Content marketing takes more effort than simply publishing one blog post on a subject; it requires you to think outside the box and look for opportunities to be creative.
Yet as you build a ‘library’ of content, you will eventually encounter a different challenge: writer’s block, which will convince you that you don’t have anything new to say.
While it’s unlikely you’ve written everything on one subject, revisiting and optimising your previous posts is one way to overcome impediments to your creative flow.
This structured approach means your existing posts will reach a wider audience and your website will climb the search- engine rankings while you think of ideas for new content.
Below are three methods to optimise your blog that are often overlooked but can quickly improve your digital marketing results.
Update old blog posts
There are a few different strategies for updating old content. The first step is to identify which posts you should update first; this will depend on the keywords users are searching to find your business.
You can identify these keywords by looking at the terms you rank highest for on search engines like Google, the top keywords that draw people to your site from your Google My Business page, and the hashtags that attract the most interactions on social media.
Try the below ideas and compare the analytics to see which one helps improve the search-engine rankings for your keywords:
• SEO optimisation – Look at your most popular blog posts and review them for on-page SEO (search engine optimisation) opportunities. One of the best ways to do this is by using an SEO ‘checker’ tool, which you can download.
These tools will do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to analysing your posts and offering suggestions for improvement.
• Update images – Fresh photos should be added to your posts. Ensure each element is titled and described using the correct keywords.
• Add new information – Visit the earliest posts on your blog and read the content. Ask yourself if the article still aligns with your business philosophy, current offers, services, and products. If it doesn’t, ‘unpublish’ it and redirect the link to prevent any errors from occurring.
If your blog post is still relevant, optimise it to get more clicks by adding internal links to recently published content, update any external links to recently published content, and update any statistics so they reflect the current year.
Rewrite content to support the new statistics, and adjust the wording in the headers to incorporate ‘long-tail’ keywords – that is, keywords that are longer and more specific.
Add infographics or video
If you’re explaining more technical concepts to your audience, your points will be clearer when you show – rather than tell – information.
Even when you incorporate text into ta blog post, your audience will likely skim your words as their eyes are drawn to images or videos.
Social media analytics firm HubSpot found that in 2020, 81 per cent of businesses used video as part of their marketing strategy – up almost 20 per cent in one year.
According to Google, six out of 10 people would rather watch online videos than television and YouTube is the second-most viewed website on the Internet, after the Google search homepage.
What’s more, viewers retain 95 per cent of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10 per cent when reading, according to Insivia.
Adding infographics and video to your blog posts makes them more engaging for readers and will improve the ‘bounce rate’ – how quickly users click away from a page.
Cracking the code
Finally, one of the best things you can do to improve your search engine ranking is to make the context of your content as easy for Google’s AI to identify as possible – essentially, ensuring Google’s bots do not get confused and misclassify your website.
In addition to classic SEO techniques, like incorporating headers and bulleted lists, you can add a schema markup and structured data – elements that a digital marketing professional can assist in implementing.
Schema markup is simply a code that you put on your website to help search engines return more informative results for users.
Meanwhile, structured data refers to highly organised information. When information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organise and display it in creative ways. Again, this is an element that is part of your website’s code, rather than information your readers will see.
Once you’ve updated your blog content you will have new information to promote on social media and through email marketing.
If you’re facing writer’s block, don’t give up! Rather than a new blog post, look into your archives and incorporate one or all of these strategies.
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