Leverage Blog Posting To Help The SEO On Your Website – 122

Transcript For Leverage Blog Posting to Help the SEO On Your Website – 122;

Caleb Baumgartner: Hello, and welcome to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I am producer, Caleb Baumgartner. And in this episode, Jesse discusses the value of utilizing a blog page for your SEO. From creating fresh content on a regular basis for your page to using your page in surprising ways to grow your SEO, a blog page is a powerful tool you may not be taking advantage of. Using this information could give you a fresh perspective on your blog and great ideas on how to better leverage it in the future. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show.

Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan, here to talk with you today about using blog posting for benefits in SEO. Not so much that just by having a blog you’re going to magically increase your ranking, but really how to leverage the blog and then what to do with it in some creative ways to really take advantage of it. Before we talk about that, I want to share with you our instant SEO audit. Go on out to our website, localseotactics.com. Click on the yellow button for the free SEO audit. It’s quick, it’s page by page, and you basically type in your webpage that you want to audit and the keyword you want to audit it against. And it’s going to give you a free report on the good, bad, and ugly with that page against that keyword. And hopefully, catapult you towards some SEO success, giving you a punch list of things to do to modify that page, and kind of your website at large, to increase your ranking.

So if you’re looking to increase your ranking, if you’re looking to improve your SEO and your local SEO, check this out, totally free, localseotactics.com. Hundreds and hundreds of people have used it, probably thousands of people by now. It’s a great tool and I think everyone gets a lot of value out of it. You haven’t checked it out yet, go ahead and check it out yourself, localseotactics.com, and start there.

So now let’s talk about using a blog. I think we’re all pretty familiar with what a blog is. But just to kind of start there and set the record straight, usually on your website, you’re going to have your pages. You got your homepage, which we’re all familiar with, and you got your primary service pages, is kind of how we always frame it up. What is it you’re selling? What is it you’re providing? You’re going to want to have pages that talk about those things. And you got the contact us, the about us, privacy policy, kind of all your standard web pages. And then you may have a blog, which is kind of a separate section of your website.

Now, the blog is pretty interesting that you can either use it to do, I shouldn’t say do, you can use it to create content about your products and services, about your business. It can also be news. It’s really kind of a free form area of your website. It doesn’t have to be about a particular service that you’re selling, or a product that you’re offering. It really can be used for just a lot of information about your company. And some people will use it exclusively for like news and events. Maybe if you get published in a magazine, or somebody who does a write-up about you, you can take that content and use it on your blog to kind of promote it for yourself. And we’ll talk a little bit here about some more of the usage scenarios and use cases.

But in general, a blog is usually kind of set aside as a separate section of your website that’s going to be a collection of pages and posts, what things that you publish. Whether you do them regularly or infrequently, just kind of as the spirit moves you, that doesn’t so much matter in this concept and in this discussion, at least. It’s just more about what is the blog, how do we leverage it, and some tips and tricks to take advantage of it. So, like I said, I think we’re all familiar with what a blog is, but that’s kind of quick basic discussion on what it is and how it’s slightly different than the other sections of your website.

And what we want to talk about here is how to leverage that blog and use that for some cool SEO benefits that you’re going to get. Now, to be clear, what I’m not going to talk about here is how to create the perfect SEO-ed blog post, how to write good blog posts, how to write epic blog posts, and doing things to get these blog posts themselves to rank. That all can be true, and you can write a blog post and publish it, and that thing itself can rank. However, that’s not what we’re talking about here.

What we’re talking about is if you’re just producing content through your blog, how to then leverage that content in other ways for SEO benefits. So there’s just a slight distinction there. The reason I’m kind of taking this approach is if we were to put a new page on our website talking about some new flagship service or flagship product that you’re having to offer, oftentimes that’s going to be pretty well curated. You’re going to type up that content or hire somebody to develop that content for you. You’re going to have good photos, things like that. Blog posting can be a little bit more down and dirty. It doesn’t have to be quite as well developed as maybe a new featured page on your website. And I think that’s important for everybody to know, because it allows you to create more content kind of in a quicker way than you may if it’s one of the primary pages on your website.

And so hopefully, the goal here is to empower everybody to be able to use a blog, add a blog to your website, if you don’t already have one. And if you don’t know how to do that, or what that entails, you can reach out to us or any professional to help you, especially if you’re on WordPress. It’s pretty painless thing to add to your website. But it is important that you get one set up and leverage it. So one of the main things that is a good benefit of having a blog and then the posts that you would publish on it is it just provides new content to your website. Even if it’s not super sexy content, even if it’s not super well curated or poured over to have awesome graphics and well-written articles, it’s content. And as we always say, the more pages, the more content you can have that’s relevant to your business, good topics, and grammar that’s easy to read, it’s going to be good for your website in general.

Now, yeah, you can have thin content and irrelevant pages. Don’t get me wrong. But the concept here is that you can have an outlet in your blog to quickly create content and publish it to your website, adding more keywords, more context, more text, more relevancy, more information about products, services, and topics on your website. With that, it’s also a great spot to be able to create maybe short bits of content that otherwise wouldn’t look good as a page on your website. If you have up in your main menu, if you’re a plumber and somebody who wants to learn more about leaky pipe repair, you kind of need an extensive page. You need a page that’s set up to convert that person, to provide them the information, to get them to opt in, to call you, to convert, whatever it is. Whereas a blog post can be just more of like a journal, a notepad, a quick communication, something a little bit more robust than maybe like an email would be. You’re just communicating some info.

It doesn’t have to have some big hook, or CTA, or other purpose. It can just be to put that information out there. And where it may not be the most valuable for SEO on a standalone basis, these posts, you are still feeding the Google database with all the content that you put on your website. So that’s kind of one benefit there, is just by producing blog pages, you’re putting out more content. And even if those pages themselves don’t directly rank, Google is still aware of them. And it’s digesting the content and kind of giving you that relevancy to your website about those.

Another thing that makes blog posts particularly attractive is that they’re very shareable on social media, quick, easy articles. If you’re producing blog posts on some kind of a regular basis, once a month, once a week, once a day, whatever it is, you can then leverage that new content to be shared on social media. Facebook is a easy kind of conduit for this. If you have a new blog post, you can share the post itself, linking to it from Facebook. Maybe there’s a snippet you want to pull out of it, a paragraph, a headline, or a combination there within. You can take that out of the blog post, repurpose it as a post on social media, or multiple posts on social media and get some traction there. And that starts to be efficient then within your organization. You can create this piece of content and then repurpose it and kind of spin it out in different ways.

That’s particularly true if your blog post is something that you’re sharing. Again, let’s just say you got a write-up in some regional publication or the local chamber of commerce, there’s some kind of feature on you. It’s easy to take their write-up and mention of you and then talk about that. Say, “Hey, we were recently featured in the local chamber of commerce’s newsletter. Here’s a link to that newsletter. We were really happy to be there. Great to see everybody, blah, blah, blah.” You can easily produce some content just talking about the fact that you were mentioned and promoting it.

Now you take that and, again, pull some snippets out of there, share that on social media, you’ve got a great, easy thing to promote and talk about to kind of get your name out there and do some branding and things like that. That doesn’t directly increase the SEO on that blog post or your website in general. But more over like the marathon-type version here, you are showing to Google and to everybody else that you’re relevant. You’re putting out more content. You’re sharing. You’re active on social media. While these are not direct ranking signals, Google is aware of this. All things being equal, if you and I listening are competitors, and if I have a blog post on my website and I’m taking that stuff and I’m sharing on social media and kind of engaging with people in those ways, I would expect myself to outrank you if I’m doing that and you’re not, all other things being equal. So I think that’s another important thing to understand how to leverage it and what to do with it is just the shareability of blog posts.

In addition to that, you take your Google My Business listing and, once a week, you should be doing a post on your GMB, just like sharing it on Facebook. You can take the content from that blog, repurpose it, and share it on your GMB posts. Whether you link back to your blog post from your GMB post, or if you link back to your main homepage or primary service page, whatever, the point is, you can take the content, the text, the body of that blog post and repurpose it. Now, I wouldn’t take it and copy it word for word and share it on my GMB posts. But you can kind of spin that and repurpose it and slightly reword it, and be very efficient compared to sitting down to write a brand new article.

Another cool thing you can do with a blog post because they’re so light and easy to create is you can test new content. If you maybe kind of reserve to the fact that when people come to your homepage, they’re going to look at your homepage and then maybe pick some of your main navigation buttons to get that product or service that they’re interested in, maybe they’re not going to explore your blog because they don’t really want to learn and read up on things. They just want to get that product or get that service and engage with you. But with your blog post, you can use that to test content.

If you’re maybe thinking about launching a new product or a new service, or talking about a certain thing, rip that thing off as a blog post, maybe share it on social media, and just see how people gauge that and respond to that. If you’re getting some good traction there, yeah, then maybe you need to create a separate product or service page on your website for that thing that you are promoting. So it’s a great testing bed as well for content and concepts for your business.

In addition, in a little bit more of a direct SEO route, your blog post is great for internal linking. If you’re trying to maybe create some content silos and draw some relevancy to different parts of your website, you can create a blog post about, let’s say, one of your primary products or services, maybe talking about how it was used, maybe a client testimonial weaved in there, whatever it is, and then link from your blog post to that product or service page, kind of bringing more links from within your website pointing towards that resource on your site.

If you were to kind of look at that linking as a map like Google would, you’ll see more resources, i.e., this blog post from your website pointing to that service page, and that kind of juices that up, or at least shows the Google and other bots that this page seems to be important if there’s links pointing to it. Other navigational points on my website point to that thing. It must be important. Then it becomes something that’s going to be beneficial for SEO. There’s a right and a wrong way to do that. You don’t want to overdo it. You don’t want to be linking the same phrases to the same page every single time. You can definitely overdo it.

But it’s a great way to mix that in and kind of start to tie things together in your website and kind of show those major arteries and highway systems are on your website and Google and other bots will be able to clearly identify that as you do that interlinking. You can link blog posts together where it’s relevant too, if you maybe have a blog post that caught fire and is gaining some traction. You can write more things about that and kind of pump that one up too, again, or you can redirect those internally within your website.

Another real cool aspect about blog posts is that because they don’t have to be super well curated maybe like a primary service page on your website is, you can farm out the creation of this content to other people. If you’re sitting there as the main copywriter for your business, I’m the one who writes the content, or maybe you have a trusted person, having other team members write a blog post is something that can be leveraged within your company. A, it gets them engaged and maybe they can bring a new voice or new perspective on a given topic. B, it can get them excited that they’re participating in something. They’ve never been asked to produce content for the website, and they can be engaged and motivated.

And then last but not least, C, you can kind of use that as almost more of a delegated resource. If you or your primary person that’s in charge of like editing the website and has the final say on copywriting, they can have other people on the team create these blog posts and content, and then they can finalize it. They can maybe switch out the headline, or rewrite a certain thing. But it’s a great way to get more labor, more resources from your team involved in creating content and maybe take some of the burden off of yourself or somebody else that may have been a bit of a bottleneck in creating new content for your website.

Within that vein, as we start to talk about creating more content for your website, if your blog posting is something that you start to do with more regularity, you can leverage your content calendar. If you have certain keywords that you’re trying to rank for, it’s the cycle like we always talk, what do you want to rank for? Am I ranking for it or not? And if not, what do I do? I either re-optimize existing content or I create new content. If you have a bunch of keywords you want to create content for, getting into a format where you’re creating blog posts for that content is a great way to get the ball rolling.

What we find is maybe somebody writes a great blog post for you on a particular keyword, or kind of product niche, or a service niche, and you put that blog post out there, you share it on social, everything else, it’s gaining traction, and it’s looking good, you can then take the best parts of that article that maybe somebody else wrote, not you, kind of coming in from a different perspective, different angle, whatever it is, you can take that blog post and you can repurpose that content within your website as well. So maybe somebody did a blog post on a particular service that you provide that had some good insights kind of through the story, maybe the testimonial that was on there, whatever the angle was. Hopefully, there’s a couple of paragraphs, or a headline or two, or a certain phrase or two that you can pull out of that blog post and then repurpose it on your website on that primary service page for, again, the service that they were talking about there.

So it’s a great way to kind of breathe new life into existing pages by repurposing content from a blog post, and just getting that fresh perspective that you might not have had because now you’re engaging maybe other team members. Or in some cases, you can even hire this out to a contractor that is a creative writing specialist, or a copywriter, to create this content for you. That can maybe get a little bit more expensive. But depending on whoever’s listening here, if you’re a small business or maybe a regional business, depending on your marketing budget, maybe that’s already part of what you’re doing. And again, that blog post provides a slightly different format of content that you can write to exist as a blog post itself. But then also, again, be repurposed throughout your website on those service pages or even your homepage.

Last but not least with all of that, blog posts themselves are fresh content. If you’ve got your website, let’s say you got a hundred pages on your website and it’s been sitting there for a year, that’s great and maybe it’s ranking well. But producing content on a regular basis, committing to blog posting, having some kind of a schedule, that’s going to put new content out there on your website. A, in just the blog post format itself. But then B, it may cause you to create other new pages kind of spun off from that concept, expanding on that primary service that we were talking about, in addition to maybe updating that page. So it’s also a great mechanism to make sure you’re providing fresh stuff. You’re engaging on your website. You’re looking at your website, or somebody in your company is at least looking at your website and getting engaged with it, instead of letting it just kind of sit there and be what it is and existing. It just is a great way to open the door and be active within your website on a regular basis.

We do help clients in a lot of ways to create content and leverage their blog posts. This was intended to just kind of share some of the advantages of doing it, again, not how to do a high-end SEO blog post or the perfect blog post format. That’s something we’ll probably revisit in a future episode. But I’m hoping for everybody this helps you more so take the idea of blog posting regular content on your website and how to do more with it than just creating that piece itself. You can really leverage this in multiple ways that are all going to benefit your SEO. Some more directly with a new page that wasn’t existing before. Maybe it can rank. Other ones to help freshen up a page, or add more content to a page, or repurpose it, or be active on social and things like this that’ll be a little more indirect for your SEO.

But long story short, having a blog can be great for your website if you have things to say and things to share, and can really help people get engaged and be active in your website again, to keep it on the forefront for your business and your marketing needs. So hopefully, that helps everybody out. Want to get in here to our five star review for this episode. If you have not left us a review yet, if you’re finding value in this episode or any of our previous episodes, we’d love to get a review from you and kind of get that trade back. We’re going to keep providing, hopefully, good value and good episodes to help you out. You can help us out by leaving a good review for us. And hey, if this sucks, leave us a bad review too.

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Appreciate that. A lot of people do find time, usually commuting. Most of our episodes are 15, 30 minutes, very digestible, and usually have some kind of action item that you can pull out of it and apply once you do get into work or get home and start working on your website about what have you. So appreciate that. If you feel the same way, getting some value, again, we’d love to get a review from you and we’ll give you a shout-out on the show. Thanks for tuning into this episode, everybody. Hopefully helps you out. And we’ll catch you on the next episode.