Maintaining a business or a Corporate Blog offers excellent benefits for marketing and promotional purposes of your brand, creating both lead generation as well as search engine optimization in the various search engines.
Routinely publishing new and unique content on a regular basis signals that your site is always “up-to-date” fresh, while simultaneously keeping the search engines interested by they constantly crawling and indexing your site on a regular basis.
Consistent blogging is also one of the best ways to rank high in the SE’s for unique long-tailed search terms. These search queries are also usually higher in relevance than what conventional sales pages are able to rank for. They also have proven to contain a much higher degree of intention by the user.
Regular blogging also fosters effective link-building since the pertinent information that you provide on your blog always attracts natural editorial links from other publishers and marketers, much more than what traditional sales pages would.
You can easily position yourself as a ‘go-to” expert in your niche or field, which will build authority within the industry, while gaining trust as well as strength of your marketing brand.
For these reasons alone, the majority of companies are now launching corporate blogs as a vital weapon for their online marketing efforts. One of the common traits of the successful blogs is that they have a large loyal returning readership, which in turn contributes to higher rankings since the information has solved what their audience is wanting to know.
3 Steps To Find Out What Your Audience Is Looking For…
What exactly is your buying audience looking for? To find this out, you’ll need to do some diligent research and then use all of the available data that’s at your disposal. You can then focus on defining the exact content of your blog, as well as your editorial calendar.
There is a three-step strategy that you can use, which involves tools and analytic tracking, so you can build a steady stream of relevant content which should appeal to the majority of your readers while achieving higher search engine rankings as well.
1.) Generating Relevant Content From Doing Keyword Research
When initially launching a blog with a distinct topical focus, it’s recommended that you use a variety of keyword research tools to create a framework of topics which you can cover.
This content foundation will serve as a base for establishing your blog as an authoritative source of focused information on the precise niche topic and industry that your readers are interested in.
So say that you operate a catering company, and now you have decided to launch a “gourmet food” recipe blog. Once you have completely researched all of the food and recipe related keywords, you can then begin planing some of the topics which you or your writers will be covering. This will also define the categories of your blog as well.
So when you researched “Gourmet Recipes,” you noticed that there were a large volume of searches for “easy gourmet recipes”. So you can make this the focus or theme of your new blog.
When you drill down further into the keyword of that niche, you can then outline some of the subcategories which you can tackle, such as:
• Easy gourmet chicken recipes
• Easy gourmet pasta recipes
• Easy succulent gourmet dessert recipes
• Easy gourmet Italian recipes
By performing just simple keyword research, you were able to quickly establish a suitable theme for the blog while also generating several ideas which will get you started, as well as how you can optimize your efforts. So based on the research, you’re also now aware of some of the topics which are the most important to your audience.
2.) Using The Keyword Referrals For Building An Editorial Calendar
Once you have covered all of the basics on your food blog, then you can begin on delving into the available analytics data. This way, you can pinpoint those targeted, long-tailed keywords which are currently driving targeted traffic directly to your site.
This analytical data is extremely valuable since it’s your own uniquely private and proprietary keyword data regarding your site. These are all the exact keyword phrases which all of your visitors, prospects and customers used to eventually land on your pages.
So again, when you look into the analytics app and then look at all the referring keywords, these are the actual terms which your online visitors entered directly into the search engines to find your blog. You should be able to find some interesting and unique long-tailed keyword phrases which are somewhat relevant to the articles on your blog, but may not be exact matches. These keywords are also most likely terms which you haven’t even created or targeted to any of your blog posts as of yet.
For example, some long-tail keywords which can appear on your analytics can be:
• How to make easy authentic lasagne
• Need a quick recipe for easy Chicken Parmesan
• Find birthday dessert recipes
You can then reverse engineer these long-tail keywords by using the same exact phrases and creating new blog posts, which will allow you to capture more unique traffic for those specific niches sent to you by the search engines. You’ll then be able to provide even more useful as well as specific link-ready content for your site readers.
3.) Using Traffic And Data For Optimizing And Refining Your Strategy
Don’t stop by just using the keyword tools and the analytics data for inspiration in creating new blog posts. You can also use all this new found data, by going back and then re-optimizing all of your previous existing blog content.
The previously published posts are still extremely valuable sources of attracting new traffic and back links, even if they’re not that new. Also, you can use and refer back to your posts which are performing the best as examples for creating new content which will have the biggest impact with your audience.
Listed are some methods on how you can use analytics to optimize your content and refining your direction
• Checkout the keyword reports and look for specific blog posts. Are they the exact targeted keywords which are driving those unique visitors to the designated optimized page that you originally designated it for?
Look for any missed opportunities. Are there any keyword variations where you can go back and then include in the copy? Is your title tag relevant enough?
• Make sure that you pay attention to user engagement. Which of your blog posts has generated the most comments? Which are the blog posts that has the lowest bounce rates or the highest conversion, and thus click-through rates? Is there a way on how you can quickly replicate these conditions?
• Look for similar patterns in your highest generating traffic, as well as the best converting posts. Are they videos, or are they specific “how-to” type of posts. What are the types of posts which gets the most back links. Does your readers like the longer blog posts or the shorter ones. Do they prefer articles, a list or video/image posts. Make sure that you learn from all of your mistakes as well as the things you do correctly. Know what works the best and ignore the ones that don’t.
Once you get into systematically incorporating all of your collected data into your content creation strategy, then you’ll find that you’ll have more returning and engaged readers.