When it comes to blog credibility and authority, there are two
main facets to keep in mind: search engine authority and the
reputation of your blog from your visitors. Building authority
with search engines is all about SEO and link building, but we’ll
dive deeper into this next week. The reputation of your blog is
all about your editorial strategy.
Think about it: If you read an article or blog post that doesn’t
cite sources, doesn’t include relevant facts and statistics, and
is full of typos, you’re not very likely to find it valuable or share
it with others. You might even be more likely to criticize the
author of that content.
Providing valuable content isn’t just about the writing, it’s also
about the editing. Let’s plan for your editorial strategy: what
are your standards and guidelines, and how will you keep your
team accountable for those standards?
Now that you’ve focused on how you’ll maintain the reputation
of your blog through the editing process, it’s time to move
onto building authority and a reputation for your blog through
search engine optimization and promotional strategies.
Who writes what?
The first step is planning who will write the blog content.
Make sure you have enough resources and time to keep
up with the content strategy you’ve set up. If you hope to
publish three blog posts a day but only have one blog post
author, you probably won’t be able to keep up with that
schedule for long. Take the time to plan out your resources,
and put your best content writers on the job.
How is your internal editing process handled?
It doesn’t matter how good your writers are, every piece of
writing needs to be edited and reviewed by an editor. Identify
a blog editor (even if it’s one of many tasks they handle) to
make sure no piece of writing gets published without being
fact-checked and edited for typos.
What are your editorial standards?
Every team that writes content needs an editorial standard
or style to look to for guidelines. Whether it’s grammatical
principles, citation guidelines, or capitalizations, make sure
you have guidelines for you team in place. Most English
online writing uses the Associated Press Stylebook (which
we use at HubSpot, too!).
How to Attract and Scale Traffic: SEO and
Promotional Guidelines
In the long term, blogging can help increase your website
traffic exponentially, but it will take some hard work on your
end. How will you disseminate and promote your posts and
make sure your content is ranking high on search engine
results pages? It takes a little search engine optimization
(SEO) and promotional effort to achieve this.
How to get started with SEO in the short term
How to do keyword research
SEO starts with ranking for keywords that your target audience
is searching for. The best way to rank for keywords is by
designing your blog posts based on the keywords you’re trying
to rank for. Start with keyword research, and use those
keywords to brainstorm and tailor your posts.
How to decide what to rank for
While researching, you’ll probably notice that some keywords
have very high search volume with high competition. This
makes them very difficult for any new publication to rank for
right off the bat. Look for long-tailed, niche keywords with
low competition to start. You may not generate high search
volume right away, but the more niche your keywords are,
the better qualified your visitors will be.
Optimize your blog posts for SEO
Once you’ve chosen keywords, it’s time to optimize each
blog post for SEO. Make sure you’re optimizing your meta
description, page title, keywords, URLs, etc. for the
keywords you’re trying to rank for. Want to learn more about
SEO? Check out this video and OnPage SEO template.
Strategies for promoting your blog
Social media
Once your blog launches, promote the launch and blog
posts on your social media accounts. Leverage your existing
audience to generate traffic to your new blog. Don’t forget to
use images, videos, and compelling copy in your posts!
Paid campaigns
Want to reach more people not already interacting with your
brand? Use paid campaigns on social media platforms like
Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to promote your
new blog.
Press release
The launch of your blog is a great time to write a press
release and announce the launch to the public. The more
backlinks you get to your blog on launch day, the better for
your SEO juice and the more traffic you’ll bring in.
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