Driving visitors to your website is the first step in transforming it from a nice-to-have online presence into a revenue-generating asset. Those familiar with my 3 C’s framework will know that the first C is “captivate”. We must captivate our target audience and get them onto our website, so that we can connect with them and convert them into customers. In this blog article, I will show you how to blog for SEO, so that you can increase your brand visibility in the search engines, drive traffic to your website and captivate your target audience.
Summary: Captivate Your Target Audience with Search Engine Optimised Blog Content
Search engine optimisation is what makes your website visible in search engines. Publishing search engine optimised blog posts to your website can help your website rank higher in the search engines. This can increase your website traffic and your brand visibility. Building your brand visibility and awareness can then open the door to the next step, which is to connect with your target audience.
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How Do You Use Blogging To Captivate Your Audience?
What Is SEO In Blogging?
How Do Blogs Help SEO?
How To Optimise Blog Posts For SEO
How Do You Captivate Your Target Audience With Blog Posts?
Captivating - the first phase of the 3 C’s framework - is all about building brand visibility and awareness. Blogging can help you increase your visibility in search engines when you publish search engine optimised blog content that your target audience discovers when looking for relevant information online.
There are three main ways in which you can use blog content to captivate your target audience:
Optimise your blog posts for search engines (SEO), to make them more visible when people enter relevant search queries
Use relevant, engaging SEO titles and descriptions to help your blog posts rank better in the search results, and encourage your target audience to click on them. When met with 10+ search results, you want the search engine user to choose your website over the others.
Ensure the opening paragraph of your blog post gets straight to the point and keeps the reader reading.
Doing these three things helps to make your website (and therefore your business) more visible online, and drives traffic to your website. Once you have captivated your target audience, you can move onto building a connection before converting your website visitors into customers.
What is SEO in Blogging?
SEO (search engine optimisation) is what helps your website get found in search engines such as Google or Bing. By ensuring your blog posts are search engine optimised, you can use them to drive more visibility and traffic to your website.
The principles of SEO for blog posts are very similar to the rest of your website. However, where your main pages (e.g. your home page and offer pages) are usually used to target high-intent, commercial keywords that directly describe the products, services or solutions you offer, your blog posts can be used to target low-intent, informational keywords that refer to a broader subject area.
How Do Blogs Help SEO?
Blogs help SEO in three main ways:
Blogs help your website rank for more keywords
Blogging can help you make faster SEO progress
Blogging can help to improve your website's overall SEO
Blog posts can help your website rank and get found for a wider range of keywords. As I outlined above, your blog posts can target informational keywords covering the broader subject area around your products or services. This helps to increase your brand visibility in the search engines, helping your business get discovered by more people.
Targeting those low-intent, informational keywords tends to be easier than targeting high-intent, commercial keywords. This can help you to increase your search engine rankings more quickly, driving more traffic to your website. This is not always the case, but it often is.
Regularly publishing quality blog content can improve your website’s overall SEO. This is because search engines have more content to crawl, and more evidence that your website is an original, authoritative and trustworthy source of information. The key here is consistent quality over quantity. Publishing lots of half-baked, poor quality content will not work.
How to Optimise Blog Posts for SEO
For your blog posts to drive traffic from search engines to your website, they will need to be optimised for search engines. Whilst search engine optimisation is an expansive subject in itself, there are four key ways in which you can optimise your blog posts for SEO. Following these best practices will give your blog posts the best possible chance of ranking and driving traffic to your website from search engines.
When optimising your blog posts for search engines, remember these four key points:
Write the content your audience is looking for
Use keywords
Apply on-page SEO essentials
Maintain healthy technical SEO
Write the Blog Posts Your Audience What to Read
For your blog post to have a chance of being found in search engines, people must be actively searching for it. This is why it is important to carry out keyword research before writing your blog post.
There are several free keyword research tools out there, as well as paid tools such as SE Ranking. You can also base your blog topics on FAQs from your target audience, as well as the “People Also Ask” section in the Google Search results.
Search queries that include questions are often known as informational keywords or long tail keywords. Specific in nature, these keywords are used by people searching for information, instructions or inspiration, rather than specific products or services. These keywords make great topics and titles for blog posts.
Furthermore, these keywords are often easier to rank for. Whilst they tend to have lower search volumes than other keywords, they can give your website more visibility, increasing your brand awareness and website traffic.
Use Keywords in Your Blog Content
There is so much more to SEO than keywords. Nonetheless, you cannot ignore the importance of including keywords in your blog posts. Provided you can do so in a way that is natural and doesn’t interfere with the readability of your blog post, you should aim to include your focus keywords in your SEO titles and descriptions, post titles, headings, subheadings and main copy.
Including your target keywords in your blog posts sends the signal to search engines that your content is relevant to search queries that include those keywords.
Apply Essential On-Page SEO to Your Blog Posts
On-page SEO refers to the things you do to a website page to optimise it for search engines. Examples include optimising SEO titles and descriptions, image alt text and internal linking.
Some key on-page SEO tasks include:
Writing unique and relevant SEO titles and descriptions for each blog post that include your target keywords, so that search engines and search engine users can know what the blog post is about
Organising your blog posts clearly using headings and subheadings. This will help your readers understand the blog post. Furthermore, optimised headings and subheadings can help tell search engines what your blog post is about
Optimising image alt text for any images in your blog post so that they describe the image and include keywords
Using links to connect your blog posts together, and connect them to the rest of your website. This can help search engines discover your blog posts as they “crawl” your website. Internal linking can also help direct visitors through your website
Maintain Healthy Technical SEO for Your Blog Posts
Technical SEO is what helps search engines crawl and index website content. Poor technical SEO in the form of broken links and slow websites can prevent your blog posts from being discovered and ranked by search engines.
Technical SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. Simple things like choosing a slug for your blog post and sticking to it can help prevent broken links (also known as error 404 codes). If you must change the slug for your blog post, make sure you use a redirect to channel traffic from the old URL to the new one.
This is just like having your post redirected to your new address when you move house, so that any post sent to your old address can be automatically sent to your new one. If you don’t do this, you won’t receive any post that is sent to your previous address, and the same principle applies to your website.
For a more in-depth guide to blogging for SEO, including further details on how to search engine optimise your blog posts, check out my step-by-step guide to blogging for SEO.
Transform Your Website Into A Revenue-Generating Asset With Purple Horse Marketing
My mission is to help independent businesses transform their websites into revenue-generating assets through SEO and blogging. As well as the complimentary SEO guides available on this website, I have a range of products and services designed to help ambitious and committed businesses and entrepreneurs captivate, connect with and convert their target audience.
In the meantime, why not check out my online course, Captivate, Connect & Convert With Blogging. This free online course offers inspiration for how you can use blogging to grow visibility, nurture your audience, and generate leads and sales through blogging and SEO. It also gives you a preview of what it is like to work with me.
If you are looking for training, support and guidance from an experienced SEO consultant without the price tag that comes with bespoke consultancy, why not check out my SEO Sprint? This live group programme equips you with the essential tools you need to transform your website into a revenue-generating asset through search engine optimised blogging. The programme runs annually, and there are only 10 spaces available on each edition, so book your spot now or register your interest in the next edition.
About the Author
Rhiannon is an independent SEO consultant with 5 years’ experience helping growing businesses transform their websites into revenue-generating assets. She has worked with businesses in a range of sectors, from service providers in the equestrian industry to products brands in the affordable luxury market. Rhiannon supports businesses with SEO and blog content strategy for their WordPress, Wix and Shopify websites through a range of offers from online self-study courses to bespoke marketing consultancy.
Connect with Rhiannon on Instagram @purplehorsemarketing