How to write a blog post that converts

Writing a business blog versus a personal blog is a very different thing considering your targeted audience. For a professional blog, your brand must speak about who you are as a company whilst providing value to your readers. Your blog posts should aim to increase your brand’s visibility, traffic and engagement from your relevant audience(s).

People’s attention span is very low, the reason why you only have 2 to 3 seconds to engage and drive them to click on your website to read your blog post. A high-quality content marketing strategy is the foundation of digital marketing, so let’s get started on how you can create valuable and compelling blog posts that will convert.

Add Value

But before we dig in, set yourself a goal that will truly make the difference, and that is to provide value to your readers through your content. This is the most important thing when writing blog posts, and let us quickly tell you why. Pay more attention to the words you use, as they will make your reader come back to your website again and again. First impressions of your blog matter and people base them on a few things such as blog aesthetic, photos, writing style, and so on. But we have a motto when we write our blogs which is “the golden trio” – Educate, Inspire and Entertain.

Educate your readers in a simple way whilst offering them new insights and ways of looking at things.
Inspire and motivate them by stirring their emotions and challenging their perspectives
Entertain them by showing your true personality, but make sure that you always keep an eye on their reaction so you can make tweaks to your blogs whenever needed.

To put it simply? Teach by telling people a story, inspire by adding personal examples of your business/brand or even you as a writer, educate and be entertaining at the same time, and there you have it. A good starting point for creating your first blog that truly converts.

1. Know your readers

Before even starting to plan out any blog content, you must know what your audience needs and wants. Start with some industry research, competitor analysis, and take a close look at who you are as a brand and what you can offer that your competition can’t.

We have a couple of favourite digital tools to get you started, so make sure you check them out:

SEMRush – paid tool, but great for content and competitive research
KeywordTool.io – free tool for searching popular keywords in your industry
Answer the public – extremely useful to get insights into phrases and questions people are searching for online around your keywords

2. Choose your topic

Start with a good brainstorm and write down any ideas that come to mind, but focus on choosing a topic that your business will be able to build an audience from. Allow yourself a three-month ‘trial period’ to test out what gets the most interest and traction, and later on, focus on that type of content. You know how they say, you’ll never know until you try, so get going and learn from the experience.

Still not sure what to write about? Think outside the box and go through your company’s emails and pick out FAQs, and write blogs that contain answers to their questions. What you need to focus on is what do you wish your clients knew, so just Google it! It’s as simple as just searching ‘blog ideas for your industry’, so start there.

3. Choose your approach

Try not to go too broad and get specific with your blog topic. You won’t be able to offer the same value to your reader if you pick a vast subject like ‘Christmas Decoration Ideas’. Instead, try to write about ‘Top 10 Christmas Decoration Ideas That You Can Make At Home’, and most likely people will gain much more from your content.

Make your message clear and focused for your audience, and let us give you a small tip (as always) – use Grammarly to save you from any misspellings, punctuation or grammar mistakes. It will save you a lot of time when it comes to content proofreading in the end.

4. Create a strong Headline

People tend to judge a blog post by its title at first glance, so make sure you pick a compelling headline that your readers will be happy to share. Tip? Include a bit of emotional marketing value within your headline and create an SEO-friendly title to increase your traffic.

5. Edit your blog

Google doesn’t like short-length content, so aim to write at least between 900 and 1500 words, and post all the blogs on your company’s website, keeping your content updated regularly. Try to post a blog once a week, and if you are just at the beginning, aim for a minimum of one blog post per month (but never less, especially once you’ve started).

Also, remember that you will write your blogs for SEO, which if done correctly, it will rank your website higher and higher in Google Rankings. So, once you’ve done your keyword and phrases research, start writing your blog around them (make sure you have a right balance between rank and reach by aiming for both keywords and keyphrases). Tip? On WordPress, you can get some plugins specifically for SEO, so make sure you check them out and instal them to your website.

Very important – Avoid keyword stuffing! All search engines are way too smart to fall for this trick that simply doesn’t work.

Where to place your keywords and phrases?

Title
Meta Description (the snippet showing up under the site title on Google results) – aim for 150-160 characters.
Subheadings
Body
Alt Text (the text for images that people read using screen readers, aimed at vision impairments, but it’s also a bonus for your SEO as the Search Crawl Bots read these too, and so they understand your image and how it relates to your blog post)
URL Slug (the end of the web link for your blog)

Tips:

Avoid duplicating meta descriptions and headings, and write short and easy to read sentences to keep the search bots and your readers happy.
Tell a story by keeping your language simple and direct. Break up the page into short paragraphs, as most people only skim through the content before they decide to read it (the reason why we recommend to break up your blog with subheadings).
Use bullet points and highlight the most important information, as that way, readers will be able to decide quickly if your blog post is of any value to them or not.
Add compelling imagery throughout your blog too, and aim for four images or more depending on your blog, but only use copyright-free photos. Pick clear and horizontal photos relevant to your content. Our favourite free stock photo websites that you can start using today are Pexels, Unsplash, Pixabay and Freepik.
Add internal and external links.

Internal links are only URL’s from your company’s website or where your blogs are getting posted, or other sister sites. By having them in your content, you will keep people on your website, and it will give Google a ‘map’ of your site, which Google loves! So aim at having at least four internal links per blog.

External links are links outside of your company’s website, such as Facebook or Instagram pages, TripAdvisor, etc. You can put as many as you want, but make sure your blog won’t start looking like spam.

Have good backlinks. which are other sites linking back to your website (known as inbound/incoming/one-way links). Google sees these links as ‘votes’ for a specific page, so aim to have a high number of backlinks to increase your organic reach on search engines. But the type of backlinks matters! Make sure they are from a trusted and authoritative website, that it includes your target keyword in the link text and that its topic is related to your website. Making sure that the link is coming from a website that hasn’t linked to you before is also important, so one quality backlink can be more powerful than 100 low-quality ones.

6. Write a strong closing statement

So here we are. Congratulations on making it so far! Now it’s time for you to close with a paragraph that will stick in your reader’s minds, create engagement and hopefully encourage shares.

Your last sentence should always be a clear CTA (call-to-action) that stands out.

You can start by briefly summarising your content and adding some conclusions, or even better, finish up with a compelling question where you encourage your reader to have their say. You can even ask for social shares, comments or subscribes (if you have a product/service that you’d like to push in front of your clients, promote them by writing something like ‘see below’).

7. Proofreading

We have some more tips for you here, so make sure to try them out!

Check your grammar by using Grammarly
Copy and Paste your blog and put it in Google Translate and listen to it audio (to avoid typoglycemia – this happens when your brain takes over in comprehending words even if they’re a mistake)
Use Wordcounter to count your words and characters, check your keywords density and much more

Let us know how your content marketing plan is going, and if you need any extra support in creating high-quality blogs, don’t hesitate to Get In Touch with our friendly team today for a free 30 minutes consultation.