Writing an SEO Friendly Blog - Success factors for 2018!

HOW TO MAKE YOUR BLOG ONE-OF-A-KIND IN A NICHE

With business blogging on the rise and generating more leads for B2B companies compared to those that don't blog, you might want to focus on your blog for more SEO benefits and long-term ROI for your business. However, it's not all that simple. It is true: a stellar blog can boost your sales. But it is also true that 53% of marketers consider blogging a #1 priority of their campaigns. More than that, 65% of marketers have increased their use of blogging this year. To cut a long story short, competitors never sleep. To overtake them, your business blog needs to be exceptional. It is not enough to write interesting articles, post them several times a week, and share updates on social media. Everyone does this.

Not very inspiring, huh? Why then do some business blogs stand out, get noticed, and start generating more conversion than traditional marketing efforts? What makes them rock? And what can you do to get into the top league with your blog and make it one-of-a-kind in your niche? Keep reading to find out. 

NO FREELANCERS

Blogging is time and energy-consuming, and that is why most marketers delegate content creation to remote writers. If you hire freelancers to write posts for your business blog, I have bad news for you: Your blog will never sparkle.The problem is, no one knows your product or service better than you. They may be great writers, but freelancers are still not competent enough to create a comprehensive, in-depth content for your niche.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Engage in-house employees. Working in your niche, they know it inside out and can provide you with interesting data or facts from behind-the-scenes of the niche. Even if the copywriting is not absolutely perfect, such content outshines wishy-washy, samey texts found in most blogs. Publish articles from experts only. Guest blogging is a great way to generate content for your business blog but, as with freelancers, be careful when choosing guest writers. If you want to make your blog one-of-a-kind, accept posts from niche experts only.

COMPREHENSIVE CONTENT ONLY

Sorry, but great content doesn’t work anymore. Exclusive does.

According to Dr. Carmen Simon, people forget 90% of what you share with them. In today’s world of information overflow and content shock, when every Tom, Dick, and Harry has a blog and believes they might be helpful to others, we all need content that is actually useful. For your blog to be exceptional in the niche, you need to generate posts which are in-depth, data-driven, and actionable. To win the audience, your blog should teach, solve problems, and give something no one else has. So, no rewrites, no poor paraphrasing of competitors, no generic articles, and no topics other than those related to your niche. A great example is Neil Patel's blog. His research-based long reads on topical issues, written with an authoritative opinion, and presenting valuable knowledge to the audience, are what makes Neil stand out.

SHOW, DON'T TELL

Your comprehensive content attracts visitors and drives traffic to your business website. But what makes people stick around, read rather than scan, and finally convert? Use the techniques of content creation to hook the audience and hold their attention. For your business blog to stand out, forget about writing baseline descriptions and widely known copybook maxims. Instead, show them how to solve their pain points. Make good use of visual storytelling, which enables readers to experience your content through feelings, actions, and visuals.

OKAY, STORIES FIRST.

We retain 70% of information through stories and only 10% from data. Remember those page-turner books you couldn't stop reading? They grabbed you because you felt the story truly happened. It evoked an emotional response from you and a connection with the book’s characters and author. The same works for brands: consider storytelling techniques when writing your blog posts, and your audience will resonate with them.

You don't need to be Stephen King or Ernest Hemingway to craft stories. Just define these key moments:

• What is the problem you are solving?
• What was the insight that inspired you to start?
• What do you do to fix the problem?
• What is your mission?

In her blog, Henneke Duistermaat best described the process of connecting all four moments to eyebrow-raising stories. And the brilliant proof of this technique's efficiency is Jon Morrow's post "How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World." It became the most shareable post at ProBlogger and touched the hearts of more than five million people.

Don't be left out in the cold. Why updating to HTTP is important

Starting in July, Google Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure,” according to a blog post published today by Chrome security product manager Emily Schechter. Chrome currently displays a neutral information icon, but starting with version 68, the browser will warn users with an extra notification in the address bar. Chrome currently marks HTTPS-encrypted sites with a green lock icon and “Secure” sign.

Google has been nudging users away from unencrypted sites for years, but this is the most forceful nudge yet. Google search began down-ranking unencrypted sites in 2015, and the following year, the Chrome team instituted a similar warning for unencrypted password fields.

The Chrome team said today’s announcement was mostly brought on by increased HTTPS adoption. Eighty-one of the top 100 sites on the web default to HTTPS, and a strong majority of Chrome traffic is already encrypted. “Based on the awesome rate that sites have been migrating to HTTPS and the strong trajectory through this year,” Schechter said, “we think that in July the balance will be tipped enough so that we can mark all HTTP sites.”

Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure” starting in July. We can help you enable SSL for your web services to ensure a seamless transition. Contact us today!

Your SEO Checklist for 2018

It's the start of a new year and it's time to review your SEO priorities. Looking back over the years, we see various changes that Google make that SEO managers must follow, or face certain death. There was the Panda updates and then Penguin from Google. These updates have often sent SEO mangers into a frenzy of ‘what ifs’, ‘hows’ and ‘whens’ and indicate the constant evolution taking place. SEO is a process, not an event, and as such managers must constantly review, assess and redefine the priorities for SEO.

1. STRUCTURED DATA

Structured data markup is the technology behind the semantic web and Google’s rich search results. The semantic web is an improved web which delivers more relevant search results to users and more qualified traffic to websites. Structured data is a way of enriching content on a web page that makes it more machine-readable by linking entities together. Vocabularies like Schema.org (vocabularies are the structures you add to your data) allows search engines to create those fabulous rich snippets that contain data like star reviews, opening hours and prices. Not only do they make your search result more eye-catching, they also improve click-through-rate (CTR). Despite numerous studies showing pages that use Schema markup ranked four times higher in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), the adoption of structured data has remained slow, which means that sites that use structured data will ultimately perform better in 2018.

2. SECURE YOUR SITE WITH HTTPS

In 2014 Google announced that sites that were SSL secure were going to be given a slight boost to rankings. Adoption was relatively slow to begin with because many believed that it would only really impact E-Commerce sites. It is estimated that around 50% of sites that appear on page 1 of Google are SSL secure sites (including non-ecommerce sites), and is predicted to be around 65% by the time 2018 rolls around.If your website still isn’t secure by now, you’re basically leaving rankings on the table. Not to mention leaving your site vulnerable to spam and mock sites with your content, that is just plain annoying.

3. TARGET INTENT MESSAGING

Search intent is what the person using a search engine hopes to achieve through their search. People generally have four (depending on how you want to count them) when the use Google:

• Geographic search: Users want to go somewhere, but don’t know where it is or how to get there. The "place" they want to go could be an actual physical location like a store or it could be a specific page on a website.
• Informational search: Users want to answer a specific question, solve a problem or just find general information on a topic. These people make up the majority of search engine users at any given moment.
• Transactional search: Users want to take a particular action. In the marketing world, this is often called "commercial intent", looking for an actionable outcome, like buying a product or servie on

Optimizing your website content to match your audience’s search intent was vital to SEO in 2017, and it’s only going to get more important for SEO in 2018. 

4. SLOW LOADING WEBSITE PAGES

The biggest reason for page abandonment is slow loading websites. If you're found via a web search and your page does not load, user moves on period. They rarely if ever come back. Google also queries your site for speed, and now also evaluates site speed as part of its ranking criteria. Here are some of the biggest culprits that bog down websites:

1. Unnecessary plugins, tracking codes, advertisements and on-page widgets. These are especially bad if any of them block your main page content from loading. Load any news site and you see what I mean, annoying!
2. Bloated image resources. This has been my pet peeve since the adoption of digital cameras! Optimizing for the web is mandatory. Using HTML to change the dimensions of images is a common mistake. This doesn’t impact file size and therefore doesn’t improve speed. Instead, use your photo editing software’s compression to optimize images for the web. Many programs have "save for web" options when exporting.
3. Uncached assets: Caching tells browsers to store files to load for the next visit. This means users don’t have to wait for an image or stylesheet to download every time the visit a page. This can vastly reduce wait time for repeat visitors. Check out Google’s guide to leveraging browser caching.
4. Uncompressed assets: All modern browsers support gzip compression, which is a method of zipping files to reduce their size by up to 90 percent. Gzip compression needs to be enabled on your web server. Google’s got a great set of resources on how to do this.

Our mission is to continue to provide you with the SEO information you need to promote your brand online. Know what high value keywords your customers use to find your products and services. Be found on the web, and appear on the first page of Google and Bing SERP's (search engine results pages). Please contact us at info@lightbound3d.com or call (437) 775-9000 for a free, no obligation consultation.