10 TIPS ON HOW TO WRITE BLOG POSTS THAT GET TRAFFIC
CREATING KILLER BLOG CONTENT THAT WILL BRING TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE
If you write blog posts for your business website then it’s important to make sure you’re grabbing your audience’s attention quickly and holding it! If you can do that, then you can reduce your bounce rate on your site (how long people spend with you) and it signals to Google that you have great content. When Google recognises sites that have great content, they will be pushed up through the rankings. This means you’ll get seen by more people and in turn will have more chance of attracting clients to your business.
In this post I am going to share with you 10 important tips for creating better blog posts in order to keep readers interested. In fact I’ll be using this very formula as I write this post!
1. Create a Title That Will Grab Your Target Audience’s Attention
Start by having a great headline. It’s your one chance to grab your target audience’s attention. Without it, people are much less likely to go on to read your post. Create a title that is catchy and completely relevant to the content of your article too. By starting with your headline it also keeps you focused on your writing on your given subject.
If you need inspiration, Google other posts on the topic you’re writing about and see what they have to say. Then write something better! Titles that include ‘How to’ or ‘Tips on’ and using numbers such as the one in this post title or ‘7 Ways to’ are pretty fail safe.
2. Always Use a Good Quality Image that Reflects the Content of Your Post
Having a great image – or several if your post is longer – is also key to grabbing people’s attention. Humans are visual by nature and so are more likely to stay interested in your post if you have great visuals to accompany your written content. If you’ve had a personal branding shoot then hopefully you’ll have a portfolio of images you can pick from to use. Alternatively if you need something different then you can use royalty free photo libraries such as Unsplash or Pexels to get you started.
3. Have An Introduction
Start your blog post with an introduction and overview of what you’re going to be discussing or teaching in your post. This gives readers a quick insight into what they can expect from your content and whether it’s worth their while reading through it. Make sure your introduction is just that – an introduction – and not too lengthy. No more than a few paragraphs should be enough.
4. Create Subheadings
Subheadings are really important as gives people the opportunity to skim through your content to get a feel for your post. Everyone is busy and they want to be able to pick up the important points in your post and read further if they want to. This is a much better way of retaining attention with your reader too as they won’t get ‘bored’ as they may reading through one large piece of text.
5. Link to Other Sites
Whilst internal linking is important for optimising your posts for search engine results – linking out to other relevant sites and articles signals to Google that you are an authority and expert in your field. This is because you are linking your content to the right sources. So when you’re writing a post make sure you do some research on Google and find the content that pops up first that is most relevant and link to it. Make sure when you add the link you click ‘Open Up in a New Tab’. This means the tab with your content will still stay open and your reader won’t be lead away completely from your site when clicking.
6. Be Mindful of Sentence and Paragragh Length
When you’re in the flow of writing, it’s easy to get carried away with long sentences. However, people find it much easier to digest information in shorter chunks rather than long waffley statements. If you do need to do a longer sentence then make sure you break up with commas, brackets or dashes as necessary. Paragraphs should also be kept fairly short – no more than 5 or 6 lines maximum.
7. Write a Minimum of 500 Words in Your Post
Search engines like long-form content in posts. By that, I mean longer and well-written posts. The reason being is that again it signals that you are an authority on the topic and therefore is more likely to rank you higher in searches. This is not to say you should write a load of irrelevant nonsense just to get your word count up. To the contrary, the more in-depth you go into on a specific subject with well written and content optimised material, the better your post will do.
Whilst you should aim for 500 words as your minimum, if you can write up to 1-2k words then this again will help you. For starters, if the content is interesting, it will keep people on your site for longer and again, the more you write, the more the search engine will think you know what you’re talking about!
8. Get Your Posts Ranking Better with Yoast or Rank Math
If you have Yoast or Rank Math installed into your WordPress site to help with your SEO (search engine optimisation), then it will guide you on how to improve your posts so they rank better in searches. This includes adding keywords, writing a snippet that people will see when they find your post through organic search methods, suggestions on sentence structure and so on. You can add either of these through ‘plugins’ in the backend of your WordPress site. Simply activate them and follow the instructions and then it will install at the bottom of each (backend) post for you to fill out.
I prefer Rank Math myself and it also gives you an SEO score based on what you’ve done to optimise your post. The higher the score, the more chance you’ve got of your post being found!
9. Have a Conclusion
Think of your posts as if you were writing a mini book. Every book has a beginning, middle and end. It needs to lead the reader on a clear journey which ends with a conclusion or ‘sum up’ of what has been discussed in the body of the post. Many readers will skim the whole post first and look at the conclusion before deciding if they want to read the whole article. Having a conclusion consolidates and summarises the overall content of the post and rounds it off nicely.
10. End Conclusion by Asking a Question
Asking a question at the end of your post will help encourage engagement which is also good for page rankings. It sends a signal to search engines that people are interacting with your site and your content is relevant and in-date. It’s also good for the person commenting too because if they have a website or a business and they enter their website link, they will get a link back to their own website. So it’s worth you considering commenting on other people’s posts too as could help drive traffic to your own website.
BONUS TIP!
Create a CALL-TO-ACTION on your posts. You’ve done the hard part – you’ve created a killer piece of content that people are getting lots of value from but then what?! Create a call-to-action that gives your reader the opportunity to learn more about you or your products and services.
For example: If you want to learn more about how to attract clients to your business then check out my FREE TRAINING VIDEO that will give you the 7 Golden Rules You Need to Follow For Personal Branding Success!
So in summary, the key thing to remember is that whilst good quality well written content will get you so far, having a structure and formula around how you write your posts will really help make the difference in getting your site and posts found. The more your site gets found, the more likely you are to create sales for your business!
Do you write blog posts for your business? Have you thought about how you could leverage them for traffic to your site? Have you considered writing as an expert in your field rather than just to tell people what your business is up to?