The heart of content marketing is your company blog. Consistently posting to your blog 12-16 times per month can greatly increase your website traffic and improve brand awareness. Here we’ve outlined several key steps in creating and optimizing your blog content.

Target Keywords

Research the keywords associated with your product or service and develop a list of topics you would like to include in your campaign. Each individual post should revolve around a single long-tail keyword. This will give your piece direction and help you produce hyper-focused blog content. Educating your audience should be the focus of your writing. Your blogs should also serve as a means to promote product pages and gated premium content. This will help you generate leads from your posts.

Create Topic Clusters

Topic clusters are the latest in structuring you content for search engines. Essentially, you create a pillar page that covers your broad topic and then several other blogs on similar sub-topics that link to and from your pillar page. This makes it easier for search engines to determine the relevancy of your content, which can improve your rankings.

Brainstorm Titles

Once you’ve determined which topics you are going to focus on you’ll want to brainstorm titles for your posts. It can be difficult to come up with eye catching titles that clearly communicate the nature of your subject matter. Spend time coming up with several ideas for each topic. Many of the titles you don’t choose can become subheadings within the body of your blog.

Structure For Easy Reading

The first step in structuring your post is to create subheadings that expand upon the general topic of the blog. This will help to organize your writing and make it easy to digest. Determine whether or not you’ll use numbered lists, bullet points, different fonts or graphics to emphasize portions of your post.

Write For Your Audience

Research subject matter related to the title of your post. Create an introduction that introduces the purpose of your piece and the problem it intends to solve. Next research each subheading and clearly communicate how it ties in to the overall purpose of your article. Cap off each post with a conclusion that includes a brief description of your products and services.

Link To High-Authority Websites

Including links to high-authority sites when you’re citing something relevant to your article can improve SEO and also increase your chances of obtaining backlinks to your own website. The anchor text you link should be relevant to what you’ve cited and should only take up a few words.

Include High-Quality Visuals

Including one or more images within you post can help its ranking and increase shares through social channels. Make sure your image relates to your writing and that you change the image alt text to match the title of your blog. Video has also become an integral piece of content marketing. Having a video that expands upon your writing is a great way to reach new audiences. Visual content is essential for all content forms.

Enlist Multiple Editors

Review your work thoroughly to ensure you catch any grammatical or spelling errors. Be sure you have touched on your primary keywords and fully optimized your blog to be found by search engines. Have at least one other person proof read your work as it can sometime be difficult to pick up inaccuracies in your own writing.