Beginnerā€™s SEO Blogging Strategy
If you’re a small business trying to figure out this SEO-jazz then you’ve come to the right place.
Read on to find out how to create your own SEO content marketing strategy for a small business (with a free downloadable template!)
Or, if listening is more your thing, then have a listen to this blog post in podcast format!
Listen To The Episode On Spotify
What Is An SEO Strategy?
Put simply, an SEO strategy is promoting your website across the internet. You need to promote your online business with a solid SEO plan that with 3 key steps.
- Find the keywords that describe your website.
- Optimise your website with these keywords.
- Promote your website with helpful, useful content (blogging)
Just like you would with a brick-and-mortar business, promoting it with a marketing strategy involving flyers, word-of-mouth, paid ads, and SEO strategies is similar!
Keywords And Optimising Your Website
If you haven’t got this far yet, then you might want to head to the free SEO resources section to download the Small Business Optimisation Guide or maybe enrol in my Complete Beginner's SEO Course.
Why Do Most People Fail With Blogging?
Now we were going to we’re going to focus on how to promote your website across the internet.
This is the real bit of SEO.
How can you get people to know about your website?
Because the more people that know about your website, the more likely it is that Google will start taking notice of your website.
And then when people type in your keywords, because people are already talking about your website and you already doing that promotion, Google will then think, “Oh, hey people have been chatting about this website, so when someone types in this keyword, let’s put it in that front of their eyes.”
E.g. If you’re an e-commerce store selling lights, and you’re doing lots of promotion for your website about “where to buy the best lights.” The chances of your website showing up in Google are a lot higher.
You’re basically making your website a lot more visible, both to people and to Google Bots.
But how do you do that?
CONTENT MARKETING (Aka Blogging)
Most small businesses go wrong with their blogging because they failed to do a content strategy.
They failed to sit down and do the keyword research and think, okay?
What are people actually searching for related to my niche?
All too often. What I’ll see on business sites is two types of blog posts, Either just blow posts that the owner thinks are interesting, perhaps about a new project they’ve done.
Or they’ll be typing a blog post writing about the employee of the month.
No one’s trying to find “employee of the month” on Google.
So there is a place for that kind of blog post, but it’s not going to build organic traffic.
How To Create A Beginner’s SEO Content Strategy
- Keyword Research
- Content briefs
- Stay consistent
Those are really the three steps to a beginner’s SEO content marketing strategy.
Now, how do you actually do the keyword research and briefs?
Keyword Research Using answerthepublic.com
I don’t want to overwhelm you with how to do Keyword, research using expensive tools.
Instead what we’re going to do is a couple of hacks. So my personal favourite is probably going to answerthepublic.com.
There you get a few free paid searches every day.
Before you start typing things in, have a brainstorming session.
Have a think about exactly your industry.
Let’s use ‘hair care products for black and mixed race people’.
Type in your niche to answerthepublic.com and look at all the questions and ideas that come up!
Boom that’s the base of your content strategy!
So, that’s one great way to get blog ideas.
Identify Your Audience’s Pain Points
And then another great way to get blog ideas, which isn’t actually used that much, is by identifying your target audience’s pain points. And that’s not as difficult as it sounds. What you’re going to do is probably head to a review site like trustpilot.com.
Or if you know your competitors already then head to their Google My Business Profile pages.
Take a look at all their reviews and take note of what people are complaining about.
Is it the expensive cost of hair care products? Is it the false promises? Is it the lack of instructions on how to use the hair care products effectively?
These are all issues and pain points that you can address in your content marketing strategy by writing blog posts about them!
People Also Ask Google Feature
The ‘people also ask feature’ on Google, (or even just when you type in a search in Google, you’ll see that Google pops up with suggestions) are great ways to get keyword ideas for your blog posts.
Remember, your SEO content marketing strategy doesn’t have to be complicated.
The aim is to solve your audience’s pain points with useful, valuable content that helps them!
That is what Google is looking for when it decides who to rank higher.
How To Find Keyword Difficulty For Free
Once you’ve got a list of keywords and ideas, you’ll want to double-check that the keywords aren’t too difficult for you to rank.
If you have paid tools, then go ahead and use them!
But if you want to do it for free, then you could check out my SEO course where I teach you the sneaky way to use Google Ad Planner to do the keyword research for Free!
Or if you could do it manually, which is time-consuming, but works.
You need to analyze the SERPS (Search Engine Results Page).
For each of your keyword topics, type it into Google and take a look at the search results page.
Are they all big names like Amazon, The Daily Mail etc?
Or are the results from similar small businesses like yours?
If they are household names and large publishing websites, the keywords are probably going to be too difficult for your website to compete with at the moment. So discard that idea and keep searching until you find ideas that have small businesses in the search results!
Those are the ideas that you want!
2. Content Briefs
Next, take your chosen keywords from your list, and open up my The Plan Success SEO Content Plan Spreadsheet.
This is the exact spreadsheet and design that I use to craft content strategies for multimillion-pound global businesses.
Feel free to make a copy and use it for your own SEO Content Strategy.
a) Craft blog post titles, H1 titles, metadata and URL
Using the template Content Plan, fill out all the necessary columns with keyword related aspects.
Use the notes column to either write a small brief, or you could even use Chat GPT to help write a quick brief using your topic.
b) Produce high-quality content with
Then you’ve got to write the copy. Always aim to write over at least 750 words, but have a look at your competitor’s posts for each topic and see what the average word count is for each keyword.
PLEASE don’t use AI to write your blog posts.
AI-Written content is so obvious and will not rank on Google. In fact, if you are publishing spammy content, it could actually HARM your business and your SEO growth.
You’re going to need to make sure your content is interesting to read!
See how I use short paragraphs and sentences on this blog post? That’s on purpose because it’s a lot easier to skim read a post like that, and Google rewards time-spent on a page as a ranking signal.
So, anything you can do to increase engagement with interesting videos, podcast episodes, images, diagrams will help your blog posts.
c) Optimise your blog posts
Once you’ve written each blog post, optimise content for engagement with your keywords, and spicy language that converts.
Format your blog posts with short sentences, short paragraphs, plenty of BOLD and italic text to keep people reading.
Make sure you use the free blog post checklist guide to make sure each blog post is properly SEO optimised.
3. Stay Consistent!
Okay, so many small businesses will come to me, like, “Oh yeah, we do blogging”
And I’m like, “Okay, cool. When was the last blog post?”
Writing one blog post every six months is not consistent blogging. And that’s why you haven’t seen results.
How Often Do You Need To Blog For Results?
For your SEO content marketing strategy to work, you need to commit to regular blog posts, at least once a month, please.
Promote Your Content
Once you’ve written your blog post, you also need to make sure that you are shouting about it and sharing it everywhere.
This used to be easier back in the day, but it still does work, Google notices!
When you’re sharing everything and people are clicking, and the people that click the more likely you will be rewarded by Google.
Final Words
As you can see, a beginner’s SEO content marketing strategy doesn’t need to be complicated.
All you need to do is follow the process and stick to the plan.
Stay consistent and the results will come.
