Are you in charge of writing content for your business? Do you write blogs to drive traffic to your business’s website? Creating content that is engaging to readers while staying optimized for Google rankings can be difficult. Apollo Marketing decided to lend a hand to people just like you.
Apollo Marketing recently taught a blog writing class open to a variety of people who wanted to learn a bit more about writing engaging content. The blog course was held in our office in downtown Frederick. If you missed out, below you can read the highlights of our course.
Selecting a Topic
The course began with selecting the content for each participant’s blog. While it is important to use a variety of techniques to make the blog engaging and have it rank on Google, having an idea on what you would like to write about is the best place to start.
The most important idea when it comes to starting your content is selecting your topic. This can be done in an assortment of ways. What we recommend is that you do a quick search to see what other people within your niche are writing about. From that, you will be able to see what’s popular now and what people may be searching for. Writing a blog about a popular topic will get found more easily.
In the topic selection process it is important to ask yourself a few questions to decide between multiple topics.
- Which can I add the best value to?
- Which can provide the most help to people looking for my services/products?
- Which do I know the most about?
Now that you have your topic, begin writing. With a solid topic as a base, you are on your way to writing an engaging and optimized blog post.
Defining Keywords
When it comes to optimizing content, utilizing keywords is essential. When people search for content, those keywords are what will bring them to your page. A nifty starter tool to use to begin looking for what keywords to use is Google Keyword Planner. The service is free and allows users to see what types of words people use when searching for your niche’s content.
Once you know the words people use to search, you are able to pump those keywords into your content that will allow you to rank for Google and get found by potential customers.
Keywords also help in the content creation process as it helps scope your selected topic into something even more specific.
Overall, keywords are crucial in creating search engine optimized blog posts. They help you get found by customers and by Google.
Defining User Experience
While it is important for Google to find your blog post, it is also important that anyone who comes to your page enjoys the content and finds value in it. With that, they will be more likely to stay on your site and may check out some of your other pages. When it comes to user experience there are a few things to keep in mind to achieve an enjoyable experience for readers:
- The Hook
- Forming the Content
- Editing Jargon
The Hook
The hook is what we call your introduction paragraph. This section of your content is critical, as it gets your readers to know that they are in the right place and they should continue reading your post. In creating this conversion-based content, your hook should do a few things.
- Qualify your audience (Why are they there? State the problems they are coming to your post for)
- Understand and empathize with their problem.
- Offer a solution.
You have about 15 seconds or so to hook your audience. If you include these three items (problem, empathy, and solution) within your hook, you should be able to capture them and get them to read the rest of your post.
Forming the Content
Writing content was mentioned earlier when selecting a topic. Now that we have a topic and know what keywords we need to focus on to rank, we can now concentrate on writing actual sentences. When writing content we need to:
- Write at about a third grade level (make it easy to read).
- Use bullet points.
- Check your facts.
- Limit jargon.
- Try to get around 700 words of content or more.
Editing Jargon
Finally, after we’ve written the content, you will end up having some jargon left over. That needs to be eliminated so that users can digest your blog more easily. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when you are trying to cut jargon from your blog.
- Shoot to remove about 200 words from your 700 word post you’ve created
- Reduce paragraph size. One sentence paragraphs are fine.
- Avoid repetition.
- Do not use any keyword more than 10 times.
After this has been completed, your blog can now be easily digested by your audience. To top it off, add in headers to help your blog feel more organized. Once you’ve done all of this, your blog will look clean and be easy to read.
Calls to Action
Once you have all of your content together, you need to wrap it up with a call to action. What should readers do once they’ve consumed what you’ve written? This is where calls to action come in. Send them to another one of your pages, have them contact you, etc. There are a variety of different calls to action you can use. Sprinkle these throughout though, as not everyone will read your entire blog. Don’t just put them at the end.
That of course is the overall basics. There was more that was covered in the course we held, and we’d love to work with you and expand upon what you’ve read today. If you found this blog helpful, and are interested in being a part of one of our classes please send us an email to info@apollollc.com. We hope to hear from you and see you soon!