Often a social media blog is the most efficient way to enhance your website for search engines. It serves as a great way to show Google that your site content is fresh, that you’re a thought leader in your industry, and that your site is easy to crawl.
This assumes that you know what you’re doing. Here’s how to run a blog that actually advances your goals:
Develop a content strategy
Don’t fall into the trap of posting whenever you feel like it. This is how you create boring, uninspired content.
To really engage readers, you need a content strategy. During this time, you can consider who your target audience is, what topics you’ll cover, what your writing style will be like (informative, persuasive, relaxed, etc.), and how you’ll make your blog engaging.
This Business 2 Community article explains why having a content strategy is so important:
“Planning your content strategy will allow you to manage how all content will be created, published, and archived. Your content strategy should evaluate all of the content that your customers might encounter and why that content needs to be created. This might include using keywords identified during keyword research to write blogs or writing new pages to lessen content gaps with competing sites.”
Our suggestion: create an idea for a content series during your strategic planning. This will keep readers coming back for more.
Post new content every week
One of the reasons why blogs are so effective is because they keep your site active. To achieve this, you’ll have to post new content at least once a week. You can post more often if you’re up to it, but don’t let your content quality slide. Google wants to see a steady stream of fresh, high-quality content.
Keep your old content accurate
There’s nothing worse than reading an interesting article and clicking a dead outgoing link. Not only does this frustrate readers, but it’s also a negative indicator in Google’s search algorithm. You must carefully curate your social media blog.
This Entrepreneur article explains the bare minimum businesses need to do. According to the article, businesses should keep all of their links updated to avoid 404 errors:
“Entrepreneurs should always check for links leading to dead pages, and redirect them as soon as possible. Do this by running Google’s crawl errors report to make sure no one gets a “404 Not Found” error message when trying to access important content on your website. Once the report alerts you to dead links, you can 301 redirect them to other pages on your site and mark the URLs as fixed.”
This sets the bar pretty low. You’ll get bonus points if you update your content and include links to newer blogs and articles. This is less important for your blogs and absolutely critical for your evergreen site content, which only gets updated on a year-to-year basis.
Use other marketing platforms to share your content
A blog with many readers gets a good site ranking, and a high-ranking site attracts more users from Google’s search engine results pages. This works beautifully if you make the cut, but this circle has proven to be exclusive.
Something you can do to speed the process up is acquiring more readers by sharing your content everywhere you can. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and marketing emails are all perfect options to share your blogs. This is a two-for-one, since attaching high-quality content to those marketing mediums will make them more effective in their own right.
Once your blog gets more readers, your site ranking will start to improve. This, in turn, will attract even more users to your site since they’ll discover your business from Google’s SERPs.
To talk more about SEO tips for small businesses, or anything else, contact us today.
