Creating content is essential to building your online platform and attracting business. Blogs specifically can increase website visitors by 55%, according to HubSpot. Yet, there are countless business owners who are dissatisfied with the amount of new audience traffic after starting a blog. Many bloggers make simple mistakes which hurt their blog’s effectiveness. Follow this blog post checklist to create a compelling blog that can be easily found by your ideal customers and will generate more leads.
Click here to get your own downloadable blog post checklist. This version will only contain the most important points, so be sure to read this blog to get the fully detailed checklist.
1. Understand Your Audience
The first task on your blog post checklist should be to find and understand your target audience. To create engaging blogs, you need to learn what your audience cares about. Specifically, what is their problem and how can you solve it? You must come up with topics your target audience will find valuable, otherwise your blog will sit on your site untouched, and you will have wasted valuable time.
The best way to find your target audience is to look at your current customers and learn about their demographics and customer behavior. You don’t have to be a data analyst to find this information. Google Analytics is one easy tool anyone can use to learn about their audience.
Then create a buyer persona or description of your ideal customer. This might seem overwhelming, but AI tools can use the collected data to create the persona for you. Keep your specific audience in mind while writing so you can easily cater your content to them.
2. Pick a Topic
Look at your buyer persona and find a problem your audience has that you can help solve. You must be knowledgeable on your topic and do research if you need to. People are coming to your blog for reliable information that can help them. Leading them astray with misinformation will ruin your credibility and you will lose customers.
3. Research Possible SEO Keywords
Conducting SEO keyword research is a crucial step in the blog post checklist. Keywords are the words your audience looks up to find something. Because of this, keywords influence your blog post’s ranking on a search engine results page. The better the keyword, the more eyes you can get on your piece. And the more you target a keyword, the higher your blog will rank on search results pages.
Not all keywords are created equal though. Some keywords are used more than others, so they’ll have a higher search volume. But if there are too many results it may be harder to rank higher on the results page, giving the keyword a higher difficulty score. A good rule of thumb is to use keywords with search volumes greater than 1000 and keyword difficulty less than 50. But how do you find keywords and learn their difficulty scores and search volumes?
There are plenty of tools available to help you conduct and understand keyword research. Strategy uses and recommends SE ranking. Keyword research takes time but is necessary. Without doing keyword research, the rest of your work won’t matter because no one will be able to find it.
4. Create the Perfect Outline
Now it’s time to create an outline. This helps you organize your thoughts and structure your post. The content must be structured to allow someone to rip through it and get the most important information. If you’re stuck and not sure of the best way to start a blog, AI can be a great tool to research and write outlines.
Also include a clear introduction and headers for each sub-section in your blog. Specifically, use 1 H1 for your title, H2s for major sections, and H3s where relevant underneath those. These headlines organize your blog like a webpage, making them important for your Google performance.
5. Write with Purpose
Once you start writing, remember the previous steps of your blog post checklist:
- Keep your audience in mind the entire time. This could affect your word choice, tone, and how much background information you provide. Remember to stay consistent in your brand voice.
- Make your blog to the point. No one wants to read through a heap of pointless information just to make it to the few sentences that will solve their problem.
- Avoid long paragraphs. When readers see a long block of text they often click away.
6. Optimize For SEO
After you finish writing, you need to optimize your blog post for SEO. Place your keywords throughout your blog and in the technical descriptions like title tag, URL, alt image tag, and meta description. These SEO elements work with search engine algorithms to determine your search ranking. They specify the title of your webpage, image description, and summarize the content of your blog. Here’s a few tips when writing these parts:
- Title tags should be less than 65 characters
- Meta descriptions should be less than 155 characters
- Use the exact keyword at the start of the title tag and meta description
- Alt tags are simple accurate descriptions of an image
Include links in your blog to credible internal and external sources. It might seem odd to add links that send people off your site, but using external links builds trust and authority for both readers and search engines. Links also play a huge role in SEO, showing the search engine what content is similar to yours and what field your blog is in. All these strategies will increase the chances of your blog post being seen by the right audience.
7. Include a Call to Action
The last part of this blog post checklist is to add a call to action to the end of your blog. What do you want to accomplish through this blog post? Do you want readers to schedule a consultation? Make a purchase? Whatever it is, it should be a way of solving the client’s problem.
Make the call to action clear and create a simple button readers can click. Explain what will happen when they click the link as well as the benefits of doing so. This is the last step to ensuring your blog generates leads and grows your business.
Want an example of a clear call to action? Use the form below to download your free blog checklist! This list will contain all the main bullet points of what to do at each step of the blog writing process.
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Not Ready to Tackle Writing Your Own Blog?
Having a good blog can put your site at the top of the search engine results page, build authority and rapport with your audience, and attract consumers to your website. But let’s face it, writing a blog can take up a lot of time and be a challenge for first time writers. Strategy can take the stress and confusion away while bringing expertise and proven results to your blog. Schedule a free consultation today and let Strategy help create blogs that will grow your business.
