In the digital world, 2020 will be remembered as the year when big-scale changes happened. Businesses around the world went online, new formats and approaches took over, and suddenly, as if overnight, everything got digitized.
This transition brought new cards into play, inspired new initiatives, and forever changed the way we use technology. There’s one thing, however, that has always been effective for business and will remain so in the foreseeable future. And that is blogging. Content is the heart of every marketing strategy and is essential for building your image and reputation.
So, here we’ve researched and compiled the best blogging tips that you need for a stellar website performance in 2022, so read on and don’t forget to make notes.
1. Make Content More Accessible With Podcasts
Podcasts have become one of the fastest-growing digital media markets with an expected 24.6% CAGR between 2020-2026, more than 75% of Americans now familiar with podcasts. Nearly half of users nowadays listen to a podcast monthly, and the market is not even at its peak yet.
Benefit From Investing in Podcasts for Your Blog
The accessibility of information is the main benefit of podcasts. In this format, customers can listen to your content while on their lunch break, doing chores, running, or while stuck in a traffic jam.
For convenience, you can provide the content of the podcast as both an audio file and written text. This way your content will still be more recognizable for search engines. Also, including mixed media in your blog post helps your page rate better on Google.
Take Audio Blogging to the Next Level
The prime difference between audio blogging and podcasting is the length and the focus of the content. Podcasts are more appropriate for a business blog because they are usually topic-centric, rather focused on a person.
Podcasts are typically longer and offer a deeper insight into a subject. Depending on how you approach audio content, you can organize your blog listings into a series, or group related content into blocks of information on relevant topics.
Try Different Podcast Hosting Platforms with WordPress Integration
To start a podcast, you need a hosting platform where your audio files will be stored. Hosting platforms have editing and episode managing tools, player, analytics, text and notes, and more.
Some of the best Hosting platforms have WordPress integration with custom plugins, which means you can make podcasts directly from your WordPress website:
- Buzzsprout
- Seriously Simple Podcasting
- Fusebox
- Podlove Podcast Publisher
- Libsyn Podcasting
- Simple Podcast Press
- Blubrry PowerPress
2. Focus on Mobile Optimization
Internet users spend most of their time online browsing on their phones. Research shows that 81% of online content reading is done on mobile phones or tablets.
When your content is not optimized for a mobile screen, your customers might be driven away from your page and choose an easier read.
Provided you are using WordPress for your blog it should support the option for a mobile preview and test, so you can easily check its compatibility.
Here are some tips on making your content more readable on mobile devices:
- Don’t use long sentences. Compound-complex sentences are harder to comprehend on mobile devices. The longer your sentence is, the greater the probability your reader might miss something and have to go over it again.
- Make paragraphs shorter. Divide your text into smaller, easier to follow portions. This will make it less likely for your reader to get confused and for information to get lost between the lines.
- Leave enough breathing space. Leave sufficient blank areas to separate paragraphs. This makes the content structure more eye-pleasing and readable.
- High-quality visuals. If the resolution of your images and infographics is low, chances are details will not be clear on mobile devices.
- Use bullets and numbers. Structuring information in lists helps to break up longer pieces of content. It makes information easier to digest.
Another very important reason to invest more effort in your website’s mobile version, is that from March 2021 Google will switch entirely to mobile-first Indexing. All websites that have a desktop version alone will not be indexed by Google and will not show in search results. Only the content available on the mobile version of pages will be visible and ranked. So make sure you are prepared for the change.
3. Answer the Hunger for Quality Content
With people staying mostly at home, online content consumption has not surprisingly doubled in 2020. The data also shows the attention span of the average internet user has expanded during the pandemic. About 77% of online users read blogs and now invest more time looking for more meaningful content. At the same time, 67% of consumers report they now investigate their information sources more thoroughly when considering a purchase.
To answer this growing “hunger” for quality content, you need to up your business blog game adding more value to what you are posting.
Create Meaningful Blog Posts
Longer posts have been proven to deliver stronger results, but more words alone do not add value to your content. The era of cheap tricks and keyword stuffing is way behind us, and Google’s algorithms have evolved to recognize meaningful content that matches the user’s search intent.
- Spend more time writing. To create meaningful content, you need to invest more effort in research and drafts. A survey reveals that spending more than 6 hours working on a blog post increases significantly its quality and value.
- Do better research. Composing research-based and research-backed articles increases the credibility of your blog. When quoting information, always add links to the studies you derive it from.
- Data-driven content. Your business’ data is your best source of ideas. Analyse it and use it to write on topics you know best.
- Write evergreen pieces. Quality evergreen content will keep bringing traffic to your site over the long run. Of course, you can also cover other topics if they are important to your business, but make sure to also write about things that will stay relevant with time and that your audience will search for.
Although there is no official confirmation by Google, it’s known among the industry that the time users spend on a page is one of Google’s “user experience signals” for ranking. Meaning that if your articles are engaging and of good quality, people do not just leave your page after a quick scan, but stay to read your content. And this signals Google that your page is relevant. So keep up the good work, and results will follow.
Focus on Posts Quality
Consider working with an editor. Having a second set of eyes go over your articles is guaranteed to increase the quality of your blog. Most bloggers prefer online tools, but even the most sophisticated AI is not as good at comprehending the subtle details of the written word that a human being can notice.
Also, this goes without saying, but – always double-check names and dates, and make sure your grammar and spelling are correct.
An interesting approach to text editing is reading your article starting from the end to the beginning. Sounds weird, probably, but it really can feel like reading it for the first time. This gives you a new angle and helps with noticing repetitions, typos, and inconsistencies.
Aim for a Personal Approach
Digital users around the world feel that brands and their approaches have not been personal enough in 2020. The reason probably being that for some businesses this was the first time they had to go digital and they had to do it in a short time. Focusing too much on checking all the boxes in an online strategy, means one might miss the most important thing – your clients’ personal needs.
When creating content for your business blog, think of your buyer personas and what they identify with, and what feels tailor-made to their needs. Research what your customers are searching and write meaningful articles on those topics.
Compile How-to Posts
People use Google to find solutions to their problems, and that keeps “How-to” posts on top of the wave. Writing quality tutorials on topics relevant to your business will bring you good website traffic in 2022, generate leads, and will continue to help with conversions.
4. Optimize for Featured Snippets
If you are running a website or a blog, you already know that SEO is tough but vital. Alas, you want your content to reach its target audience, so better get down to it and work on your keywords and analytics.
The biggest reward for SEO efforts in 2022 will be earning a Featured Snippet on Google. Basically, this is the first thing users see when they google a question. The featured snippets are located above the organic search results and are considered as the “position zero”. Their contents are an excerpt of an article with relevant information, and a link to the source.
You cannot “apply” for a featured snippet or request approval from Google. But actually, what you can do is write quality relevant content, optimize it properly, and do it with a content structure in mind that can get you featured.
Choose the Type of Featured Snippet to Fit Your Content Best
The most common types of Featured snippets are paragraphs, lists, and tables.
- Paragraphs should be rich in content, to the point, and exclude extra fluff. If your content answers a question, it’s best to give a word-to-word definition that’s objective and unbiased. Sections of up to 50 words or 300 characters usually play out the best.
- Longer lists are featured more often than shorter ones. The experts’ guess is that they are probably considered to provide more thorough information. Lists of more than 6 items have a stronger performance.
- Tables are composed of information you include on your page, but some experts consider that Google favours tables that are pre-made. So, if your content is already formatted as a table, the probability of being featured increases.
Use Long-Tail Keywords
A SEMrush and Brado research shows that one of the keys to successful featured snippets is long-tail keywords. Usually, featured snippets appear more often as answers to specific queries. That is why SEO experts believe that it is better to create content around long-tail keywords, expressing certain intent in the sales funnel. That’s also why question-related keywords tend to rank higher in the SERPs.
So, if you aim for more specific long-tail words, your chances of success in the featured snippets are better.
Date Your Content
Dating your content also helps. Although many pages prefer to avoid dating their content to make it seem more relevant and evergreen to users, from an SEO perspective, it’s a plus. Google favors recently dated content and ranks it higher. Most featured snippets are from date-stamped pages with information updated not longer than 3 years ago.
Featured snippets are intended to provide quick answers and solutions. For this to happen the information they show has to be valuable and up-to-date. You can get around this by updating old content.
Keep the URL Short And Relevant
Pages with shorter, to-the-point URLs are more likely to get featured. Organizing your blog content in subfolders or categories by keywords is also a good idea. You can customize your URLs to make them shorter and more relevant.
5. Work on White Hat Link Building
As you probably already know, links and backlinks are good for domain ranking. Backlinko and BuzzSumo, however, analyzed 912 million blog posts to find out that 94% of online content has no backlinks at all. The same study also confirms that pages with higher numbers of quality backlinks have top ranking with Google.
Even though Google constantly changes and updates its algorithms, outbound links and backlinks remain of utmost importance for a page’s ranking.
Building a white hat SEO contributes to increasing your authority and the referral traffic to your website. It can be achieved by adding relevant and trustworthy links to other pages in your articles and gaining backlinks to your site through guest blogging, partnerships, exchanges, expert quotes, and other types of content.
Good inbound links signal to search engines that your website is credible. Getting backlinks from different referring high-quality domains is better than only having ones from the same domain. So work to establish long term content-exchange partnerships with different businesses and websites, to guarantee better results.
6. Embrace Influencer Outreach and Expert Quotes
When writing for your business blog, make sure to only quote reliable sources and trustworthy research. Referring to branch gurus who are already well-known and respected in your target group community, is also a great way to give your content more credibility.
To promote brand awareness and increase conversions, you can reach out to popular influencers in your field and convince them to endorse your business. One approach is to offer financial compensation to promote your brand.
Return on Investment (ROI) for influencer marketing is considered to be reasonably high although it depends on too many conditions to be exactly estimated.
On the other hand, you can put in some hard work and planning, and develop a genuine mutually beneficial professional relationship with an influencer and establish a long-term partnership.
Both approaches are fine and which one you choose depends on your personal preferences and resources.
Influencer outreach is largely underestimated but has proven to lead to more social media shares of your blog posts, and bring immense traffic to your webpage.
Research on content spread shows that in most cases a post going viral is tightly related to influencer shares. Of course, not every blog post has the potential to go viral, but contacting the right person will nonetheless help you reach a broad audience of interested prospects, and a boost in sales is next to guaranteed.
7. Update and Repurpose Old Content
Old content on your blog should not be underestimated. You should regularly revisit and revise it to check for outdated information. If a customer reads your article and finds out the facts in it are no longer correct, their trust in your brand’s credibility will diminish. Outdated information can hurt conversions and your webpages reputation.
Breathe New Life Into Old Content
When updating old articles, first double-check if all the facts are correct. Then you can supplement it with new information on the subject. Use the writing experience you’ve accumulated since you first wrote the article to improve it and add more value.
Once you’ve finished with the corrections, make sure you republish the old article and note that it has been updated to include new information and up-to-date research.
Updated content is proven to deliver strong results, bring fresh traffic to your webpage, and rank better in the SERPs.
Create eBooks From Content by Categories
If you’ve been posting regularly on your blog for the past few years, you’ve probably accumulated a fairly large number of publications thoroughly exploring subjects in your business niche from different angles.
With some revisions and editing, the content of your articles can be compiled into know-how ebooks. You can then offer the ebooks free to new subscribers or loyal customers, use them to generate leads, and showcase expertise in your field. Provided you put some extra work into page layout and design, you can sell the ebooks and not only bring prestige to your brand but make profits as well.
Recap
Your blog is a powerful tool and should be maintained properly. Writing quality articles is the top priority of your blogging strategy, but to make it count, your page has to be up-to-date and should follow the latest trends in the industry.
So, start with repurposing some old content, make it all mobile-friendly, add a pinch of backlinks and expert quotes, make a few awesome videos and podcasts, and do it all using WordPress. This recipe is guaranteed to skyrocket your business blog into 2022.
