic of your most popular pages.

This web traffic data trend is called “the long tail” as your blog post’s popularity becomes more niche and specific, the traffic to each blog post gets smaller and smaller, but the combined traffic of all blog posts together can really add up.

Here’s how we can help…

To make your blog work effectively and bring highly targeted traffic to your site you will need 2 elements:

  1. A list of relevant key phrases listed in priority order according to potential web traffic
  2. A plan to strategically write and publish your blog articles that are optimised for the above key phrases.

As part of our search engine optimisation services we provide key phrase research. The key phrase research service finds between 200 – 300 key phrases that you can then use in your blog. These key phrases are derived from the keywords already bringing traffic to your website and keywords bringing traffic to competitor sites.

Once you have this list of key phrases in priority order you can then go about writing your blog and optimising each blog post with one of these key phrases. Alternatively you can allow our team of copywriters to create and publish these blog articles for you, allowing you more time to focus on your business.

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