How do you create a blog that successfully gets those results?
Let's dive into some blogging strategy and best practices. The
first step is to pick a topic and a title. At a high level,
write educational content. In order to attract someone to your
blog, you need to answer the questions and problems that
they're searching for answers to. Put yourself in the shoes of
your buyer personas. What are they going to be searching for?
What do they want to know about? What will resonate with them?
Consider what you know about your buyer personas and their
interests while you're coming up with a topic for your blog post.
And when it comes to a topic, make sure to write about your
industry, not yourself. Remember, you're trying to
attract strangers to your blog who have never heard of your
company before - so they're not going to find you through search
engines if you're just blogging about yourself. You have the
rest of your website to provide that information. Next,
brainstorm a list of specific topics that you could blog
about. If you're looking for a place to start, then ask your
co-workers from other teams like sales and services for some
ideas. Here are a few questions that you could ask and they
could answer: what are the most frequently asked questions you
hear? What do our customers need help with? What do you wish
people knew about our industry? What are industry bloggers,
social media, and even your competitors talking about?
Before you even write anything, you need to pick a topic for
your blog post. The topic can be pretty general to start with.
For example, if you provide running shoes, you might start
out thinking you want to write about running shoes. Then you
might be able to expand off of that -- in other words,
iterations or different ways of approaching that topic to help
you focus your writing. For example, you might decide to
narrow your topic to "best running shoes for marathons" or
"lifetime of running shoes." When picking your topics, do
keyword research. Keywords are the words and phrases typed into
search engines. They're the topics that people are trying to
learn more about. Which keywords do your buyer personas use?
Which are associated with your industry? Optimizing your blog
posts for keywords is not about incorporating as many keywords
into your posts as possible. Nowadays, this actually hurts
your SEO because search engines consider this keyword stuffing..
It also doesn't make for a good reader experience -- a ranking
factor that search engines now prioritize to ensure you're
answering the intent of your visitors. You should use
keywords in your content in a way that doesn't feel unnatural
or forced. A good rule of thumb is to focus on one long-tail
keywords per blog post. While you can use more than one
keyword in a single post, keep the focus of the post narrow
enough to allow you to spend time actually optimizing for
just one keyword. Why long-tail keywords? These longer, often
question-based keywords keep your post focused on the
specific goals of your audience. Website visitors searching
long-tail terms are more likely to read the whole post and then
seek more information from you. In other words, you'll generate
right type of traffic: those visitors who convert. And for
your blog post topic, don't try to solve every problem in one
fell swoop. This will make each post clearer for your readers
and for search engines. It will also make sure that your post
gets more qualified traffic, because you'll know that the
people clicking through are looking for information about
that specific topic. If your brainstorming your topics,
there's a good chance that will create a long list of ideas for
topics you can cover and posts you can create. This will help
create a longer-term blogging strategy, make a list of topics
that support a specific conversion. For example, if you
have an long-form guide that you want to create and promote, then
consider making a list of blog topics that support this guide's
content. This way, if someone finds your blog post and finds
the blog helpful, it increases the chances of them wanting to
click a call-to-action to access a relevant offer. Think of your
offer as a heart and your blog posts as the arteries. Your blog
posts keep a steady flow of relevant prospects connecting
with your offer. Now, let's talk about picking a title. Think
about how you read things online. You read the title
first, before you commit. It needs to catch your interest.
And the title is one of the first things that your prospects
will see. Start by creating a working title for your blog
post. A working title is something to "work" off of as
you begin to write your post. Start here to narrow your topic
down and focus on one single angle. A topic, like "social
media" could breed multiple different blog posts. A working
title, like "social media channels for live video" is now
specific. Next, include the long-tail keyword in the title.
Be sure that the keyword fits as a description of what the blog
post is all about. Also, make the value of the post clear in
the title. Your title should help readers and search engines
understand what your post is about. Set the right
expectations - what is the reader going to get out of your
blog post? What information is covered? What format is the blog
post going to take? In this example, the blog post title
explicitly tells you that you'll be reading about how to create
an infographic. Not only that but it sets the expectations
that it only takes an hour to do and there's also free templates
included. You know exactly what you're going to get from this
blog post - how it's valuable to you, and how much information it
contains. When it comes to the art of the perfect blog post,
HubSpot did some research and looked at how our own titles
have performed. Here are the consistent principles that were
found: The ideal blog post title length is 60 characters.
Headlines between 8 and 12 words are shared most often on
Twitter. Headlines between 12 and 14 words are liked most
often on Facebook. HubSpot also found that headlines ending with
a bracketed clarification -- for example, like the earlier
example -- performed 38% better than titles without that
clarification. If you're having trouble trimming down the length
of a title, run it through Moz's title tag preview tool and
Twitter to see how the title will appear on a search engine
results page and when it's shared on social media.
Technically, Google measures by pixel width, not character
count, and it recently increased the pixel width for organic
search results from approximately 500 pixels to 600
pixels, which translates to around 60 characters. Title too
long? That's okay! Make sure to create a title for your reader
first. When you have a lengthy headline, it's a good idea to
get your keyword in the beginning since it might get cut
off toward the end on a search engine results page. In this
example, the title got caught off, but the focus keyword "data
visualization" is at the front. Moving on to the body of your
blog post, format and optimize the post so that both people and
search engines can easily read and understand it. Write an
intro and make it captivating. If you lose the reader in the
first few paragraphs -- or even sentences -- of the
introduction, they will stop reading even before they've
given your post a readthrough. Grab their attention, use humor,
be empathetic, or grip the reader with an interesting fact
or statistic. And describe the purpose of the post and explain
how it will address a problem the reader may be having. It
should be a follow-up to the title that they found
interesting. Nobody likes clickbait, so you want to make
sure your post is about what the headline says it is. This will
give the reader a reason to keep reading and give them a
connection to how it will help them improve. If you read the
first few lines of this blog post, would you want to keep
reading? What about this blog post? Keep your buyer persona in
mind and think about what would entice them to keep on reading.
And what about the rest of your blog post? The body of your blog
post is where your readers will undoubtedly derive the most
value. HubSpot did an analysis and found the ideal blog post
length is roughly 2,100 words, but that will vary depending on
your topic. Always solve for the reader first. Make sure you
cover your topic in full and have met the expectations that
your blog title promised. Mention your keyword at a normal
cadence throughout the body of your post and in the headers.
That means including your keywords in your copy, but only
in a natural, reader-friendly way. Don't go overboard at the
risk of being penalized for keyword stuffing. Whenever you
create content, your primary focus should be on what matters
to your audience, not how many times you can include a keyword
or keyword phrase in that content. And no one likes an
ugly blog post. Use formatting and visuals to make your blog
post that much more appealing. When you blog, whitespace is
your friend. Whitespace is the empty space on the page. It
allows the visitor to focus on the content, not the clutter.
Don't write long paragraphs that form into huge blocks of text -
this will make your information look dense and hard to read. As
you can see in this example, there's plenty of whitespace on
the side margins of the post, around the title and first
image, and between the paragraphs of text within the
post. The space makes the post more easily digestible - nothing
is crammed together, and though the post is long, it doesn't
feel overwhelming or hard to read. You can also break up the
text in your blog post by using sub-headers, and bullets or
numbered lists to highlight your points. Sub-headers are another
on-page SEO element. Sub-headers organize and break up your blog
post into different sections to signal to Google (and your
reader) what the post will cover. Sub-headers should be
written with H2 tags or smaller -- never H1 tags, which signal a
title. Use sub-headers to split up sections of your blog post --
making sure to integrate the keywords you're using this post
to target. Bolding important text can also help readers
quickly understand the key takeaways from the post. And
include visuals and multimedia elements to break up your text.
It's hard to grab a reader's attention and this can also help
your readers understand the post at a glance. Featured images
usually sit at the top of a blog post and are another element to
draw readers in to learn more. The image should reflect what
the story is about, intrigue readers, or provoke them. It
doesn't need to directly illustrate what your post is
about, but they should be loosely related to your content.
While most people enjoy a great cat photo, it may not always be
relevant to your content. And for throughout the body of your
blog post, use multimedia content wherever it's possible
to break up the blog post and re-engage your reader. Add
images, videos, audio recordings, and social media
posts. HubSpot sometimes includes an audio version of the
blog post. Or includes a video that's on the related topic. It
changes it up for the reader but also helps them digest the
content in a different way. Changing up the format of your
blog post will provide additional value to your reader
while making sure their eyes are focused on what they're reading
and seeing. See the difference? The blog post without any visual
looks a lot less welcoming. The next step is all about lead
generation - promoting your offers on your blog. As you
attract more and more visitors to your blog, that increased
traffic means an increased opportunity to generate leads.
If you really want your inbound marketing efforts to pay off,
then it's crucial that you strategically promote the
majority of your blogs to corresponding or relevant
offers. The goal should be to attract someone and provide
content around the topic they're trying to learn more about, then
be helpful and offer them a relevant next step. Make sure
the CTA doesn't disrupt the user experience. Again, the goal is
to be helpful, not pushy. Additionally, you might want to
insert a CTA after the first few paragraphs. To avoid looking too
pushy too soon, try including a passive CTA through hyperlinked
text. It's important to include these passive CTAs, as you can't
always count on your visitor reading your entire post and
converting. Think about it. Do you read to the end of every
single blog post that you click on? By not including a CTA near
the beginning, you may be missing out on a valuable
conversion opportunity. HubSpot performs CTA tests all the
time--from image and text CTAs to placement of the CTAs--we're
always looking for ways to improve click-thru rate.
Interestingly enough, we found that text CTAs near the top of
blogs posts produce the highest click-thru rates. Something you
might want to keep in mind and test on your blog posts. Lastly,
include a CTA at the end of each post. This offer should be
relevant to the blog content that a visitor has just read.
Your visitor is there to learn something from your blog post,
so provide an offer that gives them more educational content to
continue learning. This is a CTA at the end of the same post that
was shown earlier. The title of the post is "Data Visualization
101: How to Choose the Right Chart or Graph for Your Data" at
the bottom a CTA for an ebook on how to presenting data people
can't ignore. Another option is a pop-up that the reader sees as
they scroll down the page. The offer is about the same topic as
the post, so a reader who wants to learn more would be
interested in clicking through. Next, you'll want to optimize
the blog post. When search engines crawl your blog, they
don't read every word. Instead, they scan certain parts of your
post to understand what you're writing about and how
trustworthy the content is. To help search engines understand
what you're trying to communicate, you'll want to
optimize the page around your long-tail keyword, which you
already did in the title and body of the post, but you'll
also want it in the URL, alt-text, and meta description.
The URL of your blog post should make it easy for your visitors
to understand the structure of your website and the content
they're about to see. Search engines favor web page URLs that
make it easier for them and website visitors to understand
the content on the page. What if there's a specific article you
want to read, like the data visualization example. Its URL
structure denotes that it's an article from the Marketing
section of the blog and that it's on the topic of data
visualization. The URL doesn't have to match the title of the
blog exactly. Keep the URL short. In this way, URL
structure acts as a categorization system for
readers, letting them know where they are on the website and how
to access new site pages. Search engines appreciate this, as it
makes it easier for them to identify exactly what
information searchers will access on different parts of
your blog or website. Alt-text with images helps because search
engines don't just look for images. Rather, they look for
images with alt text. Because search engines can't "see"
images the same way humans can, an image's alt text tells them
what an image is about -- which ultimately helps those images
rank in the image section of search engine results. Your meta
description is meant to give search engines and readers
information about your blog post's content -- so be certain
to use your long-tail term so search engines and your audience
are clear on your post's content. At the same time, keep
in mind the copy matters a great deal for click-through rates
because it satisfies certain readers' intent. The more
engaging, the better. The maximum length of this meta
description is greater than it once was -- now around 300
characters -- suggesting it wants to give readers more
insight into what each result will give them. So, in addition
to being reader-friendly (compelling and relevant), your
meta description should include the long-tail keyword for which
you are trying to optimize for. And include relevant internal
and external links within the post. Link to related blog posts
or your site pages when appropriate. If you've written
about a topic that's mentioned in your blog post on another
blog post, ebook, or web page, it's a best practice to link to
that page. Seems counterproductive? Well, it's
not. Blogging is start a smaller part of your content strategy.
In order to get found in search and best answer the new types of
queries searchers are submitting, the solution is to
use the topic cluster model: Choose the broad topics for
which you want to rank (like you'll do at the beginning with
your blog posts), then create content based on specific
keywords related to that topic that all link to each other
(like your blog posts), to create broader search engine
authority. This model uses a more deliberate site
architecture to organize and link URLs together to help more
pages on your site rank in search engines -- and to help
searchers find information more easily. This architecture
consists of three components -- pillar content, cluster content,
and hyperlinks. So your blog posts can serve as cluster
content that then include hyperlinks to more information
location on your pillar content page. It's a better experience
for you, the search engines, but most important your visitors.
Make sure you have easily accessible options for your
readers to be able to share your blog posts. If a visitor finds
one of your posts helpful and valuable, then they're likely to
share it to one or more of their social media channels. And don't
forget about mobile! With mobile devices now accounting for
nearly 2 out of every 3 minutes spent online, having a blog
that's responsive or designed for mobile has become more and
more critical. Make sure to keep mobile in mind as you
structuring your blog post. What would the experience be like if
someone were you read your blog post on their mobile phone
instead of a desktop computer. You might change the length of
the post. You can see what the difference looks like here. Keep
those smaller devices in mind! At the end of the day, it's
important to write consistently and frequently. There are a lot
of blog posts out there, so make sure to choose quality over
quantity. Always. Commit yourself to a blogging schedule.
The more often you blog, the more likely you are to get
found. After all, each new blog post is an opportunity to
attract new visitors as well as a continuation to your overall
content savings account. The more often you post quality
content, the more you will see your blog grow and influence
your business. And there you have it - the fundamental
strategy and best practices for getting your blog up and
running, so that you can begin to attract new visitors and
convert them into leads.