A company blog can be an amazing marketing tool. It can help you create value for your customers beyond your product, build brand awareness, and rank on Google.
But, how can you stand out in the overcrowded blogging landscape of 2023? In this guide, we’ll share our favorite blogging best practices.
This post is part of a series. If you’re interested in growing your company blog, check out our answers to the most common blogging questions marketers have.
Without further ado, let’s dive in.
6 Key 2023 Blogging Guidelines
Whether you’re just starting out with your company blog, or you’re planning to take your blogging efforts to the next level, we suggest that you:
- Focus on your target audience
- Don’t forget the visuals
- Think of SEO beyond keywords
- Repurpose your content
- Review and update old articles
- Use your blog to create connections
In this section, we’ll share different strategies to apply these best practices.
Focus on your target audience
The most successful blogs solve real problems for real users. When designing your content strategy, make sure to target your users’ genuine needs and interests. But, how can you make that happen?
Practice social listening. Follow the conversation around your area of expertise on social media. Build content that resonates with common questions and positions.
Ask your sales & customer support representatives. There was once an SEO specialist who, instead of targeting the same keywords as their competitors, decided to listen to recordings of customer support calls. In these recordings, he heard certain terms that weren’t high-volume, top-ranking keywords. But, they were still relevant to the conversation. He used them as secondary keywords and, surprisingly, he got results.
Connect with those members of your team who are in client-facing roles, and ask them which are the most common customer needs and pains.
Aside from paying attention to social media and collaborating with your sales team, you can implement content skyscraping. Look at your competitors’ most successful content, and compete directly with it. Targeting the same keyword, make longer, more comprehensive, and more updated content. That way, you’ll be providing a better answer to a question that you already know that your clients have.
Create unique value
“Creating unique value” is easier said than done. Most bloggers follow a pretty formulaic approach, resulting in hundreds of blog posts that look the same. Before you start writing, ask yourself: What can you offer your audience that your competitors can’t?
Here are some ways to create unique and valuable content:
- Spend most of your content production process doing research. Aggregate data from different sources, recognize underlying patterns, and reach unique conclusions.
- Conduct your own studies. Instead of compiling data from third parties, you can conduct your own studies and surveys. That will make you the primary source for relevant industry data. And, when you publish your results, you won’t just be offering unique value. You’ll also be building links to your website by offering a resource that other websites can link to.
- Set yourself apart with UX. Think beyond your content’s words, and take a look at your website’s reading experience. Simply offering a more pleasant UX could give you an edge over your competitors.
- Be true to your brand voice. Is your niche characterized by flat, boring, or generic content? You can set yourself apart with a brand voice that goes in the opposite direction.
Don’t forget the visuals
Using visual content helps your posts rank on Google Images, as well as Google SERPs. But, it also creates an opportunity for link building. A good infographic is an asset that others can use in their own content, linking to you as a source.
Visuals also make your content more enjoyable, more memorable, and more authoritative.
According to Buffer, combining visual content and written content makes long pieces less daunting. And according to the MIS Research Center, presentations that use visual elements are 43% more effective at getting people to agree with their main thesis.
Think beyond keywords
SEO isn’t just about keywords. Answering common questions, offering unique information, and delivering an engaging reading experience are more effective SEO-boosting practices than keyword stuffing.
Google’s algorithm favors content that’s unique and in-depth. So, although you should take keywords and search trends into account, spending time researching, planning, and editing your content will go a long way.
If you’re only looking at your content through keywords, you may end up using your blog to answer questions that are best addressed with other types of pages. Make sure you understand where your customers are in their journey, and how to connect with them. Keywords are just a means to an end.
Repurpose your content
The content production cycle for a blog post can take days. If you’re outsourcing your blog posts, you probably know that the average cost of a piece of content in the US is in the $100-$400 range. But, you can get more out of this investment if you use your pieces as raw material to create more content in other formats. Repurposing is the key to cost-effective content marketing.
Turn your post’s key takeaways into an Instagram carousel, a Twitter thread, or even a short video. By doing so, you’ll also be inviting social media followers to visit your blog.
Review and update old articles
Users love fresh content, and so does Google. That’s why a blog post’s life cycle doesn’t end after you’ve published it. And it doesn’t end after you’ve repurposed it. Review and update your most successful articles often.
Updating old content keeps it competitive. If one of your blog posts is extremely successful but includes outdated information, a competitor may create a new piece and try to take your backlinks away from you.
Of course, in order to keep your old content updated, you need to create content that’s worth updating. Basically, your content needs to provide lasting value. In content marketing, we refer to these types of posts as “evergreen content”.
Use your blog to create connections
As we’ve seen throughout this article, you can use your blog content to make an impact, beyond your website. You can use your posts to enhance your conversations with prospects, as well as to connect with other content creators in your industry.
Your posts’ usefulness doesn’t start and end on your website. Clicking Publish is just the beginning.
Don’t Let Coding Errors Get in the Way of SEO Success
In this post, we shared 7 blogging guidelines all content teams should follow to achieve marketing success.
As a marketer, you probably spend hours polishing your content. But, how about your code? Is your website’s code supporting your SEO goals? Even a small, unintentional coding mistake can prevent your content from getting indexed on Google.
Luckily, that’s exactly what SEORadar prevents.
With SEORadar, you can monitor your website’s code changes before they hurt your SEO. Discover more or start a free trial today.
This post is part of a series. If you’re interested in growing your company blog, check out our answers to the most common blogging questions marketers have.
