How to maximise your blog content

Not getting the pick-up you expected from your blogs? Find yourself asking “Why...?” Adele Emmins, account manager at CPL, has some advice.

You’ve spent hours crafting beautifully worded posts and you know your audience will love them but, for some reason, they don’t seem to be reading them...

If this sounds all too familiar then you’ve come to the right place – we’re here to help!

There are a few, simple tricks of the trade that you can implement to get your blog posts performing better. And better performing blog posts mean a better performing website, so it’s win-win all round.

Get your support from structure

This may seem an obvious one but it is easily forgotten: make sure your blog posts have clear structure and have a catchy title and headings.

Use bold text to make them stand out but, more importantly, make sure they are coded so they show as H1s, H2s, H3s, and so on. If you want to be really clever, include keywords that you want your website/blog to be found for in your title and headings too.

Not only will giving structure to your blog post help your reader stay engaged and find the information they are looking for quickly, it will assist Google (and other search engines) to understand easily what you regard as important, and this will help with your SEO.

Is there anything else I should be doing for SEO?

Yes – pay attention to your metadata.

Adding page titles and meta descriptions shouldn’t just be for static pages; consider these when you are writing blog posts too. Think of this space as free online advertising space. Sell it and explain why someone should choose your blog post over another. Done well, not only will it help with your SEO but should encourage click-throughs and help improve your website’s overall engagement.

It’s not just about you

Although you want to share your thoughts and advice with your readers, show that you are a reliable source of information by linking back to other reputable websites that cement what you are trying to say.

For example, you may or may not have noticed our above link to Moz where it spells out the meaning of metadata (meta tags). Although there may be slight differences in the language used or the way in which it is explained, we are both, essentially, saying the same thing.

You can use this opportunity to link back to other blog posts or pages on your website that might have relevance – you’ll see our example of this below (wink, wink). By doing this, you encourage users to stay on your website – an added bonus.

Engagement = good performance

Adding your own links to your blog posts is not the only way to encourage users to stay on your website and thus improve your website’s performance, you can add clever calls-to-actions too.

At the bottom of this post we have included a few different calls to action depending on what the user may want to do – aren’t we nice giving them a choice? (it’s all tactical) To encourage them to stay, we offer simple links to previous and next articles and, with a quick scroll, they can find image links to our latest news stories too.

Other calls to actions include:

• Social share buttons – where users can share our blog posts on their own social media channels

• A newsletter sign up – in case users think our blog posts are so good that they want a monthly reminder

• A ‘contact us’ button – so users can talk to us about how we might be able to help them

Interaction with any one of these helps boost our website’s performance, whether that’s staying on the site and reading more or signing up to our newsletter (conversion = winning) so we can stay in communication.

Some are easier to add to a website than others, but they are just as important as the blog post’s content so they should be thought about at the beginning, when designing and building a website’s blog section.  

What have you got to lose?

Get started and implement some, or all, of these tricks of the trade to your latest blog post and start seeing a difference.