We know that blogs help to increase organic search traffic, ultimately driving more visitors to your website, and growing your customer base; however, are all blogs the same? Does it really matter what you write about? We are going to keep the answer short and sweet, “Yes, it matters”. If you aren’t providing content that is relevant for your business and will attract the right viewing eyes and keep them interested, your blog is not living up to its potential. We are here to help. We are going to review how to generate blog topic ideas to improve SEO for your website and business.
For those in the back with their hands up… Hang tight. We will provide a brief refresher as to what blogs are, SEO is, and why it all matters.
We can review blog topic ideas to improve SEO, but if you don’t really understand what either of those things are or why they matter, we have probably lost your attention already. That would not be good content on our end, so don’t worry, we are going to explain.
- Blogs: In this day and age, most people know what a blog is, but when it comes to business, it can be a tad different than what you may be thinking. A business blog will usually be featured on a company’s website and will always be related to a particular business topic, product, or service that connects to that business in some way. Blogging for business is a marketing tactic designed not only to inform readers, but to increase visibility of your organization and, ultimately, to push readers towards buying your products or services.
- SEO: The foundation of all online marketing is search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization affects how visible a website or web page is on various search engines. Organic search results are the website listings that most closely match the user’s search query based on relevance; also called “natural” search results. Ranking high in the organic results is what SEO is all about. Organic search results happen naturally and are not paid for like paid search. They are “natural” in the sense that, the search engine algorithms analyzing all the pages across the web, feel the pages they display contain the most relevant information for that particular search. With organic search, search engine optimization (SEO) is used to optimize a website’s visibility or ranking.
- Why Blogging, SEO, and Organic Search Matter: 51% of all website traffic comes from organic search, and over 40% of revenue is captured by organic traffic, and this number is growing. Blogging helps advance SEO quality by positioning your website as a relevant answer to your customers’ questions. The right blog posts can give you more opportunities to rank in search engines and get people to visit your website. Blogs help SEO in numerous ways: keeping your website and content current and fresh, increasing the time people spend on your website, allowing you to target specific keywords, creating a space for internal linking, and by building a connection to your audience.
How can you come up with blog topic ideas to improve SEO?
It’s clear that blogs help SEO, in turn increasing the organic search traffic driven to your website, but as we mentioned above, not just any blog will cut it. You need to provide information to viewers that will matter to them. Your content should help consumers answer questions that they are trying to solve for, allowing you to become a trustworthy source, in turn, building a connection with them. So, how do you come up with those topics?
- Actively Listen to and Research What People Want to Know: The answer is rather simple, do your research and listen. Ask your employees what common questions customers are asking, check your data for keywords and topics that come up often, use AI to get a better understanding of your ideal audience and what they want to know, pay attention on social media, and keep up with current events and trends in your industry. There are so many things you can do to get a better understanding as to what your customers and potential customers want to know and will find interesting, the key is paying attention and doing them as you try to come up with blog topics to improve SEO.
- Focus on Specific Keywords and Phrases: Long-tail keywords improve your click-through rates and conversions because they answer questions from customers who are in specific stages of the buyer’s journey. Long-tail keywords are terms that are more specific to your business and less searched for than common search terms. It may seem counterintuitive to be very specific with your keywords and blog topics; however, when you focus on writing blog articles that answer specific questions, you will attract buyers who want what you offer. Long-tail keywords conversion rate is between 70-80% (short-tail is 15-20%). Long-tail keywords can be awkward to fit into your website pages, so blogs make the perfect places for you to use them to improve SEO.
- Keep Things Relevant: We said this above, but if you are trying to find blog topic ideas to improve SEO, you should stick to things that your business knows and does, and your ideal audience is looking for. If you are a bakery, you aren’t going to want to write about how to unclog a toilet. Stay in your zone, so you show up in the search results to people who are actually searching for what you are providing.
At Water Bear Marketing, with our OrganicSearch product, we focus on SEO and create custom blogs, relevant to your business. We are focused on increasing our client’s online ranking, consumer perception, and improving their chances of being found across the Internet with clear and accurate information. Our OrganicSearch program allows you to stand out, literally. Our goal is to get you seen in as many places as possible.
