Having a blog on your website is an incredibly important tool for any business. Despite the ever changing digital landscape, a blog continues to stand the test of time as it is not only a resource for potential and current customers and a great way to boost website traffic, it is a way for you to build trust by showcasing your knowledge and expertise. We can’t see blogs going anywhere, anytime soon!

There are ways for you to freshen up your blog - think Buzzfeed adding TikTok video content to their listicles to appeal to a younger market - some of which we will touch on throughout this post. However, it is all fruitless if your blog remains invisible on search engines. To help counteract this, here are some guidelines to follow when trying to make your blogs more visible:

1.     Optimise your blog for SEO

When building a website as part of launching your business, you will have seen a lot of information about optimisation for search engines. The same applies to your blog and individual posts. There are many things you can do to optimise your blog and help it to rank higher on search engines but the most important is choosing the right keywords. You need to have an attention grabbing title that also is SEO focused, ensuring your keywords are utilised right from the beginning, while also dispersing them throughout the body of the blog post, without it looking forced or unnatural.

Other areas to look at are including external and internal links, ideally that open to a new web page rather than diverting the reader from your source material. It will also help to categorise and tag your blog pages, this helps the search engine differentiate and better position the posts. If you want more information you can check out our Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

2.     Reuse and republish

Constantly creating new content can be time consuming and at times can fall by the wayside when client focused work becomes your main priority. You may be lucky as your business grows to have teams dedicated to produce new and exciting content every week, but while you are still establishing your business, why not try reusing older content?

It depends on the industry you are in, but you can comfortably say for most, that things change pretty quickly. However, there will be some basic areas that you will have covered that will never change, only our approaches to them do. For example, if you have a skincare blog that once wrote about the various skin types, that information doesn’t change but the products to treat them do. Therefore, you can update it and re-publish the blog with a new date, rather than creating a new draft. That way you are better establishing the existing content on search engines, while adding new more current keywords.  

3.     Add imagery and videos

Adding visual content to blogs will be more beneficial to your visibility overall as search engines respond well to this. As mentioned above Buzzfeed has taken this to a new, more modern level by including TikTok videos in their posts. Most websites, whether you are using platforms such as Squarespace or have a website developer, will be able to embed social media content into your posts to add that extra element.

By including these types of visuals onto your blog posts you will be appealing to a larger and potentially younger market, a market that may no longer see the value in blogs but are intrigued by the cross-platform integration. Try to keep any video content as relevant to the body of text as possible, otherwise the search engine may deem it to be confusing or spam and your blog post will be penalised for it.

4.     Share, share, share

Once you have written your blog, you can’t just rely on search engines and good writing to do the hard work for you. You should be sharing your blog across all your social platforms to try get it in front of a larger audience. But in addition to this there are other avenues you can go down in order to get the most exposure for your new post.

Utilise blog publishing platforms such as Medium - this will again allow you to increase your audience and it has the added benefit of boosting SEO. You can also make use of LinkedIn and Facebook groups. As a business, if you haven’t already, you should be joining groups to connect with like-minded people and potential customer bases. Be mindful to not use these as a means of business promotion, but a way to share your knowledge through a blog format.

5.     Use analytics

Last but not least make sure you are keeping track of the popularity of your blog. This will give you an idea of the demographic your posts are appealing to, and more importantly are they appealing to your target demographic? Tracking analytics will also give you a clear indication of what topics are trending and what you should be focusing your content on.

You can outsource this for free with Google Analytics which will offer a fairly in-depth look at not only your site content analytics but all data surrounding your website including traffic and geographical demographics. You may also have analytics built in as part of your web platform which is also good to have, but since Google is the most commonly used search engine it will be more productive to utilise this platform.