Blog Post Basics: Tips For Getting Noticed

If you have a website, you should have a blog. Blogs mean fresh content, and Google loves fresh stuff. It’s what will draw people to your site.

But there are a couple of things you need to know that will make that blog post work even harder for you. Spending a few minutes to consider things like SEO ranking and pay-per-click advertising can make a big difference. (Don’t worry, we’ll explain those terms in a moment.)

SEO Ranking: The Big Question

Before you begin clacking away on your keyboard, creating your brilliant blog post, you need to ask one question: What is my audience searching for?

Let’s say you’re selling tires designed for Japanese cars. Your potential customer will do a Google search for “tires for japanese cars”.

Use that information to write your blog post, making sure those words appear a couple of times somewhere. For example, you might write, “We have a great selection of tires for Japanese cars.” Notice that sentence uses these words: tires, cars, Japanese. These words, or keywords, must appear somewhere in your post. Otherwise, people who are searching for you won’t find it—or your website.

Google indexes every website on the internet, regularly going through every site and cataloging what’s on it. When someone searches for “camel”, Google shows them all the pages that have the word “camel”. If you don’t have the right keywords on your website somewhere, your audience won’t find you!

By the way, once you figure out what keywords your audience will be searching for, you can’t just throw those words anywhere. They need to be a natural part of a sentence, title, or paragraph. This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

In the past, people tried to increase their chances of being found by bombarding a blog post with keywords. That no longer works. Google penalizes sites that do this by lowering their ranking.

If you ask, What is my audience searching for? you’ll know what keywords you need to add to your post so your SEO ranking will be high, and your audience will find you.

Now, let’s say you’ve written your blog post, and it’s up on your site. You’ve followed our advice on adding SEO keywords. It’s only a matter of time before Google finds your post. But what can you do in the meantime to get the word out?

Pay-Per-Click Advertising: How And When To Use It

One thing you can do is advertise your post. Many people do this by posting links to the post on their social media accounts. But another option you may want to consider is “pay-per-click” ads.

What are the benefits? First, unlike other advertising, you only pay for a pay-per-click ad (PPC) when somebody clicks on it.

Another benefit? You’ll get faster results. If someone finds you via Google search, that’s an organic result, and it takes time to grow that interest. Google may take a while to find your post, and even then, it may not show up very high in the results. But if someone sees an ad and then clicks on it, you know that person’s interested. PPC ads can get you more traffic immediately.

Another benefit is targeting. Unlike a Google search, you can get very specific about your ad: when and where it’s shown, and on what device. You can catch a potential customer exactly when their interest is highest.

PPC is also budget-friendly. You’re only spending ad money on actual clicks. And you can set a cap on how many clicks to pay for.

A word of caution: don’t do this all by yourself. Get expert advice; you’ll need to work closely with an expert to produce great results. You know your business, and the PPC expert knows his, and together you’ll make a more effective PPC campaign.

Conclusion

SEO ranking and pay-per-click are only two of the many ways you can make a better blog post, something that gets noticed, that your audience wants to read, and that drives them to your website. If this still seems a bit intimidating or time-consuming, why not consider hiring us to write your blog post for you? We’ll even put your name on it!