Since search engines use keywords as a jumping off point when filtering results, it’s incredibly important to make sure that you know how to use keywords in your content correctly so that your content has a better chance of being found, indexed and ranked.

While there are many opinions on how to use keywords for SEO, I want to provide you with a basic and quick step-by-step guide on how to correctly and safely use keywords in any type of SEO content that you write/post.

How Many Keywords Should You Use On A Page?

When talking about how many keywords to focus on in a page, the answer depends a lot on the keywords you are wanting to use, how related they are to one another, and if they help push the message of the content forward. With the right keyword research, though, it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with a list of 5-10 keywords. That being said, it doesn’t mean you should focus on all 10!

Let’s first discuss the rules of keyword hierarchy. There are 3 main types of keywords for SEO:

1. Primary Keyword
2. Secondary Keywords
3. Additional Keywords

Your primary keyword should be the main focus of the entire article, so the title and ensuing content should reflect that. You can’t really write a good piece of content about 2 separate topics, so only one primary keyword should be used to drive the meat of the content forward.

Secondary keywords are complementary keywords to the primary one, but just slight variations. Usually a main topic will include 3-5 main talking points so using a handful of those secondary keywords makes sense.

Additional keywords are just any other related keywords that are phrased or spelled differently than the first two but mean the same thing. This is a catch-all net to get different variations of your main keywords in there to try and rank for one (or all) of them. Typically, “long-tail” keywords would be included in this category.

So Again, How Many Keywords for SEO?

In most cases, it would be 3-8 total, based on the length of the content. This breaks down into 1 primary keyword, 1-3 secondary keywords and 1-4 additional keywords. This gives you a fighting chance to start ranking for one of them and then further down the line you can even reoptimize your content based on what it’s currently ranking for at that time.

Using more than 8 or so keywords (assuming you don’t have either insanely long content or extremely short content) can come off as spammy. It’s also incredibly hard to naturally incorporate that many keywords for SEO into writing, and really isn’t necessary. What you’ll find is that related keywords will naturally and automatically come up when writing content based around a few really good keywords. Doing more than this usually hurts readability and sticks out like a sore thumb to readers as well as to Google’s page crawlers.

Where to Use Keywords for SEO in Your Content Writing

It’s easy to just say “you need to add keywords for SEO”, but implementing it is a different matter entirely. In fact, there are certain rules and best-practices for adding keywords to a website that can make your SEO efforts much more worthwhile.

You should insert keywords into your content writing using the following steps:

1. Use Keywords in Your Meta Description

This is one of the most basic ways to add keywords for SEO, but it’s often overlooked. The meta description acts as a simple summary to describe what the content is about, so placing the keyword in this summary helps Google to better filter your results. It’s a powerful way to get 1 or 2 of your most important keywords attached to the part of your page that’s directly served up by search engines.

As a refresher, a Meta Description is a 160 character (or 20-25 word) description of what your page is all about. This description is what shows up under a page name and URL when people search for a keyword phrase on search engines. Here is an example of a Meta Description as it appears on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

How to Use Keywords for SEO in a Meta Description

First, it’s important to have the right tools. If you’re using WordPress, try downloading the Yoast SEO Plugin. This little plugin allows you to quickly optimize your content for both SEO and readability, as well as gives you spots to enter in your Meta Description and SEO Title Tag (see step #2).

Next, when using SEO keywords in a meta description make sure to use the keyword at least once, but no more than twice. Be sure to prioritize a helpful, enticing description over keyword stuffing though, since this is the first thing someone will read before ever visiting your website.

SEO Pro Tip: If you can get a secondary keyword in your meta along with one instance of your primary, you’re killin’ it when it comes to using keywords for SEO.

2. Insert Keywords in Your SEO Title Tag

Keep in mind, I said SEO title, not your main article title. You’ll be optimizing that in just a minute. First things first, let’s get some helpful keyword data in your SEO title tag (also known as a meta title tag). This title tag is similar to the meta description in that it is the name of the page that users will see on search engine results pages (SERPs) when they search a keyword phrase. This title will be clickable from the SERPs and will take the user directly to your page. Here is an example:

How to Use Keywords for SEO in a Meta Title Tag

Similar to meta descriptions, you only have a few characters (about 50-60) to use when writing your SEO title tag. Because of that, you typically want to limit your title tag to just your primary keyword as well as your company name. This is the most concise, user-friendly and SEO-friendly way to execute it.

3. Use Keywords in Your Article Title

If possible, put the keyword in the title of your content. Since Google pairs this title header with your meta description to paint a picture of what your content is about, having the keyword in the title is very helpful as long as it can be used naturally.

If the keyword can’t be used naturally in the title, use a variation that still gets the point of the article across while hitting some of the main words from your keyword phrase. A little is better than nothing!

4. Use Keywords Within the First 200 Words

Many experts believe that Google gives more weight to the first 200 words in your content. The reason why is because usually the first 100-200 words of an article are where a content writer sets up the introduction of what will be discussed. Since most readers only continue on in an article if the introduction is good, it stands to reason that it could be a ranking factor as well.

Where to Use Keywords in an Article Introduction

Knowing that Google scrutinizes the first 200 words of a blog post, it’s very important to make sure that you put your primary keyword within the first sentence or paragraph, if at all possible, without sacrificing the quality of the content. Similarly, you should try to use at least one secondary keyword in the first 200 words as well (though not in the first sentence).

Keep in mind that Google is trying to get an overall picture of what the article is all about, and the way you outline your content really matters. You have to be careful to lead Google to the keywords you want it to focus on and not confuse it when optimizing content for keywords. This means your primary keyword should live in all the most important places, your secondary keywords next, and then any other additional keywords after that. Think of it as a pyramid of usage, with primary keywords at the top.

The focus of the article (and introduction) would be the top of the primary, filled in by secondary and lastly additional keywords to make up an entire keyword structure and strategy for that piece.

 

5. Insert Keywords Naturally Throughout the Article

In a seemingly SEO-centered digital world, it’s easy to forget that the reader actually comes first. You should never compromise your reader’s ability to be engaged, informed and enlightened by your content because of bad keyword placement. But believe me, it happens all the time. Here is one solution to help you write your keywords more naturally in your content.

Use Stop Words in Awkward Keyword Phrases

One way to help you write keywords more naturally is to utilize “Stop Words” in your keyword writing. These are words that can be added within keyword phrases to help them read more naturally without decreasing their ranking value.

For instance, if you had a keyword phrase you were targeting that reads “plumbing Salt Lake City“, there is literally no way you can insert it into your content exactly as-is without it either looking like a typo or a blatant keyword insertion. The better way to add keywords for SEO is to use a stop word in that phrase. Adding the stop word “in”, would now have it read “plumbing in Salt Lake City”, which can much more easily be inserted into natural writing. Try it out!

You can easily find a list of commonly used stop words you can utilize when adding keywords to your website.

How Many Keywords Should You Put in Your Content?

This is a great question that’s often discussed and argued about among SEOs. The real answer is that it completely depends on the types of keywords you have and the length of your content.

The general rule, however, is you should try to include your primary keyword about once every 100-150 words. So if you’re writing a 1000 word article, inserting the primary keyword around 7-10 times would be appropriate. Also keep in mind that you want to fairly distribute these instances of the keyword throughout the article. You don’t want all 7 instances of your primary keyword in the same 200 word section or you lose the flow of a consistent keyword theme throughout.

Secondary and Additional keywords, however, shouldn’t be in the article more than your primary keyword. Whatever your baseline is for using your primary keyword in your content, decrease by about 25% for secondary and another 25% for additional keywords for SEO. Then you can keep a healthy keyword structure that Google crawlers should easily be able to follow.

6. Use Keywords in the Last 200 Words

Similar to how an introduction of an article is important to keyword rankings because it sets the framework for the content, it could be argued that the conclusion (or last 200 words) is just as important, if not more important. For this reason, try to include your primary keyword again near the last or second-to-last paragraph and include a secondary keyword if possible.

For blog posts, it’s usually good practice to include a call-to-action (or CTA) in the very last paragraph, so if you can fit the primary keyword there, great! If not, get it in that second-to-last paragraph as we talked about above.

7. Use Keywords in Headings (H1s, H2s, H3s, etc)

Headings are a formatting tool that most text editors offer to allow you to help break up your text. From a purely visual standpoint, they are a must-have. Huge chunks of paragraph content with no end in sight are intimidating and often skipped completely. Using headings to break up content allows you to visually move the reader along to the most important points, or the ones they are most interested in.

From an SEO standpoint, headings might be even more important. The HTML tags used to identify H1s, H2s, H3s, etc are also ranking signals for Google to know what’s most important in the content. Adding keywords to headings in content may be the single best way to try and rank for multiple keywords. The more content you have, the more headings you have – so longer content usually ranks better than shorter content.

When a keyword is used in headings, it brings more emphasis to the meaning and importance of the keywords. This helps the search engines to know how relevant those keywords are to your content. Here’s an example of where to find heading formats in a text editor:

How to Add Keywords to Heading 1s (H1s)

Heading 1s, or H1s, are typically reserved just for the main title of the article. If you use multiple H1s in your content, you’re basically asking Google to get confused. Instead, just stick to a single H1 as your article title with your primary keyword included.

How to Use Keywords in Heading 2s (H2s)

Heading 2s, or H2s, are where you can do the bulk of inserting important keywords. H2s are the headings that break up the main sections of your content and usually come into play every couple hundred words. For a 1000 word article, you can plan on around 3-5 of these H2s. this is where you’d want to include the primary keyword again in one of them and reserve the rest for secondary keywords you are targeting.

How to Insert Keywords to Heading 3s (H3s)

Heading 3s, or H3s, are used to help break up and list individual points in the main sections. You might find H3s in the form of numbered lists or clarifying sections to an H2 heading. This is another good place for an instance of the primary, but probably a better spot for secondary keywords and any additional keywords you have.

8. Use Keywords in Anchor Text Links

When a keyword is used as an anchor text link in your content, it implies that there is a place to find even more information regarding that word. This helps to place added emphasis on the keyword and the relevance it has to the content it’s being linked to. So how does that apply to the article you’re currently writing?

Well, it doesn’t. Not exactly. Using keywords as anchor text links in your articles can help OTHER pages on your site. This is also known as creating an internal link structure showing Google where the most important articles are for exact keyword phrases. If you can plan your content accordingly, you know you can use anchor text links of certain keyword phrases to drive the authority of other “pillar” pieces.

SEO Pro Tip: Do NOT use your primary keyword (or variation of it) in anchor text that is linking to another page unless you’ve completely given up hope of ranking for that keyword on that page. Doing this basically tells Google to ignore that keyword on the page you’re working on and to look for it in the page you’re linking to. This is a common mistake that a lot of content marketers make. Instead, find a related topic within your article with an associated keyword that you can link to another page to help improve it’s authority. For any of the main keywords you hope to rank for on the page you’re working on, DO NOT LINK out to other pages using them as the anchor text.

I won’t get too much more into the specifics of link structures in this article, but if you’re interested then check out what Neil Patel has to say.

9. Use Keywords in Image Alt-tags

First of all, if you aren’t using images in your content writing then PLEASE do so! I can’t overemphasize how many opportunities you’re missing out on if you aren’t using some kind of visual cue to help educate, engage and inform your readers and prospective clients. Images and content writing (and videos for that matter) are a perfect marriage when it comes to user engagement.

How to Use SEO Keywords in Alt Tags

In terms of keyword usage, using your keywords in an image alt-tag can help it to be shown during image searches. This can help users to be led to your content in a round-about way.

Not only do images help break up the text and give it color, personality and sex appeal, they also can be a great opportunity for you to add keywords for SEO to your website. Take advantage of putting images in your articles and the blessed alt-text you’re allowed to manipulate.

10. Use Keywords in URL

Last, but not least, when it comes to adding keywords to your website to maximize your onsite SEO, you should always try to put your primary keyword in the main page URL of the article you’ve written. If you’ve done the steps above and put your primary keyword in the title of your article, it should be in the URL automatically when you go to publish it. But even if your title is similar to the main keyword but doesn’t include it completely, you should tweak your page URL to include it after the fact.  Here is an example:

There has often been talk among SEOs and content marketers of whether or not it’s necessary to put your primary keyword into your page URL and if it affects rankings. Based on a study we did here at BKA Content, analyzing around 60 posts over a 6 month period, the posts we had with a keyword as a part of the page URL were overwhelmingly ranking for that exact keyword, where posts that didn’t have the targeted keyword in the URL did not. That’s enough evidence for me that it IS effective to include the keyword in the page URL.

SEO Pro Tip: During that same content marketing study we did here at BKA Content, there were some concerns that changing the URL after the fact might hurt any existing rankings we had for that page and that the page might not recover. After changing the URL after the fact (while always including a redirect from the original URL), there was always an immediate drop in tracked rankings in our keyword tracking tool, but it never affected our actual site traffic. In fact, almost every page that had the URL adjusted ended up rebounding in about 3-4 weeks in our keyword tracking tools to rank for more keywords than they were originally.

Track, Refine and Use Different Keywords If Necessary

Last of all, don’t forget that you can go back and re-optimize your posts in a few months once the dust has settled. Give your content about 3 months before you decide to make any real changes, then go and see what keywords it’s ranking for and what’s gained traction, and optimize further from there. If your post is ranking better for a secondary or additional keyword than the initial “primary keyword”, then switch your primary keyword for SEO!

Just be sure to be careful about making massive changes or you could end up capsizing the entire boat. Engage in the art of SEO maintenance and make small changes to optimize keywords and see if the results are favorable. Do this over and over again and you’ll have a really fine-tuned content marketing strategy on your hands.

Conclusion: How to Use Keywords for SEO

• Focus on 3-8 keywords total per article (primary, secondary and additional).
• Add keywords to Meta Descriptions, Meta Title Tags and page URLs.
• Use keywords in title, headers, Alt-Image tags.
• Insert keywords in the first and last paragraphs and evenly throughout.
• If it doesn’t work naturally, don’t use it. Keywords should be relevant and highly applicable to your content, if the word is odd or doesn’t fit, use the correct version of it that makes sense or throw it out.
• While keywords are great, the meat of the content is the most important thing you should focus on. Keyword-riddled content helps nobody and Google will not rank your content unless it helps somebody.

So there you have it, basically everything you could ever want to know about how to use SEO keywords in your writing. Have anything to add about using keywords for SEO? Leave it in the comments below!

Good marketing content should make things happen. That could be persuading a potential client to click to visit a website, add something to the cart, pick up the phone to call you, or more. Many elements go into how an SEO content writing service actually does that and the content word count of any type of SEO article is one important element.

 

What Are The Correct Word Counts for SEO Content?

When it comes to SEO and optimizing content for search engines, the simple rule is that more is better. More content around a subject (and related subjects) gives you more indexable space to add keywords and show Google that your piece of content is all about the topic you’re trying to rank for. That being said, more content isn’t always better when it comes to the type and purpose of the content. A 1000-2000 word blog would be acceptable because a reader expects to find out all the answers to their questions in that medium. A 1000-2000 word product description, on the other hand, is sure to turn off readers immediately and push them over to competitor sites.

You may need multiple pieces of SEO content on more or less the same topic, but exactly what is to be written and the SEO word count length will vary greatly. Some things like meta descriptions or Twitter posts will have forced limits but for most things, you are left on your own to determine the content word count lengths you want.

Following are some industry guidelines to help you get started. You can use these SEO content word counts when you write your own content or when you work with a professional article writing service.

 

On-Page SEO Content

Website content’s job is to create a home base for your most sought after organic keywords and to move people along in the buying cycle. Every page should give just enough information to accurately answer a specific question and instill the reader to click to the next step or to call you. The content should also be long enough to be able to insert your top keywords naturally without the content sounding spammy. Website content is usually written by skilled copywriters that can engage readers while expertly inserting keywords in as concise a way as possible.

How Long Should Web Page Content Be?

In general, web pages should have an SEO word count between 200 and 400 words for the main body of content. This, of course, does not include a sidebar or navigation content. Exceptions can also be made for longer “how it works” type content, that goes into more depth on specific services or selling benefits.

 

E-commerce SEO Content

Some exceptions to the above guideline (when it comes to on-page content) include category or product description pages on e-commerce sites. Typically, product and category descriptions are meant to be succinct and highlight only what you need to know. These small descriptions aren’t the place for flowery, run-on sentences. You usually only have a few seconds to tell someone what the product is and why they should buy it. Being concise about benefits, features and selling points is a must in e-commerce content.

How Long Should Product Descriptions Be?

Product descriptions are going to be the e-commerce content type with the shortest SEO word count. The ideal SEO word counts for individual product descriptions would be between 50 and 250 words. Most of these words are going to come in the form of bullet points and even incomplete sentences in order to drive home the point.

The reason for this is that your product page likely already has images, product specs, customer reviews and pricing listed. The only thing left is to sell consumers on are the specific benefits and features as quickly as possible. When people are shopping online, they are usually quickly comparing between a few sites. Getting consumers the information they need as quickly and simply as possible is to your advantage.

How Long Should Category Descriptions Be?

The ideal word SEO count range for a category description would be between 100 and 300 words. Category descriptions are a place where you can set the stage for the use-case of multiple products as well as highlight why potential consumers should buy them from you. Since you’re talking about more than just a single product, you have a little more leeway to be able to add extra words (and keywords) for SEO benefit.

 

White Papers

White papers showcase your thought leadership in a given area and establish you as the expert. They are also used to help explain a complicated subject, service or product in a problem/solution format.

How Long Should a White Paper Be?

How long should a white paper be? The simple answer is that your white paper word count will likely be longer than most types of SEO content.  A good white paper should have an SEO word count of at least 1,000 words in length but could be close to 4000 or 5000 words, in order to provide the level of detail truly needed here.

It’s also good practice to include a lot of cited research and images to illustrate points in order to make your white paper word count that much more effective.

 

Informational SEO Articles

In a way, you can think of these SEO documents as condensed white papers. They should always provide very useful and specific information but in fewer words. Optimizing content specifically around a single keyword phrase with a lower competition difficulty level may allow you to start ranking organically without as many words.

How Long Should an SEO Article Be?

SEO articles should focus on a specific keyword phrase, and not be as broad as a guide or as extensive as a how-to blog post. Most SEO article’s word count should be between 500 and 1500 words.

This means the message and content of these SEO articles will be more focused than in white papers in order to get the point across succinctly. On top of that, utilizing SEO posts in this way gives you a chance to still get some SEO ranking from long-tail keywords while also helping you stay in budget (since most content writing services charge per word).

 

Blog Posts

Let’s face it—some blogs exist almost solely for the purpose of boosting SEO. Other blogs are really intended to be read, boosting credibility and follower loyalty. The best blog posts, however, do both. Because of this, there is no one-size-fits-all word count for blog posts. In general, the blog word count of newsworthy posts designed to fuel the part of the SEO engine that rewards fresh content can be as short as 500 words but should be created more frequently.

Blogs designed to be more thought-provoking—even controversy generating—can be as long or longer than SEO articles or even white papers. The longer the blog word count, the more captivating it should be. An integral part of this is the voice used to keep readers interested.

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

If you’re looking to create informational content that also helps you rank for high-volume industry terms, then longer SEO word counts are necessary. So how long should a blog post be? According to recent studies, the average word count length of a blog post that was winning the top spot in search engine rankings for keyword phrases was 2000+ words. It’s good SEO word count practice to save your longer blog posts for your more in-depth guides so as not to overwhelm your audience with too much content in every post.

 

Press Releases

Press releases are meant to be a formal way to introduce a company change, new product, key employee, or any other relevant story pertaining to a company or organization. A written press release is designed to cover the who, what, why, where, when and how of the information. They also have some very specific formatting elements that need to be followed in order to be deemed as such.

How Long Should a Press Release Be?

The ideal SEO word count for a press release is usually in the 400-500 word range. This allows you to have enough words to fill out each section of the press release (think title, description, body, boilerplate, etc.) without losing the impact of the announcement because it’s buried too deep somewhere in a massive online document.

 

Match SEO Word Counts to Content Purpose

At the end of the day, the most grammatically perfect sentence is not at the heart of what SEO content writing is about. Matching the message, audience, vehicle and SEO word count length are what will deliver the results that you need. This combination of the art and science of writing is what a content writing service thrives on. We live and breathe this every day, making sure that our SEO content does what our clients need it to do.

Do you want to create amazing content that people will remember long after they’ve left your site? Are you interested in producing marketing deliverables that are shareable, unique and engaging (and can easily be branded to increase exposure for your company)? If these are your goals – and they should be if you care about bringing more traffic to your site and increasing leads – you need to create an infographic.

 

What Is an Infographic?

An infographic is a graphic that displays useful data in a creative way. With a unique representation of data that you or other sources collect, you can portray information clearly and artistically. A professional graphic grabs the attention of readers and helps them understand the knowledge you want to present.

This style of imagery isn’t just a way to mix things up, there are proven benefits of including infographics. A HubSpot study found that articles generated 178% more inbound links than normal when they included an infographic. That’s huge in the SEO world! Articles with visual representations of data also got a whopping 72% more views on average.

 

Why Are Infographics Useful?

Blog content is a great foundation for a content marketing strategy. However, people will only remember so much of the text content they read, while 80 percent of information conveyed visually is retained. Infographics still require the great writing and research that you use in your written content, but they’re laid out and designed in a way that allows people to quickly understand information and remember it for longer.

 

How to Make a Good Infographic

If you’re new to creating infographics, you may wonder how to make a good infographic. Don’t worry, there are plenty of tools out there to help even beginners create nice-looking graphics. And our guide can help you decide what to include.

If you’d prefer to stay hands-off, these tips are still helpful for compiling research, creating written content and working with a designer to bring your idea to life. With that being said, here are the seven elements used to create effective infographics for your website.

 

1. A Well-Thought-Out Infographic Topic

Choosing a topic for an infographic is really not that different from choosing a topic for a blog post. In fact, one great method of choosing topics is to USE the information from your blog posts. Go through some of your top-performing blogs and consider how you’d break out the information into an infographic format. Any blog post that has well-structured lists, factual or numerical data, or tells a story are great places to start.

Aside from that, you should select an infographic topic that will matter to your readers and that hasn’t already been overused by others. Think about your industry and come up with infographic topics that people should know about. Whether you’re answering a question, displaying important new research or explaining a difficult concept, it can be useful to readers.

Make sure that whatever infographic topic you choose, you take a structured approach to presenting it to your readers. Instead of simply throwing together a bunch of statistics on a topic area, aim to find the story or the unique focus within the data. When appropriate, give context to the data you’re displaying and show your readers why it’s applicable to them.

 

2. Infographic Structure

So how do you create the actual infographic? Essentially, infographics are about telling a story with data, but you don’t always have to take the same approach. According to Alberto Cairo in this Marketing Land article, infographics need structure, but not necessarily a narrative structure. Basically, your image needs to make sense in terms of what information you include and how it’s arranged.

This infographic from Funders and Founders, for example, presents productivity tips broken up into a variety of categories depending on what the tips pertain to.

Keep in mind that nice infographic structure is all relative. Some really great infographics are simple and easy to get through, others are more colorful and data-heavy. As far as deciding what design elements to use in order to create a structure, the sky really is the limit. One starting point is to find other good infographics that have resonated with you and follow a similar pattern or style.

 

3. Legitimate Research and Facts That Wow

Thorough research is important in all content, but in an infographic where interesting facts and figures are usually the main focus, it’s mandatory. After you’ve chosen a subject and a focus, find the data that supports your facts.

If possible, find statistics that your company has already gathered. Check out interesting analytics or surveys you have conducted, and put them into a graphic. However, it isn’t a prerequisite to create your own data for an infographic. Find interesting facts from others who have taken the time and effort to conduct surveys and tests. When possible, find the primary source of the research instead of citing a secondary source (someone who mentioned the primary resource on their site or in their content).

Prioritize NEW Statistics in Your Infographics

With so many infographics out there, you’ll probably notice that a lot of them repeat the same statistics. Some overlap is inevitable, but you should make an effort to find information that is new or surprising to your audience.

Find something that helps them or enriches their life in some way whether that means improving their work strategies, helping them do something better or more efficiently, or informing them about something they didn’t know. Ask yourself: how does this infographic help my target audience?

Include Sources

It’s also good to include a list of all your sources at the end of your infographic for two reasons: first, so you can give proper credit to the people that did the work to find those statistics; and second, so people that enjoy your content can find out more about it from the sources you consulted when making it.

 

4. Write Quality Infographic Content

Whether you’ve created content just for this image or you are taking from an existing article, infographic content needs to be altered to fit the format. Flowing sentences don’t work for this style. Instead, stick to strong verbs and concise wording. For example, if you’re writing about the process of putting on a mask, make each step comprehensible but short. People want to absorb as much information as they can in as few words as possible.

A quick review of the examples out there shows that there’s a lot of variation in how much text infographics contain compared to the amount of visual imagery. There’s no one right answer to how much text you should include, but it does need to be high-quality and error-free writing.

Pick Good Data

If you’re reusing content from a blog post to make your infographic, the most important task is to pare that content down and use only the most impactful sections for the text of your image. A smart method is to find sections that are data-rich and group those stats together in an image. If your infographic isn’t focused on numbers or data, pick content that is useful and relevant to the topic you’ve chosen.

Create an Infographic Outline First

If you’re creating an infographic from scratch, consider writing up a bare-bones outline for the information you want to include. Write small blocks of text and bullet points that could be used to introduce your content and state your data. Then during the design stage, you can take the outline and rework it into a full infographic, making any needed changes at this point.

 

5. Thoughtful, Innovative Infographic Design

Whether you’re designing your infographic or you’re handing that part over to a professional designer, have an open mind to all sorts of design, from photographs to flat design to illustrations.

There are many ways to categorize the information you gather. Visme recognized the five most common ways:

• Alphabetically: Just like this bullet point list, you can categorize the information on your infographics A-Z. This helps readers follow without too much effort, and it’s a great way to know what to put first.
• Categorically: Put data in categories, so readers know where to look. If you are looking at a variety of data, this is a great way to organize your thoughts.
• Chronologically: If you are creating an infographic about history or have specific dates, a timeline or other chronological order is the way to go.
• Geographically: Studying demographics in specific areas or gathering surveys from different cities? Group by city, state or nation.
• Hierarchically: Readers easily move from each item to the next, and they know exactly which pieces of information are the most important.

With these types of categories in mind, you can start designing in a creative way. No matter how you organize data, design your infographic in a way that is engaging and original. Here are a few examples to give you ideas for your own project.

Great Infographic Examples

This example from Optics Central discusses the different phases of the moon using Oreos as a visual. Similar to an object lesson you’d use in a child’s classroom, this infographic teaches concepts in a simple (and delicious) way.

Here’s another example of using photographs (and food references) to display information. This infographic, from LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, based off of content from HubSpot, shows how to create the perfect mix of blog content.

This example from DesignMantic features a pleasing, retro-style design and a warm, slightly muted color palette.

Another important thing to remember about infographic design is that it should bear some resemblance to your branding. This example from Classy shows how fonts and colors in an infographic can match your brand identity.

When you’re ready to design your infographic, you have a lot of options. If you have a graphic designer on staff, work with them to translate your ideas into a graphic. If you don’t have access to an in-house designer, you can find a freelancer or use a web-based infographic-making tool such as Canva or DesignWizard.

The Right Design

Each design approach has pros and cons. The main con to hiring a designer is that their services may be costly, though if you want professional, high-quality design, the cost is probably going to be worth it. Making the infographic yourself will be much cheaper, but if you don’t have strong design skills, the quality of the finished product might not be what you were hoping for.

Whether you get the help of a professional designer or use your own team, it’s a good idea to have a brand style guide. This is a thorough explanation of your brand: the colors, fonts and styles of the company as well as the voice and tone you are trying to portray. Designers will use this as their resource as they create infographics, making the image fit naturally with the rest of your website. This is a great way to develop your brand as you continue to add more content, graphics and videos.

 

6. A Thorough Review Process

Typos aren’t acceptable in infographics any more than they are in written blog content. Before you deem your picture ready to publish, make sure it has gone through just as much review as any of the other content you put out. In addition to proofing grammar and spelling, make sure that your infographic is fact-checked and has a logical flow.

It can be helpful to pass your content off to someone who’s not as familiar with it for review and to get a sense of how your infographic will be received by your customers.

 

7. A Promotion Strategy

The best infographics won’t get any traction if you don’t have the right promotion strategy for them. There are several sites that you can submit infographics to for wider reach, and of course, you should include your graphic on your blog, in addition to promoting it on social media and via email. If you create a joint infographic with a business partner, your options for promotion double as you can both use all the options at your disposal to get more eyes on your image.

 

Start Creating Great Infographics!

Infographics are great as standalone content, as a complement to another piece of content or as a way of recycling old content. They’re attractive, popular, shareable, engaging and can reach and influence people in a way that text content can’t. Use the tips above to come up with great infographic topics and start producing more effective visual content for your company.

And in case you’ve already forgotten what you’ve read, here’s an infographic to remind you of what to include in an infographic:

Does your business run on Shopify? This powerful suite of e-commerce tools generates an estimated $20 million in revenue each and every month, thanks to its robust and intuitive small business offerings.

Whether you’re already attuned to the wonders of Shopify or you’re still seeking a platform for your growing endeavor, knowing how to start a blog on Shopify can help you harness the power of content marketing to get noticed and build authority among your audience.

Follow these steps to add a blog to your Shopify store, then gather inspiration from five awesome examples of Shopify blogs done right.

 

First, Why Start a Blog on Shopify?

Content marketing helps attract new readers and guide them through your sales funnel, turning idle visitors into leads and then into customers. By publishing regular blog content on your Shopify site, you improve SEO performance, boosting your Google ranking and putting your store in front of fresh eyes.

At the same time, your targeted content will solve reader problems, fostering a sense of trust in your brand that helps them feel connected to you. Because this type of blog takes advantage of your organic Shopify content, you’ll get healthy, sustainable traffic that will help your company thrive. If you’re intrigued, this guide provides everything you need to know about launching your Shopify blog.

While many Shopify sites sell physical products, you can also sell services through this platform. Examples of thriving Shopify service sites include rentals, lessons, classes, tours, ticketed experiences, memberships, consultations and even digital products like ebooks, templates and other downloads.

 

How To Start a Blog on Shopify

Ready to set up a blog on Shopify? With consistent effort and quality content, your blog can flourish. Keep in mind that there are many things you can do to improve traffic, such as using strategic keywords and adding images. Using blog content services can also help you publish more quality content.

But since you’re here, we’ll show you how to get started.

 

1. Set Up Your Blog

First, log in to your Shopify Admin Account. This gives you access to the backend of Shopify, where you can change designs, write content and add features to your website.

Next, check out the right column and click on Online Store > Blog Posts. From here, click on Add blog post.

Now, you can create a blog post. Similar to WordPress, this template will allow you to add a creative title, content with formatting options and a featured image. Notice that on the far right, you can choose when to publish the blog and how to categorize.  Shopify has an automatic “news” section that you can classify your blog as, or you can choose others. Tags can be a helpful way to categorize your blog.

 

2. Set Goals for Your Blog Content

Because your blog can help generate sales and increase traffic, it’s important to create a content strategy. Not only will an organized content plan help you direct your writing efforts effectively, but it also streamlines the writing process. If you know what you’re going to write about and how to write good blog posts, you don’t have to spend as much time worrying, researching and brainstorming.

Start simple by setting a few goals for your Shopify blog. For example, maybe you want to increase your new monthly leads by 300% or double your sales in the next quarter. Your content should support the goals you set, which should ideally be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART).

Because you can tag your blog posts, this gives you categories that help readers find the blogs they want to read. Consider what main types of content you’ll produce. For example, if you own a baking business, you may want an entire category devoted to recipes. If you sell guitars, a third of your blog content could be guitar-playing tips. Tag your content so that readers can find a large selection of similar blog posts that address their needs.

However, try not to have too many tags, or it can get confusing. Many Shopify blogs stick to 1-2 overarching tags that help readers find what they’re looking for. Additionally, keep the tag names simple for ease of access.

 

3. Start Creating Blog Content

When you have your Shopify blog in place, creating content is as easy as visiting the Blog posts menu and clicking the Create blog post button. From there, you can add text, images, videos and links. You can also select an excerpt from the post to entice readers to click through and integrate tools to help search engines index and rank the post.

If you prefer to use an external service or your business already has a blog, you don’t need to use the site’s blogging software to know how to start a blog on Shopify successfully. You can also add a link to your existing blog on a service like Blogger or WordPress. Visit the Navigation area of your Shopify admin page to create a link to your blog on your main store page or within your navigation menu. Then, select the appropriate menu and click Add Menu Item to make a link for your blog. Save your work and you’re ready to connect with your readers!

 

SEO Tips for Your Shopify Blog

Blogs are a great way to direct traffic to your website, but only if they are optimized correctly. SEO plays a huge factor in helping a blog post be seen by interested readers. Here are a few SEO tips you can implement as you create each blog post:

• Avoid using H1s within the body of the text. Headings are used to create a hierarchy within the blog post, which improves the readability of your content. Headings also help search engines know what the most important parts of your blog post are. H1s should only be used for the title of your blog post.
• Use paragraphs, bullet points and white space. Help readers follow along by breaking up the text. Formatting your text in this way also improves SEO.
• Add images. You might see a pattern emerging; search engine optimization works hand in hand with reader optimization. Pictures can break up the text and make it more interesting for readers while also improving SEO.

As you combine readability, formatting and high-quality content, you will increase both your search engine rankings and overall readership.

 

4. Build a Shopify Post Calendar

Maybe you already have a notebook bursting with blog ideas for your business. If you haven’t been brainstorming topics, now’s the time to plan content that will paint your brand and your products in the best possible light. When learning how to start a blog on Shopify, consider writing (or hire a blog service to write) posts that:

• Cover the design and manufacturing process for your product.
• Showcase the faces behind your brand.
• Illustrate various uses of the product and highlight fans of your brand with case studies.
• Show potential buyers how to use your product.
• Describe pain points that your product can solve.

Remember that you can also publish posts that aren’t directly related to your products. Evergreen articles about your industry and topics related to your brand improve your SEO rankings while cementing your place as an expert in the minds and hearts of your audience. Regardless of the topic, however, each piece of content you publish on your blog should directly tie back to one of your established content marketing goals.

Once you have your list of post ideas in place, schedule them on a calendar to keep your editorial plan on track. While you can adjust posting frequency and schedule based on your needs and preferences, most businesses publish weekly or twice-weekly posts once they understand how to start a blog on Shopify.

 

5. Develop Your Blog Content

Whether you plan to hire a blog service or rely on a staff writer, draft a thorough content brief for each planned post. This should include details about the topics, desired links, SEO keywords, length, and ancillary items such as photos or metadata.

As you decide how to develop each content asset, don’t forget to thoroughly audit your existing publications. You can reduce, reuse and recycle in a variety of ways, such as:

• Breaking longer blog posts into bite-size social media teasers
• Updating and republishing outdated items
• Pulling together several related posts into a long-form blog, whitepaper or ebook
• Changing the format of a content asset, such as developing an infographic from an old blog
• Curating guest posts from other content creators within your niche, especially those with whom you’d like to build a partnership.

If content writing seems overwhelming, don’t discount the benefits of building a blog for your brand. Instead, look into outsourcing content to take advantage of the expertise and convenience of a professional blog service. You’ll have access to the resources of a full-service content shop without the cost of hiring an in-house writer or the stress of adding “blog writer” to your long list of roles.

 

6. Attract Readers to Your Shopify Blog

Learning how to start a blog on Shopify won’t have much impact on your business without a comprehensive promotion plan. Spread the word about your brand-new blog on all your business’s social media platforms, including but not limited to Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. If you publish an email newsletter, make sure to announce your new content outlet to your dedicated subscribers.

You can also connect with potential new customers on the places where they hang out online. Look for message boards dedicated to your niche area on forums such as Quora and Reddit.

 

7. Review Benchmarks for Success

Remember those goals you set when you started learning how to start a blog on Shopify? Pull them out at the end of the first month of blogging and see where you are with your progress. Consider the following questions:

• Am I achieving my SMART goals?
• Are these goals helping my brand and generating customers in the way I want?
• How can I refine/update my goals to better fit my needs?

Actively improving your content strategy will help you get the most success out of your Shopify blog. To see the results of blogging efforts, many blog publishers use tools like Google Analytics to gather information about visitor engagement, traffic and page views.

5 Great Shopify Blog Examples

Don’t just take our word, Shopify blogs can be great assets to your website. Here are five great examples of effective Shopify blogs that engage readers and bring in more traffic:

1. Gaiam

If you’ve ever taken a yoga class or two, you’ve probably heard of Gaiam. This retailer specializes in high-quality yoga mats, apparel and accessories for a lifestyle centered on wellness.

Gaiam’s Shopify blog provides content to match, seamlessly tying into their merchandise with yoga how-tos for beginners and yoga education for special interest groups like swimmers, runners and seniors. These posts are interspersed with aspirational, lifestyle-based pieces about topics like living an authentic life and tapping into the benefits of meditation.

Gaiam’s mix of content drives SEO optimization and promotes conversion, all while positioning the company as a trusted authority in the yoga and wellness world. If you want to know how to start a blog on Shopify, this successful example is a great guide to look at.

 

2. Au Lit Fine Linens

You might not think that a blog about bedding could be compelling, the Shopify blog by this brand, is just that. Educational topics on the company’s Between the Sheets blog cover both sound sleep and sophisticated loungewear, gifts and home décor (notice the strategic tags that categorize blog posts). Readers will learn how to select and purchase sheets, duvets, quilts and related products while thinking about the quality of their sleep and the serenity of their space.

Like the content from Gaiam, the Au Lit Fine Linens blog provides problem-solving information with an aspirational quality. The soft colors and soothing tone of Between the Sheets appeal to clients who want to create a luxe sleeping space. The content here sells a lifestyle as well as a product line, with a diverse range of content types like tip lists, infographics and charts.

 

3. VineBox

The Shopify blog by this subscription wine service shows off a brand that truly knows its readership. Wine fans who already subscribe or might sign up for VineBox consider themselves connoisseurs, and the company’s content gives potential and current customers the knowledge they need to fill the role in real life.

Short, snappy content makes the sometimes-complex concepts behind wine accessible to readers, with fun facts about the flavor notes in different bottles, details about the history of grapes used to make wines and dinner-party pairings to impress guests. The VineBox blog acts as a mentor for those who fancy becoming solo sommeliers, using the wines they get in their subscription boxes of course. Even if you’re not a fan of wine, you can learn a lot about how to write intoxicating content for your blog on Shopify.

 

4. PrettyLitter

Who would want to read a blog about cat litter? No matter how potentially unappealing your product may seem from a content standpoint, the PrettyLitter Shopify blog sells its products effectively by serving as a one-stop-shop for cat owners. Visitors will find everything from how to choose a cat to fit their lifestyle to caring for an elderly pet, serving their readers by addressing common pet owner pain points. At the same time, this brand increases its SEO by ranking for industry keywords that might otherwise be the sole landscape of larger businesses.

 

5. Ridgewallet

The Ridge by Ridgewallet is a great combination of class and modern design. This company sells metal wallets that limit clutter, protect your credit cards and look great in your pocket. Many articles are focused on educating readers on the benefits of using a metal wallet and lifestyle tips.

The theme of this blog is professional, intelligent and simplistic. The combination of colors, images and persuasive content can be a great inspiration to you as you consider design elements for your blog.

 

Hire a Blog Service for Your Shopify Blog

Now that you know how to start a blog on Shopify and you’ve seen a few blog examples, you’ll need content that can cast your business in the best possible light. If you don’t have a writer on staff or the time to create your own content, consider hiring a blog service like the team at BKA Content.

We offer several solutions to streamline your content marketing efforts, including monthly blog subscriptions, self-serve content and managed services with a dedicated account representative to guide your strategy. Get in touch today to learn more about how BKA Content can take your new Shopify blog to the next level.

Search engine optimization and copywriting are two essential elements of the marketing mix for modern brands. You need to be able to attract organic website visitors and deliver persuasive marketing messages if you hope to grow your business. However, many business owners and marketers treat these as two separate functions. In reality, effective digital marketing relies heavily on SEO copywriting, a combination of the two disciplines.

Understanding how copywriting supports SEO and vice versa can help you to better market your business in the digital age. Below is an overview of how SEO and copywriting interact with and enhance each other as well as a short guide to getting started.

 

Understanding SEO and Copywriting

To understand SEO copywriting, you first need to understand SEO and copywriting individually. With that insight, seeing how the pieces of the overall puzzle fit together is much easier.

 

Search Engine Optimization

When you search for something on Google or another search engine, a complex algorithm analyzes billions of web pages to find the most relevant ones. This process happens slightly differently for each search engine, but the core functionality is the same: the engine finds pages in its database that may be applicable and ranks them based on what it thinks will be the most relevant to the user.

According to Google, there are over 200 factors considered when ranking search results. Plus, the number of web pages that have been crawled and analyzed by Google is enormous. Google is very secretive about how the algorithm ranks pages. However, many marketing experts have figured out various strategies that help pages they create to consistently rank well for certain keywords. This is the essence of SEO.

By optimizing web pages to rank well for target keywords and search terms, businesses can ensure that their web pages get seen more and visited more often by potential customers. Of course, your competitors are also trying to rank well. So, SEO is a complex and ongoing process of targeting, optimizing, evaluating and improving.

Some of the elements that are relevant to SEO include incorporating keywords on web pages, earning links from other websites, using a good structure that search engines can crawl and understand, and having a technically well-made website. A lot of SEO is about identifying which elements need the most focus in any given moment.

 

Copywriting/Content Marketing

At a high level, copywriting is simply writing for marketing purposes. This can include the words used on advertisements, on websites, on social media, in blog posts and any other collateral that is used for marketing purposes. For the purposes of SEO copywriting, the most important forms of copywriting are creating copy for web pages and content marketing, particularly writing blog posts.

In a sense, anyone who has ever written something to promote a brand, product or idea has practiced copywriting. Of course, professional copywriters and copywriting services can spend years or decades fine-tuning the art to be capable of communicating with strong and persuasive writing. Knowing what tone to use in which contexts is also an important element of copywriting.

From a business growth perspective, the benefits of copywriting are likely obvious. When you have written content that attracts, engages and persuades an audience, you will have a lot of success growing your brand. However, copywriting isn’t just about being convincing. It is also about delivering value to the audience whenever it interacts with your brand.

 

How SEO and Copywriting Fit Together

The need for SEO copywriting is simple: search engine optimization requires content to earn good rankings on search result pages and copywriting requires SEO to achieve maximum visibility and impact online. Like many aspects of marketing, SEO and copywriting are at their best when they are used together in an integrated strategy.

This natural alignment is further boosted by the goal of search engines. Google and other search engines are trying to deliver value to their users by providing relevant, high-quality search results (of course, their main goal is to earn revenue by selling ads on their search pages, but that requires engaged users). Therefore, search engine algorithms are primarily looking for web pages that are useful to human beings.

The upshot of this is that good SEO and good copywriting often look very similar. Effective SEO needs to deliver pages that searchers will want to read and interact with. After all, there is no point in attracting website visitors if they aren’t interested in the content of your website. Similarly, good copywriting needs to deliver marketing writing that is engaging and effective.

 

Four Steps of Effective SEO Copywriting

With the above information in mind, it is easy to see why SEO and copywriting fit together so naturally. Plus, if you are familiar with one of them, you have a great head start on mastering the other.

The following are four steps for writing effective SEO copy. Everyone’s process is a little different, so the right steps for you may look a little different. Nonetheless, they will likely include much of what is explained below.

 

1. Research Keywords and Search Terms

SEO copywriting requires you to target your content for specific searches. Before you can do that, you need to spend some time researching what people are looking for. There are a variety of keyword research tools that can help you with this. There are a few elements to consider when picking keywords/search terms to target:

• How often do people search for that term?
• Is it a competitive term? Are your direct competitors also trying to target it?
• Is it sufficiently relevant to your business? Would someone searching for the target term be satisfied upon finding your website?
• Does the search term reflect an intent that is relevant to your page? In other words, are you targeting sales-related terms with product pages and informational terms with blogs and other resources?

When you have good search term selection, a lot of the rest of your strategy will start to fall into place. This aspect of SEO should be an area of focus for all digital marketers.

 

2. Plan the Content and SEO Strategy

Once you know what terms you will be targeting, you can start to plan out a more specific strategy. Your SEO copywriting will likely need a content schedule for new blog posts and other releases. Additionally, you may need to update some of your existing pages to optimize them better and make them more useful to visitors.

You should also take some time to consider the terms you found through research. There may be some that would work well for your brand, but that you don’t currently have relevant content for. Planning some new SEO copy for those terms could help drive your strategy.

 

3. Write SEO-Optimized Content

Next, you will need to create your planned content. This should be search engine optimized content. So, you will need to create high-quality pages and blog posts that will be useful to visitors and write them so that search engines rank them well. Fortunately, these two goals are often aligned.

There are a variety of factors that can play into how well you rank for keywords. These are a few of the most important:

• Canonical Organization: Search engines like web pages with well-organized headings. These should use H1, H2, H3, etc. headings. Make sure the headings reflect the content that follows them.
• HTML Tagging: Use HTML features such meta descriptions, page titles and image alt text. These will help search engines to better understand what is on your page.
• High-Quality, Relevant Writing: The quality of your writing matters too. Lots of spelling mistakes or confusing language will turn off not only visitors but also search engines.
• Keywords: Your target terms need to appear in your content. However, they shouldn’t be stuffed in there. Make sure they are used naturally. You can also experiment with different densities or frequencies of use.
• Links: Having links to your pages from other websites can greatly improve your rankings. You can earn these by having high-quality content. It can also help to link to others from your website.

 

4. Publish and Promote Content

Finally, you will need to make your content available online. It can be helpful to promote certain types of content with ads, social media posts and other channels. These won’t directly improve your search engine rankings; however, they will increase visibility and potentially earn links, shares and more organic traffic.

You will want to measure the impact of your SEO copywriting. Having a robust analytics strategy will help you to test both your writing and your optimization.

Keep in mind that the above four steps are not necessarily a perfect series. In many cases, you will jump back and forth between different steps. Plus, it is a continuous cycle that should be regularly repeated and improved. With time, you will master both SEO and copywriting, earning your brand more visitors and conversions.

 

Get Help With SEO Copywriting for Your Brand

Creating great content and getting noticed online is not easy. It is made even harder by the fact that millions of other businesses are competing for attention. Consider using copywriting services to help. BKA Content can provide high-quality, professional writing that is optimized for maximum search engine visibility. Contact us today to learn more.

It’s Halloween night. The moon is full and a dog howls. You look behind you and see… a GHOSTWRITER. Except the ghostwriter is really nice; He likes coffee with two sugars in the morning and he has a fondness for collectible rubber ducks.

Let’s face it: Ghostwriters aren’t that scary. Collaborating with ghostwriters can help you create killer content, especially as a business looking for online, engaging content. If you don’t have the time to write blogs, articles and other types of content on your own, ghostwriters (specifically professional blog writers from a blog writing service) may be the ideal solution.

What Are Ghostwriters?

In their most simplest form, a ghostwriter is someone who is hired to write a form of content (blogs, books, literary journals) but isn’t credited for it. You may think this is a sad way to make a living (all the work and no credit, right?), but it’s actually quite normal and useful for both the writer and the buyer. Just like many other services, the company that buys the content gets the credit because they essentially buy ownership of the content and can use, alter and improve the product they buy. Writers get paid and can write on a variety of topics without having to take ownership or maintain that content for a long period of time. In other words, content writing services are just another cog in the wheel that help businesses run smoothly.

What Can Ghost Writers Do for Me?

Wealthy business owners might tell you that task delegation is one of the secrets to their success. Even if you’ve never considered it an option, there’s no reason to exclude online content development from outsourcing.

When you don’t have the means to write and optimize your blog, there are a few different approaches that can help. You can hire an article writer in-house who produces brief content for short-term projects. You could also ask other leaders in your industry to contribute an article or two and lend their authority to help boost yours.

If you need more regular blog contributions, you might consider contracting staff writers. These professionals have byline privileges and work on a freelance basis. Still, they usually maintain a standing relationship with the publisher of their work.

Yet, if your blog’s purpose is to express your ideas in your voice, none of these options are viable. Moreover, there is the possibility that these methods could undermine your credibility by watering down your message or contradicting your ideals. In these situations, there is a fourth blog outsourcing option that is perfect for a content marketing strategy: ghost blog writers.

Ghostwriters, most famously associated with prolific big-name authors, operate in virtually every industry. They are frequently contracted for long-term projects and have experience with most types of content writing. Since they write anonymously and credit you with the work, they are the perfect choice if you are bursting with ideas for your blog but can’t produce the results you want.

1. A Blog Ghostwriter Can Do What You Can’t

There could be a myriad of reasons why you are unable to write a coherent, polished blog entry:

• You are skilled at formulating cutting-edge concepts but are terrible at expressing them in written words.
• You encounter writer’s block due to the tunnel-vision brought on by working inside your industry.
• You don’t have time to do it well, or do it at all.
• You hate writing. Period.

Your minimal blog writing skills or hurried efforts could damage your reputation as a thought-leader. In turn, this could lead to a loss of authority and reduced profits.

Ghost blog writers are skilled at translating your thoughts and ideas into eloquent prose that is relevant, witty and instantly captures your audience’s attention. Best of all, they can do it in a way that sounds exactly like something you would actually say.

2. Blog Ghostwriters Are Professionals That Produce Superior Content

Professionals know how to get the job done well — if you’re useless with a drill and hammer, would you build your own fence or hire a contractor?

Blog ghostwriters are experienced literary professionals and dedicated to their craft. They have the time and energy to thoroughly research a topic, compose multiple drafts and make sure the message is perfect.

Like other professionals, many ghostwriters actively pursue advancing their skills and repertoire. They often have working relationships with other writers and share tips and tricks that help them write better blog content for you.

Ghost blog writers, in particular, spend a lot of time learning the techniques specific to internet content writing. These can include SEO strategies, web formatting and creating content that captures and holds a reader’s attention. A blog writer worthy of hiring will also ensure that the finished piece has a professional polish — no garish spelling or grammar mistakes or awkward phrasing common to the lower-cost writers from overseas.

How Do I Find Ghost Blog Writers for Hire?

So how do you get writers for your blog? Finding freelance ghostwriters is easy; finding outstanding ghost blog writers is not. Like most professional endeavors, though, every successful outcome starts with a solid plan.

1. Set Your Blog Content Marketing Goals

Before you start looking for ghost blog writers, you need some substantive content marketing goals, If you haven’t already, you need to come up with a clear picture of your blog’s objective in particular. Different content marketing goals could change the skill set requirements you’re looking for with a blog writer for hire. You can limit your search to ghostwriters with the exact qualifications needed for your purpose.

Increase Organic Traffic

Organic website traffic is driven by unpaid sources. These include non-ad based search engine results and backlinks from other websites that use your blog as a source. Successful marketing strategies rely on creating content that contains relevant search keywords that your customers are likely to use, yet distinguish you from your competitors.

Your ideal blog ghostwriter will have experience in SEO, creating easy-to-read layouts, using backlinks and writing compounding posts. Your ghost blog writer should also be able to produce great content quickly. To build organic traffic, you need to post optimized content as often as possible, up to five times per week.

Build Brand Awareness

If you already have a respectable flow of traffic to your website, you can slow down a little and focus your efforts on increasing brand awareness. Posting blog content that teaches skills or explains industry-related topics in detail can help develop your reputation as a thought leader in your field.

Ideal ghost blog writers should have the ability to produce well-researched, relevant content that incorporates graphics, charts and images in a high-quality layout. The blog writer will be speaking with your voice as an expert in the industry. So, strong research and interviewing skills will help him or her develop a comprehensive understanding of your sector.

Food for thought: Instead of hiring a ghostwriter that is an industry insider, consider someone who has never worked in your field. They will enter with fresh eyes and might have a perspective that appeals to an untapped customer base.

Target Audience Personas

Great ghost blog writers can draft expert-level content, present it most attractively and make it sound like the words came directly from you. However, if they can’t match your audience personas’ tone, their content may not be engaging enough for readers to spend more than a few seconds on it before moving on.

Provide your blog ghost writer with a description of your audience that is as detailed as possible. Armed with a list of targeted demographics, interests, hobbies and other persona characteristics, your ghostwriter could browse social media for public profiles that fit the description for trending current events, passions or worries. Your writer can then incorporate those trends into blog posts, making the content more relatable.

2. Search the Blog Ghostwriting Talent Pool

Next, compile a list of the most relevant and applicable job skills and start searching for qualified ghost blog writers.

Blog Ghostwriting Services

Also known as content creation agencies, professional ghostwriting services often have access to an extensive network of vetted freelance ghostwriters. Therefore, you won’t waste time sifting through applications, sample articles or conducting interviews.

Ghostwriting services offer a wide variety of content styles and categories. Most offer simple content purchases through their websites. Alternatively, you can request customized account managing services. Your personal contact will help you tailor your content and assemble a dedicated ghost blog writing team capable of tackling your project.

Ghostwriters for hire networks have streamlined the development process for SEO criteria and client-specific style guides. They are a great choice if you need a lot of content within a short period of time`.

Job Listing Websites

Your other two options are posting a job listing or perusing blog ghostwriters’ resumes. There are a multitude of websites that connect companies and workers, ranging from free online classifieds to professional social networks to job portals where freelancers pay a subscription fee for full access to listings. Keep in mind that you’ll need to implement selection criteria, or you’re likely to be overwhelmed with applicants, many of whom know very little about your industry.

3. Vet the Blog Writing Applicants

If you decide against using a professional ghostwriting service and choose to hire your own ghost blog writers, these steps can give you a solid start, especially if you’ve never conducted a vetting process before. When either receiving responses to an ad or reaching out to freelancers, the first step is to review samples of candidates’ published work.

Create a Short-List

After you receive a flood of responses to your ad, there are a few simple criteria that can significantly separate out the chaff:

• Follow basic instructions: The best blog ghostwriter candidates will answer every question you ask and follow your instructions to the letter. Ditch the application if they send you a 20-year-old college essay after you request a recent article in a major publication.
• Correct spelling and grammar: This is a must. Don’t be too nitpicky, though — many finer points of grammar are stylistic rather than unequivocally wrong — errors that a standard spelling and grammar checker would point out are a red flag.
• High quality of writing: Essentially, if you don’t enjoy reading it or if you have a hard time understanding it, file it in your recycling bin. Don’t waste your time trying to teach a blog ghostwriter how to write satisfactory content.

If, after applying the criteria, you still have a long list of candidates, narrow the parameters until you have only several applicants remaining.

Audition the Blogging Candidates

Before you go any further, make sure that they are willing to sign a nondisclosure agreement. This is a standard operating procedure for ghost blog writers, and if a candidate balks, it is better to know now.

Competent, organized ghostwriters will have a portfolio ready and may have even tailored it to feature work that they feel is most applicable to your blog needs, based on the information you’ve given to this point. Examine it to get a feel for their experience. More importantly, try to gauge how well they adapt to different industries and writing styles.

Next, give each applicant a writing assignment specific to your blog’s niche. Specify that they have free rein to format the blog content as they see fit on a content management system.

Include a detailed list of requirements; for example, the due date, a minimum word count, keyword placement and source links are a few of the standard items on a style guide. You don’t have to go too in-depth in crafting your list; the point is to test the writers’ attention to detail.

Set a favorable precedent by offering to pay the ghost blog writer for the assignment. At the end of the hiring process, their content will be yours to use as you see fit.

Additional Tips

Here are a few things to look for in their completed assignments:

• Writing instructions: We’re repeating this one for a reason; a writing professional may not produce the best content at first, but don’t waste your time with a ghostwriter that doesn’t make the extra effort to nail every single detail of your request. Remember, at this point, they are trying to impress you, and if their best effort doesn’t meet basic requirements, there’s not much hope for improvement later.
• Content: Your ideal blog ghost writer will begin with a concise, intriguing title and compose engaging, non-generic content that is relevant to your business. He or she should write in the first or second person narrative, and the source links should be to reputable websites.
• Format: Your ghostwriter should format the blog for readability. This includes breaking up the content into short paragraphs, inserting subheadings, and using techniques that draw the eye downward, such as charts, lists and images.
• Clarification: Don’t write off candidates simply because they ask a ton of questions about your instructions or goals. These are the writers who take extra steps to get it right the first time. Also, look for questions that indicate a willingness to go above and beyond. This can include a request to increase the word count or add components that you didn’t initially request, such as videos or sound clips.

However, if they add too many extras without asking you first, it might be a warning sign of a rogue writer that could potentially damage your reputation with content that doesn’t adhere to your message or style.

Finally, prepare interview questions: Medium has recommendations for interviewing freelancers on its website. Conduct your interviews face-to-face with a video conferencing app. If that’s not possible, you could interview ghostwriting applicants over the phone, but never settle with email. You may pick up on intangible personality characteristics during a spoken conversation that might not appear in written correspondence.

Is It Unethical To Contract Ghostwriters for Blogs?

If you’re feeling slightly uneasy about someone else writing a blog entry for you and then publicly claiming it as your own, you have company. Some professional bloggers believe content written by undisclosed ghostwriters is unethical, especially on social media and blogs that aren’t strictly informational.

Their premise is that since the object of those posts is to cultivate a personal relationship with readers, there is an expectation that the people publishing the content are doing the writing. Therefore, if a ghostwriter writes the content, then the readers’ relationship would be with the social media ghost writer and not the personality associated with the website.

There is a certain distaste in that scenario, for sure. However, most professional or branded blogs on the internet are designed to deliver useful or fun information. That information is directly supplied by the entity that puts its name on the website. Here, the ghost blog writer’s role is simply to translate concepts into written words that are both polished and the best expression of the originator’s meaning and intent.

Here’s a more practical way to look at it:

• Do all haute couture clothing designers have the skill to weave cloth and sew perfect seams to bring their art to life, or do they need the most talented master sewing professionals available?
• Do Supreme Court Justices have the time and energy to publish their own decisions and opinions, or is it permissible to give the job to their judicial clerks?
• Does an international public speaker learn every language spoken in each country, or would a translator with prodigious skill better cross the language barrier, conveying not only the words but also the intended meaning?

No one expects industry leaders to perform 100% of the tasks involved to produce the finished product, so why should your company’s blog be the exception?

1. Using Experienced Blog Writing Professionals for Specialized Tasks

The most commonly accepted (and comparable) example of ethical ghostwriting is the work done by presidential speechwriters. Successful politicians realized long ago that if they could articulate their ideas in a way that spoke to people’s emotions, they had a better chance of being elected.

Judson Welliver, a White House “literary clerk,” was recognized as the first official presidential speechwriter during the 1920s, although Alexander Hamilton famously wrote a considerable portion of George Washington’s Farewell Address in 1796. Basically, the notion of a professional writer putting words to a public figure’s ideas is nothing new.

The best blog ghostwriters will collaborate extensively with you to gain the most accurate perception of your personality, philosophy, and idiosyncrasies. That way, when you publish their work under your name, it seems as though you might have written it yourself.

2. Pushing Ethical Boundaries

While ghost blog writers traditionally and happily remain anonymous, no policy requires you to either disclose your collaboration with a ghostwriter or display your name over any content you did not write. Still, there are a few types of content where using ghost blog writers could raise ethical questions:

• Blogs created to interact directly with an audience: Either a sudden switch to or between ghostwriters will often cause a shift in tone that many readers will detect, no matter how skilled the blog writer. Readers who discover that they were interacting with a ghostwriter instead of the expert figure could feel personally violated, leading to a significant loss of credibility and respect.
• Blogs written by ghostwriters with minimal input: While not strictly unethical, many would consider content claimed by an expert figure who contributed little or nothing to the effort to be fraudulent.
• Scholarly blogs or papers written for academia: Students and professors are assessed not only on their original concepts and theories but also on their ability to communicate them accurately and wholly to their peers.

Hire Professional Ghost Blog Writers for Your Site

As you can see, the process of hiring and vetting a blog ghostwriter yourself can be very involved. If this is the first time you’re using ghost blog writers, you may easily be overwhelmed just by the search process, let alone the effort it will take to manage your new content writer.

In the beginning, when you’re still testing the blog waters and not sure exactly what you need, the quickest and easiest solution may be to use a blog ghostwriting service. An experienced content account manager will ask you for all the information you didn’t know you needed to supply and take care of the busywork. You may also consider using our monthly blog subscription plan to get well-written content consistently.

Now, all you have to do to implement your content marketing strategy is to sit down with paper and pencil (or laptop) and let your progressive, industry-altering blog topic ideas flow.

What if you were able to reach a larger audience in your industry while also adding credibility to your brand? Contributing to guest blogs is a great way to gain the trust of potential customers, increase your exposure and ultimately boost your SEO. Adding guest blogging to your own content marketing efforts is a crucial step to produce unprecedented online marketing success.

Read on to find out everything you ever wanted to know about guest blogging for SEO, including how to get started.

 

What is Guest Blogging for SEO?

So what is guest blogging for SEO? Guest blogging is commonly known as a marketing tactic whereby someone writes an article (or guest blog post) to be posted on a third-party website or blog. Typically, you’ll be labeled as a “guest contributor” and your blog will be scheduled to be posted on the website at a later date. Along with your name, you’ll usually be able to include a picture of yourself in your bio, a small description, as well as a link to your website and social media profiles.

 

What are the Rules of Guest Blogging?

One important thing to note is that each website that allows guest blog post contributors usually has their own set of “best practices” that must be followed in order to post on their site. Some of the ground rules for guest blogging on other sites may include the following:

• No self-promotional or sale pitches in the article about your company – must be purely informational
• Must be relevant to the reader base of that site and provide value
• Needs to be a certain word count
• Should be formatted a certain way to follow that site’s writing style guide
• May need to include images or ideas for images
• Usually can’t include links in the content back to a page on your website (outside of the one link you’re given in your bio)
• Must be submitted by a certain date and is subject to revisions by the site editor

While this is not a comprehensive list of guidelines that come along with guest blogging for SEO, these are some of the most common. Being familiar with traditional rules that come along with guest blogging on other sites can help you to make sure you’re not spending time on areas that will have to be changed later anyway. Once you do find a website that allows for guest blog posting, then you’ll want to read through their style guide and adhere to it in your writing. More on that later.

 

Why Guest Blog?

There are many reasons to write a guest blog post, but some of the most compelling reasons are to create links back to your site to help with rankings on SERPs and also to get exposure to another website’s followers and reader base.

Guest blogging has been a subject of much debate in the world of internet marketing, yet it is still considered one of the best content marketing strategies that you can cultivate. It has the potential to bring awareness to your brand, expand your network, and increase traffic to your business website. Guest blogging is beneficial for both your business branding and your authority as a writer. It can be a powerful tool if you use it right.

 

What are the Benefits of Guest Blogging for SEO?

First, it’s important to understand the benefits of guest blogging as a whole, then we’ll get into the specifics of how to get started. Here are some of the many benefits of guest blogging in general.

1. Expand Your Network

Guest blogging on sites in your niche is a great networking tactic to use in any content marketing plan. By contributing to niche blogs, you have an opportunity to engage with audiences you may never have had access to on your own. The more guest blogs you contribute on, the more readership bases you can reach. If your content is helpful, engaging and provides real value, you may have people following you directly on social media to see when your next post drops.

Not only that, you have the opportunity to potentially collaborate with other authors on other industry sites. Getting the attention of other industry influencers and quoting them, and subsequently getting them to quote you back, gets you in front of their loyal followers.

Getting active in the community through commenting, sharing, and posting is a great way to build relationships in your niche, establish yourself as an expert and attract attention to your own blog.

 

2. Increase Social Media Following

Social media presence is one of the leading content marketing methods that attract customers to your business. Guest blogging for SEO can boost the number of eyes that see your content and help deepen your pool of followers. Often, guest blogging enables you to link to your own social media platforms in your contributed piece. Not only that, many guest posting sites will promote your content through their own social media channels as well, tagging you in the process.

The number of shares your content gets through social media establishes trust and credibility. There have been some cases where writers gained as many as 200 followers a day after contributing to a blog with their social media links attached. Quality content builds the trust of your target audience, which can spread more easily through these social media channels. Enabling feedback and engaging with your audience also helps build a trustworthy relationship.

The key is that your content is shareable and useful to an audience. Once you’ve checked that box, you stand a greater chance of gaining a larger social media following through writing guest blog posts.

 

3. Gain Authority

Trust begets loyal customers. Your audience may respond to your content if you establish credibility as an industry influencer through other blogs within your niche. Guest blogging for SEO gives you the opportunity to appear on any number of trustworthy sites in your industry. Appearing as a guest blogger may add authority to your own information on the subject and draw positive attention to your brand. The more you post, the more recognizable you become and the more people will trust you as an expert.

Not only that,  guest posting leads to MORE guest posting. As you add to your portfolio of sites you’ve written a guest blog post for, it’ll open up doors to other sites that were once off-limits.

4. Bring Awareness to Your Brand

Brand voice is an important factor to keep in mind as you write guest blog posts. Once you’ve become a recognizable voice within an industry, your audience will look for that voice in your own brand. This is your chance to show your audience what you have to offer and what sets your business apart. Bring something fresh and exciting to the table! It will help keep customers interested in your brand and allow them to connect on an emotional level

. If you’re having a guest blog writer help you, you’ll want to make sure you find one that can accurately convey information the same way that you would.

To gain your target audience, you must contribute to blogs that already have an established flow of traffic. Your contribution to a blog should be relevant to the kind of content you provide on your own site. This helps the audience maintain interest in what you have to say. Building better backlinks will help optimize your success in gaining relevant traffic. Contributing to popular blogs in your niche is a great way to introduce your content to an audience rather than waiting for them to find you.

5. Increase Backlinks

Backlinks are a metric used by search engines to show that a site is relevant, popular and an authority in a certain space. When it comes to links, this benefit is true both singularly, as well as compositely. Singularly, just the number of backlinks you have to your site from different domains is looked at positively by Google. If lots of other sites are linking back to your site, despite what their site content is about, search engines assume you are a reputable site with shareable content.

Compositely, if the blogs/sites that are linking back to your site have to do with the products and services that you offer, it can help to raise your rankings specifically with industry keywords. This is the best of both worlds. So if you sell clothes and have lots of links coming back to your site from fashion websites, Google takes into account you must be an expert on fashion. Even though most of these links to your site are just in the form of your main domain name, they are still valuable when it comes to diversifying your backlink profile.

6. Boost Direct Traffic

Lastly, if you can contribute to guest blogging sites that already have a lot of authority and have a huge reader base, just by nature of being a “contributor” you raise your level of authority to readers. They immediately look to you as an expert in the industry. The more your name is seen through guest posting and the more valuable your content, the better chance you have of people coming directly to your site to get expert help from you, the expert. This type of direct traffic is incredibly valuable, as the potential customer already views you as an expert and trusts you’ll be able to help them.

Ultimately, guest blog writing for SEO increases your chances of getting backlinks to your website, raising your rankings for targeted keywords and upping your traffic levels as a whole. More website traffic to your own site leads to more potential chances to make a sale. Links aren’t given out freely though (aside from your main domain name) so getting guest posts that include anchor text links on targeted keywords can be pretty hard to come by naturally – but that’s a topic for another day.

Still, getting links to your main domain still raises the floor of your website authority as a whole and is a worthwhile endeavor.

 

How Do I Find Sites that Allow Me to Write Guest Blog Posts?

Now that you understand the wide-ranging benefits of guest blogging for SEO, the next step is to find places that allow you to submit authority guest posts! This is also known as learning how to leverage guest blogging networks. There are a few easy ways to get started with this and you aren’t limited to just one – many companies take advantage of all of these guest posting methods and more in order to get a jump on the competition.

Identify “Information Wells” in your Industry

First, you need to find where people within your industry are getting their latest news/trends and important information. Obviously, there are major business sites like Forbes that would be fabulous to get on, but you likely won’t be able to post on a site like that in the beginning (unless you’re willing to shell out some dough for a sponsored post). One pro tip is to start smaller, local even. Are there local business news sites that you could publish on? When you google keywords related to your “industry” news, what comes up?

Start compiling a list of these different sites and the contact information of who you might need to reach out to (or a link to their contact us page). Many of these sites may already have established contributor guidelines, where others may not and it will be something you set up in a custom setting.

Build Relationships with Online Journals That Allow Guest Blogging for SEO

Next, you need to identify which of these sites allow authority guest blogs from contributors. Likely, you’ll have to go through a vetting process to become a regular content contributor, and you may need an existing writing portfolio before you’ll be considered. This is where writing on your own blog comes in handy because it is at least one published source of your writing you can show off to a site.

Once you get access to a site as a contributor, you’ll usually be given the green light to write guest blogs a few times a year, if not more. This is a great way to establish yourself as an authority in your space, since you’ll be in front of many more eyeballs than a typical business website, and you’ll have multiple chances to write about topics they may be interested in.

Build Relationships with Other Site Owners That Complement Your Products/Services

This method of guest blogging for SEO is the most organic of them all, and the strategy is slightly different than the one we just discussed. Essentially, you are working to develop relationships with other site owners related to your industry and writing guest blogs for them. On the flip side, you are also potentially letting them write for you as well. You’ll want to make sure you’re genuine in your guest blog post pitches and that you’re trying to appeal to their reader base instead of just wanting a link back to your site.

The idea is to find another company that has complementary products and services in your industry that you don’t compete with directly. If you are competitors, you’ll never work out a deal to swap posts/links. If it’s a business site that does something similar to what you do but isn’t the same, these are the best to reach out to. In a sense, you can scratch each others’ backs to get in front of each others’ reader base. You also can probably work out a deal to get the coveted “anchor text” backlink from one of your highly targeted keywords as well.

The only con to this method is you may only get one or two guest blogs published before you’ll want to move on to a different site. That being said, one or two posts is a huge win if you can get an anchor text link utilizing a top keyword.

Employ a Guest Posting Service (aka Link Building Service)

A form of guest blogging can also be done through guest posting services that have developed their entire business model around helping business owners get guest posts and backlinks. The quality of the sites that your guest blogs will be posted on may not be the best, so your link value may not be as high, but typically the volume of posts and links you get makes up for that.

Link building companies typically get you “anchor text” links as well, meaning the actual keyword you’re trying to rank for will be the one being sent back to your site. This is the most coveted of all backlinks because it’s an obvious indicator to Google and other search engines that this other site sees you as an expert for that exact keyword. Otherwise, they would not have created a hyperlink using that text.

Backlinking using a guest posting service can be a worthwhile avenue to go down, but it doesn’t usually increase the branding, reputation or authority of your site on a human level. Because of this, you likely shouldn’t replace the direct guest blogging you’re doing on your own to establish your brand. Rather, these two things can complement each other very well.

 

How Do I Get Started Writing Guest Blog Posts?

OK, so we’ve outlined the major benefits of guest blogging as a whole as well as how to identify sites that will let you contribute. So what’s next? How do you get started writing a guest blog post? Do you use a guest blog writing service? While you definitely need help with the writing, you also need to make sure you have a content marketing plan and some keyword research in place.

Get Your Content Marketing Ducks in a Row

Before you can write a blog or properly utilize a guest blog writing service to help you craft high-quality, authoritative guest blog posts, you need to make sure your content marketing campaign is set up and you have metrics to help measure success. You are writing to target a specific audience (or audiences). Identifying the right niche and tailoring your post to gain that audience’s attention are important factors in getting successful results.

Utilize Keyword Data

Content writing with keyword research in mind can help you when developing the guest blog posts that will bring customers to your business. As we’ve outlined here, guest posting offers wider opportunities for search engine visibility and lets an audience get familiar with your brand. Because guest blogs usually incorporate links to your own blog, using relevant keywords may pad your backlinks and make them more visible to search engines.

Consider your keywords and content carefully before you start to write; to generate the best results, you need to make each word count.

Hire a Guest Blog Writing Service

Last of all, just because you know you need to write guest blog posts it doesn’t mean you have to write them yourself. In fact, in many cases you SHOULDN’T write them yourself. If you don’t have a background in writing and editing, writing a guest blog post can not only be incredibly hard but can take you a very long time. As an industry expert (or someone in the process of establishing themselves as one), you need to spend your time being at the cutting edge of technologies and trends in your industry.

Take a cue from some of the top industry influencers worldwide and get yourself a ghostwriter to help take your thoughts, bullet points and ideas and translate them into a flowing, engaging blog post. This provides you with the opportunity to scale your guest blogging for SEO and make your efforts much more worthwhile. There are many guest blog writing services that exist (like us!) to help pair you with a writer (or writers) of your choosing that have experience in your industry and can learn to speak in your voice, style and tone.

 

Guest Blogging for SEO Recap: It Can be Done!

So while there is a lot to know about guest blogging for SEO, it’s also something that every business can start venturing into. Start small, make your writing count, and start building your guest blogging portfolio from the ground up. The longer the go, the more your brand will benefit and the better chance you have of increasing traffic, leads and ROI.

Have any other great guest blogging tips? Leave them in the comments below!

 

Approximately 13% of marketers devote their efforts primarily to traditional advertising techniques, such as print, television, and radio ads. Another 60% focus their attention on digital marketing, including material created by a digital content writer for dissemination on the web. So, which approach is more successful?

It’s a trick question.

The fact is that the most successful marketing approaches combine both traditional and digital marketing techniques. This helps to reach the widest number of potential customers in the first place, then move them more effectively through the marketing funnel toward an eventual sale. Let’s take a look at why you should consider a more integrated approach, how to combine digital and traditional marketing techniques, and what role a digital content writer plays in your integrated strategy.

 

Why Should You Integrate Digital Content Writing and Other Digital Strategies Into a Traditional Approach?

Traditional marketing techniques include print ads, billboards, television spots, and radio promos. Though some marketers view them as outdated, these techniques can be very valuable. In particular, traditional marketing is effective at moving potential customers into the top of the marketing funnel by attracting attention and gaining interest.

Here is where such efforts can hit a snag.

Consumers find information about goods and services they want to buy by conducting research on the internet. However, they do not necessarily conduct the search immediately after seeing or hearing the ad, although mobile search makes this possible. Chances are, the follow-up web search for more information may not happen for several more hours or even days.

If you’re lucky, your potential customers remember your company name perfectly from your ad and enter it accurately into a search engine. However, it may be more likely that the prospects don’t remember your name exactly, but they remember what you do. Therefore, they may conduct a search for the goods and services that you offer.

Without a strong web presence with digital content optimized for searches, your company may not show up in the search results. This is where having a digital content writer comes in handy. Though every web search generates thousands of web results, a majority of users never scroll past the first page. This means that if you are not one of the top search results, you may as well not be included in the search at all.

The picture can get even bleaker. If you have competitors who have more successfully integrated SEO into their digital marketing strategy, their web pages are likely to rank higher in the search. Rather than scrolling through pages of results to find you, your customers are more likely to just click the top web result. Thus, your traditionally focused marketing can be very successful … at helping your competitors.

 

How Do You Integrate Digital Marketing Into Your Traditional Approach?

When it comes to integrating digital techniques into an existing traditional strategy, there is a right way to do it and a lazy way to do it. The lazy way is to create a lot of pages that include keywords to get search results but that offer no substantial content. These may get you hits, but they are unlikely to lead to conversions. Your customers are looking for valuable information, and if they can’t find it from you, they will go elsewhere for it.

Putting out content that is meaningful and helpful to your customers is more likely to convert leads into sales. However, maintaining a consistent publishing schedule of quality content is extremely time consuming. Hiring a digital content writer is one way to maintain such a schedule while allowing yourself enough time to tend to the other vital aspects of running your business.

 

Why Should You Integrate Traditional Marketing Techniques Into an Existing Digital Strategy?

Maybe you’re at the other extreme of the spectrum. You see traditional marketing as a thing of the past. You’re looking forward to the future, so you’ve devoted all your advertising resources to a digital content writer and online marketing:

• Optimized web design
• Extensive social media presence
• Online banner ads
• Link building

You’ve congratulated yourself for being on the forward edge of the digital revolution. There is just one problem: You are not seeing your leads convert to sales.

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. One of the most recognizable brands in the world, Pepsi, took initiative early in the last decade to discontinue all traditional means of advertising and devote all their resources to a digital-only strategy. In an effort to stay closer to the brand message, Pepsi did all its advertising in-house, severing relationships with external marketing agencies in the process. Instead of buying television airtime during the Super Bowl, as it had done for 23 years prior, it devoted that $20 million to a corporate social responsibility campaign called Pepsi Refresh, promoted via social media. That campaign attracted a lot of attention but didn’t necessarily translate into higher sales.

Pepsi’s digital-only marketing strategy was a bold move. It lasted only a couple of months.

The theory behind it was that a digital-only strategy would garner a heavy social following that Pepsi could market to directly. However, the one-dimensional technique failed to target a large proportion of their existing audience. Since then, not all of Pepsi’s television advertising efforts have borne good fruit, but they have succeeded in reconnecting with their target audience.

 

What Makes Digital-Only Marketing Less Effective?

One theory is that the sheer volume of digital material is overwhelming. While using social media, your customers become saturated with tweets, trends, hashtags, campaigns, and promotions. It is difficult to keep up with it all. With so many brands and companies clamoring for consumer attention all at once, people tend to tune out even messages that they would otherwise be interested in and attentive to.

This theory demonstrates the importance of quality content, not just quantity. Whether it be a social media post or a longer-form piece, content created by professional article writing services may help to amplify your brand voice over the digital cacophony.

 

What Does a Successful Integrative Marketing Campaign Look Like?

Interestingly enough, we can look to Pepsi’s biggest competitor, Coca-Cola, for guidance on how to integrate traditional and digital marketing techniques successfully. A few years after Pepsi made its disastrous foray into digital-only marketing, Coca-Cola introduced its integrative “Share a Coke” campaign. Bottles of Coke products bearing people’s first names on the label served as the centerpiece of this campaign. Personalizing your message is already an effective way to connect with customers, but Coke solidified the connection with heartwarming television advertising depicting a diverse range of people sharing personalized bottles with friends and loved ones in emotional situations.

These traditional techniques were effective at attracting people’s attention and creating a demand for these personalized bottles. Customers didn’t want just any random name on their Coke bottles; they wanted their own names as well as those of their friends, families, crushes, etc. Coke then directed customers to visit its website to purchase bottles featuring the names they wanted. The campaign was wildly successful, with the “ShareACoke” hashtag featuring in 235,000 tweets and Twitter impressions reaching nearly 1 billion.

 

Why Is an Integrative Marketing Approach Effective?

Cross-channel advertising created by a digital content writer involving both traditional and digital approaches is effective for a number of reasons:

 

1. Human Psychology

In a fascinating article for Search Engine Watch, Howard Jacobson explains why watching ads on both television and YouTube results in twice the brand recall. The whole article is well worth a read, but here is an outline of the factors he describes:

Essentially, Jacobson argues that viewing ads on multiple channels helps us to remember by forming meaningful and recognizable patterns. Additionally, seeing your advertisements everywhere may give your audience the impression that your company is a bigger deal than it really is.

 

2. Relative Permanence

Digital content and advertising can be ephemeral. Despite your best efforts, your content can sometimes get lost in the shifting sands of the internet. While television and radio ads can be similarly transient, print ads have more staying power. This can make it easier for your audience to revisit those ads as needed if seeking more information later.

 

3. Less Intrusiveness

Sometimes the way to get someone’s attention is not to actively try to attract it. Here again, print media can have an advantage because it is viewed as a less obtrusive form of marketing. Using traditional methods to play “hard to get” can provoke interest in your ad. Customers may start seeking more information, which is when SEO article writing can work in your favor.

 

4. Active Encouragement

Once your combined traditional marketing and SEO efforts have attracted customers to your site, digital marketing in the form of interactive web design encourages immediate action. An SEO article can include a link at the end that the user can click immediately to accomplish one or more of the following:

• Place an order
• Schedule an appointment
• Get directions
• Call for more information

Your traditional ads may include a call to action that uses language encouraging your audience to take the next step but do not provide any mechanism by which to do so. Therefore, using a digital or web content writer to create specific landing pages can be the guiding light that brings your customers further down into the funnel.

 

What Role Does a Digital Content Writer Have To Play in an Integrative Marketing Strategy?

To answer this question, let’s take another look at the marketing funnel:

While digital marketing can be a factor at all points in the funnel, it tends to be most effective at providing a bridge between the top and the bottom. Therefore, the role of the digital content writer is to create search engine optimized articles that offer meaningful and useful information about your goods and services with the goal of increasing desire and spurring the audience to action.

Research shows that the content marketing aspect of your digital marketing campaign sees better results the more often you post and the longer each article is. You can increase your web traffic by a factor of 3.5 by posting new content approximately once every two days compared to once every seven days. You are also more likely to see “strong results” from an article of 2,000 words or more, even though most blog posts range between 500 and 1,000 words, and 1,050 is the average.

If you try to create all that content by yourself, you may soon run into a problem. Quality content takes time to write. Composing a single blog post can take six hours or more. The average is 3.5 hours, which is still almost half of an eight-hour workday. Creating your own content for your blog can start to seem like a part-time job without the extra salary.

It can be tempting to sacrifice quality for quantity, but that’s a lazy shortcut that is likely to do you more harm than good. Not only is your lower-quality content unlikely to stand out from the daily digital deluge, but publishing subpar content just for the sake of getting your name out there is unlikely to improve trust in your company or spark desire for your goods and services. Creating content for marketing purposes is already the digital content writer’s part-time or full-time job. Therefore, he or she can devote not only the time but the resources to creating quality articles that reflect well on your business and help transform interest into desire and, hopefully, action.

 

What Are the Benefits of Hiring a Digital Content Writer?

When you hire a single freelance digital writer on a contract basis, you pay for only the content you order without having to pay costs associated with employment, such as salary, benefits, training, etc. You gain the flexibility of being able to order content when you need it and the peace of mind that comes from knowing that your task is in the hands of a qualified professional.

When you hire article writing services that work with teams of multiple digital content writers, you get all those benefits plus a few more. Having more writers on a project results in greater scalability. You should be able to order as much or as little content as you want at any given time and potentially get your order back more quickly. With a larger pool of writers at your disposal, you gain the benefit of all their collected experience.

“Collected experience” refers to writing knowledge and skills, obviously, but it also refers to a background in your own or related industries. Writers have diverse origins, and all their past education and professional history can benefit you. The result is sophisticated material that can speak directly to the unique pain points of your readers.

Article writing services such as BKA Content also offer a wide variety of different types of digital content. Peruse our shop to see what we our digital content writers have to offer your business.

Content marketing for small businesses. Without it, will your small business thrive?

It might feel as though you are constantly told that you must implement content marketing in order to survive as a small business in the current market. But is that really the case? Many businesses continually wonder whether content marketing for small businesses is worth the time, money and effort, especially when they do not see immediate payoffs to their efforts.

 

Is Content Marketing for Small Businesses Worth It?

The answer is: yes, content marketing absolutely works for small businesses. Not only that, it’s the great equalizer in marketing. While larger businesses can throw hundreds of thousands of dollars a month at ad spend to come up first in search engine rankings, small businesses can own the market on certain keyword phrases when thy have long-form, quality, valuable content to offer consumers.

A couple hundred dollars put into a really good blog post can eventually rank near the top for a keyword phrase that another company is spending thousands of dollars in ads for. If you’re a small business, this is the best way to get the most long-standing value for your marketing spend.

With that in mind, the question becomes more about whether or not small businesses can afford NOT to do content marketing.

 

What is Content Marketing for Small Business?

To start, it’s important to define what content marketing actually is. The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing for small business as a “strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.” Essentially, instead of blatantly pitching your products and services to your customer base, you’re providing relevant, valuable information to your prospects to help them solve their own issues.

Seems a bit counter-intuitive, right? Why would you tell someone how to do something themselves when you want them to use your product or service instead? The answer lies in building trust, authority and brand recognition. Chances are the product or service you provide solves a pain point for your customers. Just because you give a potential customer some tips and tricks to use to help solve their own problems, doesn’t mean that they will do it themselves. Rather, you’re building trust with your customer base that you care about them and want to provide good, accurate information.

When the problem does arise again, they’ll usually opt for a professional, someone they trust, to come in and do the job right. If your content has been able to reach them before this point, your small business is much more likely to come to mind when they’re ready to purchase.

 

What are the Benefits of Content Marketing for Businesses?

As a small business owner, you have to constantly determine what is worth implementing to grow your business. Many factors are involved, including time, money and manpower. But the underlying truth is that if you don’t continually bring in new leads to your business, you’ll eventually run yourself out of business. And with the internet becoming more and more prevalent for savvy customers, being found online is becoming a must.

Small business content marketing (or SMB content marketing) is actually great for your bottom line. Initial costs are relatively low for what it can produce in the future. The key is being consistent, persistent and, ultimately, patient. Most of the benefits of content marketing don’t come until months down the road.

 

There are many benefits of content marketing, including the following:

• Increased leads
• More sales
• Higher SEO rankings
• More traffic to your sites
• Brand awareness
• Reputation building
• Develop an authoritative voice
• High ROI

Let’s break this down one by one (in no particular order) so you can see exactly how these content marketing advantages can help your company.

 

1. Increased Leads and More Sales

As a small business, it is important to find more potential customers to convert into sales. With content marketing for small businesses, you have the chance to expand your reach. This gives you an opportunity to bring in more leads that can then be sent through your sales funnel. With more leads, you have a higher chance of converting them into sales, thus increasing your revenue.

Want some small business examples? Here you go:

According to a study from HubSpot, businesses with a regularly updated blog found an increase in leads of 126 percent compared to those who did not blog. Imagine what you could do with that many more leads! In fact, the conversion rates are about six times higher for those businesses who have content marketing campaigns than those who do not.

 

2. Higher SEO Rankings

The algorithms for Google and other search engines are very involved and complex. Content marketing for small businesses helps with a couple components. First, it expands the amount of information about your company that could be pulled during a search. Content marketing for business gives you more online real estate to help end up as part of search results. It gives you a chance to give visitors specific information that answers the queries they’ve typed into Google.

Additionally, best practices in content marketing include creating fresh, new content. This helps improves your chances of increasing organic search rankings.

 

3. More Traffic

When you increase your ranking on search engines, you increase your organic traffic to the site. You also have the ability to gain traffic for a variety of topics, all of which end up on landing pages from where consumers can then navigate to other areas on your site. According to one study, small businesses that are considered content marketing leaders had 7.8x more traffic on their sites than those who were non-leaders.

The key comes in doing some really great keyword research for your smb content marketing campaigns. What are your existing customers searching for? What are prospective clients searching for? What keywords have a lower level of difficulty than others and are therefore more winnable? A lot of the strategy comes down to which keywords and queries you want to focus your content marketing ideas on. Once you start putting out the article content, you’ll quickly see the benefits of this sort of article marketing if you’ve done great keyword research beforehand.

 

4. Brand Awareness and Reputation Building

An important benefit of online marketing for small businesses is that it helps to build your brand. You have multiple platforms in which to build your brand identity and voice. Then, you promote it and raise awareness about your company, attracting more customers from a wider pool of potentials.

In addition to simply putting the word about your company out into the public, you also have a chance to create the reputation you want through developing positive content. Part of this goes hand in hand with developing your brand identity.

Additionally, you can create content that makes you stand out as a leader and authoritative voice in your industry. This increases the chance that others will share your content, building even greater awareness of your brand. Furthermore, as an authoritative voice in your industry, you also become a safer, more reliable company with which to do business.

What do all of these content marketing benefits have in common? They boost your small business, help you compete and drive sales. This helps your bottom line, and it does not cost as much as many other forms of marketing. Brand marketing done through content marketing for business makes it easier to compete, even with some of the larger businesses in your field.

To gain the maximum advantages of this, it is essential that you do it right.

 

What are Content Marketing Best Practices for Small Businesses?

There are several best practices in content marketing for small business that ensure you gain all the potential advantages of the medium. Whether you choose to invest in website content writing solutions or handle it in-house, there are some key steps to take to develop your properties:

• Create a goal or objective
• Research the target audience
• Plan
• Develop content
• Promote
• Measure
• Make changes

 

Create Goals

It is common for small businesses to jump into running a content marketing campaign with no real objective in mind. This makes it harder to bring in the rewards and replicate any positive results in the future. It is best to develop an objective or goal using the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely) goal method.

Some small business examples of good content marketing goals might be sitting down and identifying the number of blog posts you want to create and the word count length of the blog posts. Next, schedule the posting times of the content and how many pieces of SEO content you’d like to create a month. After that, get into the specifics of keyword research and identify the top keywords to target in the content creation. Lastly, set times to measure, report and adjust the content and ultimately track the increase of rankings and traffic for certain keywords.

 

 

Identify Your Target Audience

Then, determine who your target audience (or audiences) is. This might require some market research into your current customers and those you wish to bring into your business. You might consider doing some surveys of existing customers or using outside help to gather data of your ideal customer. Knowing your audience is crucial to content marketing for business and should be done before you write any content.

You’ll want to know who you’re speaking to and what they’re looking for in order to connect with them on any sort of level through your writing.

 

Prepare a Content Marketing Plan

Once you have a goal and audience in mind for your small business content marketing strategy, develop a plan. This might include who writes the content, what topics it will cover, the voice of the pieces, the type of SEO content you’ll need to write, and other components. Content marketing best practices include creating an editorial calendar where you can track the keywords you are targeting, where the content is in the development process, and when it will be submitted.

Marketing strategy best practices also include the creation of a style guide for whoever writes the content. This includes going over brand guidelines, outlining your target audience and explaining formatting, voice and tone. These tools are essential to getting content out timely and just the way you want it.

To build a “brand voice” you have to stay consistent to who you are. If every piece of content looks, feels and sounds different, you’ll lose customers who don’t feel they can trust who you are trying to be.

 

Create High-Quality SEO Content

Once you have a basic structure/template in mind that determines the program, it is time to start developing content. This might be through a blog writing service, in-house staff or a combination. If you’re trying to scale your content marketing efforts to any degree, using in-house staff (or writing it yourself) goes out the window pretty quick. Be sure to have a content development budget in place so you don’t run into any surprises when you get to this stuff. Getting the content written can be half the battle. Find a good writing partner and get to work.

 

 

Promote Your Posts

You are not done once the content is written. No matter how strong the content is, it is just as important when engaging in content marketing for small business that you promote it in the right places. Otherwise, no one will find it. This might include some combination of social media promotion, featured posts, PPC campaigns, SEO and keyword optimization. More advanced content marketing campaigns use internal linking as one tool in order to drive ranking to “pillar” pieces that target the highest value keyword terms.

Until then, get creative with your promotion and leverage your existing following and networks to spread the word.

 

Measure The Results

Once the content is posted and promoted, your job continues. It is essential to any online marketing campaign that you continue to monitor it using different metrics, such as conversation rates, traffic, bounce rates, keyword rankings and more. This will tell you what works–and what does not. Then, you can tweak your small business content marketing program so that it continues to improve and helps you to meet your goals.

 

Elements of Strong Content Marketing for Business

When developing your content marketing strategy for your small business, it is important to remember that there are some key elements involved in a strong content marketing campaign. Content marketing for business is more than just creating well-written, interesting content every once in a while. It also includes:

• Ideal timing and frequency
• Relevancy
• Value
• Visuals like infographics
• Optimized keywords

 

Frequency and Timing

There are many facets to how frequency and timing play a role in online marketing for small businesses, but one of the most important is a point we’ve referenced to above – the frequency of posting. Studies have shown that companies that blog 16 times or more a month see 3.5 times the traffic of companies that only post 0-4 times a month! So not only is having a single really good blog post here or there beneficial, it’s important to be putting out new content frequently to maximize your results.

That being said, most small businesses can’t start out at creating 16 blog posts a month right off the bat when beginning an online marketing campaign. This could either be due to budget constraints or bandwidth constraints. If bandwidth is the issue, you may consider looking into hiring SEO content writers or a content writing company to help you scale your content creation efforts. If budget is the issue, you’ll want to look at reallocating some of your other expenses to be able to put more towards content.

But until you give content marketing for small business a real chance and put some money towards it, you[‘ll never know the benefits it could bring to your business. Don’t be that business owner!

 

 

Relevance

The next thing to consider when looking at elements of a strong content marketing strategy for business, is the relevance of your content. Are you picking topics to focus on only because they have high search volume traffic every month? Or are you picking keyword phrases and topics that are specifically relevant to what you do?

While there can be some value in getting lots of traffic to your site, no matter what the keywords are, if your small business and its products and services aren’t relevant to the content you’re putting out, it won’t net you too much of a return. Remember, a very specific keyword phrase that would point someone specifically to you is much more valuable than a broad, high volume, winnable term.

 

Value

Successful content marketing for small business hinges largely around the amount of value the content provides potential customers. You may be an SEO optimization king, and get your posts to rank by injecting keywords all over your content, but if the article isn’t providing value to the people reading it they’ll jump ship and go to other websites (your competitors) to find content that’s actually worth something to them.

Make the most of your content marketing opportunities by creating high-quality, valuable information first and then optimize for search engines second.

 

Visuals

Additionally, do not forget that content is not just written words and blogs. Some of the most popular content forms today include webinars, infographics, videos, podcasts and similar content forms. Depending on the way your customer base prefers to digest information, you may find that visual content is a huge needle mover for you. This is where the really creative side of content marketing comes into play.

Example of an Infographic in Content Marketing for Small Business

 

 

Content marketing ideas for visuals don’t have to be limited to what we’ve suggested here – try some new ways to educate and inform your followers and you may be at the forefront of the next content marketing trend. Storyboard animations, video scripts and many other forms of media have been used to convey information and can be successful avenues to pursue.

 

Optimization

Last, but not least, to make the most of your content marketing for small business, you’ll want to make sure you’re constantly optimizing your content for both readers and search engines. We’ve previously written about how to use keywords in your SEO content, so take the time to make sure you understand the why and how of keyword optimization, and then ultimately hire a great writer to create high-quality content with those SEO principles and keywords in mind.

 

Content Marketing for Small Business Works!

The short answer to whether or not content marketing for small businesses works is yes. You will gain valuable benefits of content marketing that will help your business grow. For even better results, develop an online marketing program for writing high quality content with all the important elements listed above.

If you need help with the website content writing services portion of content marketing for business, we would love to help! In fact, we’ve even created blog writing subscription plans with built-in strategy, editing, visuals and SEO-optimization geared specifically for small businesses. Contact us today to see how we can best work together on how to create a content marketing campaign for your small business.

In case you haven’t heard, single-page websites are a trend that is utilized in the SEO world. Every content marketing agency gets requests for them each day, but we’re left to wonder if they are really the best choice. Before you add them to your order, check out the benefits of one-page website SEO as well as the ways this trend could actually end up hurting your rankings.

What Is a One-Page Website?

A one-page website, also called a single-page website, uses a minimalistic design that compiles all your information, CTAs and links on a single page. Users scroll down to read content, in which each section or desired action fills up the screen to focus the reader. This differs from a multi-page website, which has many additional pages and navigation buttons to other places within the website. Here is a great example of single-page design from Scriptogr.am:

This design is quite different from your normal website page and even the search engine optimization strategy is different. One-page website SEO doesn’t always target the same aspects that multi-page SEO does. For those wondering if single-page optimization is worth their time, we compiled a list of pros and cons about this fascinating trend.

The Pros of One-Page Website SEO

While there are plenty of arguments on either side of the debate of SEO single-page vs multiple-pages, we’ll focus first on the benefits that are drawing businesses to create single-page sites.

Increased Link Authority

One of the main goals of every content marketing plan is to increase the authority of your site. Single-page websites do this easily because any promotion done generally links back to the main URL. When you create several single-page sites, you gain the authority of having numerous websites that link back to your page without having to convince other authors to embed your link.

Linking is one of the most important factors to SEO professionals, as evidenced by the fact that a large survey done by Moz.com revealed that the domain- and page-level link authority and features accounted for over 40 percent of the impact in Google.

Better Mobile Experience

One of the main reasons that businesses are jumping on the one-page website SEO bandwagon is that most people are accessing their sites from a mobile device. While laptops and desktops still have their place, users are performing the majority of their searches via a smartphone or tablet, especially those not related to work.

The company comScore analyzed data and found that U.S. citizens were using their mobile devices to access the web 71 percent of the time. If you deal globally, this will be even more important to you since other countries, including Indonesia, China, Mexico and Brazil, report numbers that are the same or higher.

Single-page websites are ideal for mobile users because they were made with scrolling in mind. The unique design makes objectives and CTAs simple, which can be great for small businesses or organizations that want users to act.

As the number of users accessing your page through a smartphone or tablet continues to rise, it is increasingly important for you to make sure your site is as mobile-friendly as possible. Whether or not you use one-page website SEO, focus on optimizing your website for the growing use of smartphones.

Simple is Better

As you design your web page, one of your main goals is likely to target certain viewers and guide them through your site. One of the benefits of having a single-page site is that this can be easier since there are usually fewer options on the page. By keeping it simple, you can direct your targeted audience to the links in a less confusing manner than it would be for them to find products on your main site. Here is Lucky Beard’s simple and successful one-page website:

Take advantage of this by only including details that pertain to the product or service this specific viewer is looking for. While you may have several different types of products, focus your single pages only on those products that are similar to the one the viewer is searching for.

Simplicity is also a very popular trend in every category, from house design to website look. Less is more and being able to create pages that only feature certain details means you can incorporate a simple, clear view for your customers.

The Cons of One-Page Website SEO

Now that we’ve covered the pros, let’s go over some of the cons. Some of the very things that are positive about one-page website SEO can also be negative if used incorrectly. When determining if you want to include this as one of your content marketing methods, consider the following factors:

It Takes Planning

Creating a single-page site may present simplicity to your customers, but it’s not always easy for you to design. You will need to work with your content marketing and content writing agencies to be sure you are only putting information on the page that will be of interest to the user. With just one page to work with, too much content and too many links can cause the viewer to lose interest or become overwhelmed.

With such a concise type of marketing, you really need to plan carefully when determining what to include. This means you need to consolidate, simplify and improve your brand image and voice. You’ll need to keep layout and design in mind, too. Part of the magic of one-page website SEO is the aesthetic.

Maybe Too Simple

Another problem with a single-page site is that your viewers may be turned off by the lack of information. There is generally much less information on these websites than there is on multi-page sites. This can lead viewers to see the page as more of an advertisement and click away. While this can be a problem, it can be overcome with careful design and planning.

Some experts recommend using several H1 and H2 headers in order to divide and designate different sections. You need to find the perfect balance between too much and too little information. Viewers can become annoyed if they don’t find enough relevant content on the site. You will also likely need to alert viewers to the ability to click to the full site (if it exists) and then persuade them to do so.

Not Enough Keywords

If you have several keywords you want to incorporate, a single-page website will likely fall short. Multiple-page websites fill lots of pages to effectively boost rankings for multiple keywords. Your website will be pretty narrowly focused, so your pool of keywords will be smaller anyway. This makes it harder to rank on Google searches.

It’s More Expensive

Investing in SEO is a no-brainer, but some strategies cost more than others and single-page websites are one of them. Since the effectiveness is debatable, many experts in the field feel that there is not enough benefit to these sorts of landing pages to outweigh the cost. While this aspect will have little to do with how a viewer perceives your site, it has a lot to do with what your marketing budget is and how interested you are in being thrifty.

Lacks Advanced Strategies

There are plenty of fairly advanced strategies that you will just have to forego on a single-page website. Methods that require several pages can boost your rankings, but usually require multi-page sites to work. In other words, your normal digital marketing methods may not work. You may have to learn some new strategies or tweak the ones you’ve used in the past.

What We Think About One-Page Website SEO

Is one-page website SEO a good or harmful part of your plan? It depends on what you use it for. For smaller businesses or groups, this may be the best way to reach your target market. Especially for those who have only a handful of objectives, this mobile-based layout might do the trick. Take a look at Balance, which uses a series of questions to help you create a life balance map:

However, if you have a big company or are expecting increased growth, stick to multi-page websites. They can give you more options for SEO, content and buying options. However, every company strategy is different and may require the personal and eye-catching benefits that this single-page trend offers.

Single-page websites can be a great addition to your content marketing plan, but they need to be used in the right way (typically as specific landing pages) and should definitely not be your sole strategy. Talk about the options with your content team and evaluate together whether one-page website SEO is right for you.