Blogs are an extremely valuable way to demonstrate your skill and capability, helping you to drive traffic to your website and establish your business as a credible option for customers. But in order to really make this content for marketing your business work hard for you, it’s important to pay a little attention to your website.
Why is this important? Because your website is where your blog is hosted, so you need to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to get to your site, find your blog and take the next step. Keeping your website spick and span is the first stage in a successful blogging story.
Accessing your website
This might sound obvious, but if users can’t access your site easily, they’ll move on. And online readers are impatient – they expect your site to load quickly and to switch pages reliably and easily. Getting this right means doing a couple of things:
- Make sure your site is hosted by a reliable company. Not all hosting companies are created equal, so if you’re not happy with your current host, switch to one that is recommended by others for speed and efficiency.
- If your website is WordPress-based, you can install a plug-in that helps your site to load more quickly. If you have a bespoke site, or you’re building a site on a different platform, ask your developer to make sure it’s built so that it can load as fast as possible.
Is it easy to find your blog?
You should have a ‘blog’ or ‘news’ page in your main navigation. As soon as people have to start hunting around for your blog pages, they’ll give up. Make sure you make use of ways to categorise and tag your blog posts so that when people land on the page, they can find what they’re looking for.
Check your links
It’s great SEO practice to make use of links, both within your site and externally. What’s not so good is if those links don’t work, or they take you to the wrong page. Always double-check your links at the time you add content to your site, and also periodically check all the links on your site to make sure they’re still valid – this is good web content maintenance practice.
Make sure your list is up-to-date
This is both website and CRM-related. If you have an email list that you use for content marketing management, you need to make sure that it is up-to-date and that there’s an easy way for people to sign up on your website. If you have a newsletter sign-up, review the form that people have to fill in to make sure it’s quick and easy to do. You should also check that you have the right opt-in wording for GDPR, so that people are aware of how you will use and store their data.
Use your analytics
If you have access to Google analytics, use it. This will tell you where people are visiting you from, how they found you, which pages they look at, how long they spend on each page and much more. This is extremely useful data that can help you to see what’s working on your site and what needs changing. If you use someone else to manage your website or upload your blog – a virtual assistant or marketing support, they can do this for you and report to you on a regular basis.
Get used to your CMS
Your Content Management System is how you update and manage your website. Many small businesses use WordPress, and there are a variety of other platforms that allow you to upload content yourself. It’s really important to familiarise yourself with the process of uploading a blog, and how to manage website content. The more you understand about using meta-tags, keywords, image captions and all the additional SEO features available, the more visible you can make your content to the right audience.
Content planning and research
Before you start writing, you need to have a plan. For most businesses this means:
- Knowing your audience – the more you know about who you’re talking to, the more likely you are to reach the right audience and get your key messages across.
- Deciding on topics – you need to focus on topics that are going to be most useful to your target audience. Make a list and a sub-list, so you have plenty to work with.
- Researching keywords – if you’re expecting or hoping that people will find your blog from search engine results, you need to make sure you have the right keywords in the right places.
- Thinking about content variety – blog content can be more than just the written word. You could use infographics, video content, animations, lists and more to make sure your content is varied and interesting. Match your content plan with these content types so that you are creating great content every time.
If you’re ready to up your game with great content for marketing your business, you need to pay attention to making sure your readers can find it and access it as easily as possible. We can help with that – feel free to call us on 0800 994 9016 or use our contact form in the menu above.