One of the most effective marketing strategies helping advisory businesses (those that sell advisory services to consumers or other businesses) grow these days is content marketing — writing effective blog posts that resonate with your target audience and that get noticed by search engines.
But we’re finding that although most bloggers do a good job in the former (resonating with their audience) they often forget to address the latter, speaking effectively to search engines. And it’s not that complicated to do.
Here are three simple ways to improve the searchability of your blog posts:
1. Include keywords in your post’s title.
Title tags: Include keywords in the title tag of your post. If your site was developed in WordPress or other content management system you should be used to seeing this field when you put your posts up. If not, look for it and start filling it in instead of skipping past it.
The first words matter most, so write a title that gets right to the point and take a few minutes to craft it so your most important keywords are first, yet still make sense to the human reader.
On-page title: Your on-page title is the title that comes up at the top of the page. It’s different than your title tag which is specifically for search engines. Your on-page title is strictly for the human reader, so write this so it intrigues the reader and creates curiosity to read further. Use metaphor or pun if you want to to make it resonate more. Don’t use metaphor or pun in your title tag. Search engines don’t understand it.
2. Use keywords in links.
Instead of linking “click here” in a sentence use active words for your links. The best ones serve almost as titles of what the link is about. And be sure to cross link your posts – refer to previous posts and link to them. You can do this in the body of your post of at the end. WordPress offers plugins that will list relevant posts at the end of your posts automatically based on the titles, title tags and keywords used in your posts. It helps you build connections between your posts so the posts themselves can help build each others popularity.
3. Use descriptions instead of pronouns in posts.
This can be hard to do for advisory business posts because the posts are so often focused on a person or a business entities’ expertise in a subject area and their personal perspective. But if you can, reduce the use of pronouns like “We”, “you,” or “it.” Try to be more descriptive so search engines know who and what you are talking about, even if it is a bit repetitive.
For example, say “Facebook marketing can be a very effective marketing tool for advisory businesses.” instead of “It can be an effective marketing tool for your business.”
Identifying keywords.
The biggest challenge can be identifying what keywords to use in your posts. You can use an online tool to help you think of what they should be, but the truth is that if you just read your article draft, keywords will stand out and all you have to do is go back through the article and intersperse them throughout in your subheads, opening sentences, closing sentences and in summaries at the end of the article or section of an article. Don’t overcomplicate it. If you find yourself stuck, try Google’s free online keyword tool to help you think of what keywords to use. There are instructions on how to use the tool along the left side of the page. Think of it like a thesaurus for keywords. It will help you think of better ways to say what you’re saying. Although be careful, the purpose of a traditional thesaurus is to help you think of different ways of saying something. What you’re trying to do is find one or two better words or phrases to use consistently throughout your post. Want to engage a one-two punch? Use the keywords you’ve just identified and interspersed into your article as cross-reference links to other articles on that subject in your blog.
— Chris Quinn, principal and brand strategist
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