Blogs have become a substantial part of social communication for every business. Successful blogs can boost the reach and exposure of your business in search engines and social media, while a blog can also help you establish your business as an industry thought leader, and can play a major role in lead generation, conversion, and customer loyalty.
However, many blogs fall short of expectations. Some of the major reasons why blogs fail to deliver are a lack of valuable content, publishing inconsistency, and a lack of, or poor, promotion.
Valuable content is the backbone of a successful blog, and content relevancy has a great impact on how your content is ranked in search engines and in social media news feeds.
First off, creating great content is a fundamental step in SEO. Search engine algorithms have evolved in complexity, and will rank sites that meet peoples’ needs. They can actually now surface results to match each user’s individual surf and search behavior – if your content matches the current interest of your target audience and you’re using the keywords and contexts they are looking for, this will help you boost your ranking and your visibility in search engines. And with the continued development of algorithms, the same is increasingly true of social platforms too.
In order to drive more users to your blog and to grow your content reach, you can do a couple of simple things to improve your SEO and promotional efforts.
Here are 5 key strategies to grow blog and boost your content reach.
- Listen to your audience
The better you know your target audience, the better you can create content that matches their interests.
Look out for topics that are generating significant engagement on social media – monitor your social media followers and their comments, but also tap into social communities and discussions in your niche.
Look for frequently asked questions and challenges that come up, and seek out gaps in coverage.
Is there anything trending you can add to your posts that will make them stand out?
Create helpful content and provide actionable tips that your target audience will remember as a useful resource for information.
Tool Tips
Try out the WordPress plugin Easy Blog Ideas, or use Buzzsumo to help you find top performing content so you never to run out of topics and ideas.
- Include keywords in your pages and posts
Keywords play an essential role in optimizing your pages and posts for search engines, as well as for your audience.
Conduct thorough keyword research – ideally, you’re looking to stay on top of how your audience refers to your focus topics and what search terms and/or hashtags they’re using.
Use these keywords to search for topics you can write about, and include them in your meta tags and descriptions, as well as in your copy, headlines, lead texts, links and image descriptions, where possible (within context).
Tool Tip
Use keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner or Long Tail Keywords for your keyword research.
- Maximize the readability of your posts
Search engines preferably rank sites that load fast and are both responsive and user-friendly.
Make sure your blog posts are easy and fun to read. Use short sections of less than 300 words, and paragraphs with less than 150 words. Add in headings and subheadings for each paragraph, including your keywords where possible, and utilize bullet points and lists to make your posts easy to skim and scan.
Tool Tip
Try out the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress to help you with basic SEO and check your posts for focus keywords, meta tags and descriptions, and readability.
- Use images
Visual content is more likely to get shares, likes, and comments than text-only posts. Additionally, visual content can also drive extra traffic from image searches in search engines and social media.
Illustrate your marketing contents and social media posts with photos, infographics, and videos. With so many tools and options at your disposal, you don’t need to be a professional designer to create professional looking visuals these days.
Tool Tip
Use tools like Canva to create unique infographics and share pics, or try Moovly to create animated videos easily.
- Promote your posts on social media
No matter how great your content is, you need to effectively promote it to get it in front of your target audience.
Social media can help – by utilizing social channels for promotion, you can build your brand authority, boost your link profile and increase reach. The more engagement you can generate with your content on social, the more this will help your ranking and visibility.
You should look to share your latest posts on Twitter and Facebook, but also think of Google+, Reddit, Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr – and also LinkedIn, if your content is business-related (LinkedIn has seen significant increases in content engagement of late).
You can also look to share your content to relevant Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn Groups or Reddit Subreddits, and social bookmark communities such as Delicious or Digg.
Additionally, you could consider re-publishing your content on Medium, Tumblr, Bloglovin’, Quora, and LinkedIn Pulse.
Share and cross-promote your content at different times and days across social networks, and customize your updates with personal comments, hashtags or handles for each channel.
Source : https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/5-key-strategies-to-grow-your-blog-and-boost-content-reach/518337/
