Since the beginning of May I’ve been on a bit of an SEO mission, blogging every single day.
This has led to a lot of questions from clients and followers like:
- Why are you blogging every day?
- How do you possibly write this much?
- Is it really helping your SEO?
- How do you decide what to blog about?
- Should I be blogging every day?
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These are all great questions, and the short answer to each is:
- I launched a brand shiny new website last month, and am now in the run up to launching my new book. I’m blogging so much to give both the best possible start in life.
- I’m a writer. I spend all day, every day writing. I’m not going to say blogging daily is easy, simple, or fast, because it isn’t. It takes time and planning, even for me, a professional blogger. HOWEVER with a good plan in place and a sensible approach you can get it done in a surprisingly short amount of time. In fact, I don’t sit down daily and write a blog post. I batch fourteen (two weeks worth) or more at a time every other weekend.
- Yes it’s really helping my SEO! In just over 2 weeks it’s already bumped my organic traffic to three times as many daily hits as I had in March, before the new site launched. But it’s the long-term benefits that are really going to help because my posts are carefully optimised for key search terms.
- I already had a plan for this year for a weekly blog post – that schedule was created using my Divine Blogging method. I added an extra long-form post per week during my book launch period, and the other days are filled with SEO posts – shorter form posts specifically designed to hit key search terms. So for those, I decided which keywords I needed to optimise content for and created a post idea for each.
- If you’re in the middle of a launch period, or planning a launch, blogging every day is a great way to give your site a boost. If you’re marketing your business without any form of advertising, blogging every day is an awesome way of maximising your organic traffic and (if you’re smart about it) should boost your inbound marketing efforts in the long-run as well. If you’re serious about content marketing (whether you’re using ads to help or not) having a month or two of daily blogging every year is not essential, but it will make all your other content efforts work even more effectively.
In short, daily blogging is a seriously powerful (and surprisingly easy) way of giving your business a massive boost with a minimal amount of time or money spent – SEO posts are short, you can make six out of your seven posts a week c.300-500 words, with one long-form post a week added in, and you will get great results.
And if you plan those daily posts well, getting big batches written takes far less time than you think.
A huge part of that planning is getting your titles right.
Brainstorm Your SEO Terms
Brainstorm a title for every day you want to blog, so that when you have time to sit down and write you don’t have to stop and think about each individually. You know exactly what needs writing, and can just knock them out one after the other until you get through the list.
If you’re unsure which keywords you should be optimising for you will need to do a little keyword research to get you started. Decide how long you’re going to keep up a daily schedule for. If it’s the first time you’re doing it, I recommend doing 30 days to start with to help you get the hang of it. However, there are a few other factors that might influence how long your daily schedule is.
For example, if you’re launching a new product or service, the best way your content marketing can support it is through a 90 day launch period, including at least one long-form post a week (ideally two), and preferably a daily short-form post on all the other days.
Yes, it’s a lot! Trust me, I know, I’m in the middle of doing it myself right now, but where launching is concerned it’s the most powerful way to leverage your blog to support your efforts especially if you’re not using paid advertising.
If you’re unconvinced, I totally get it – it’s a lot to do and seems like far more trouble than it’s worth. Which is exactly why I’m launching both Divine Blogging: The Book, and the Divine Blogging Academy (details coming soon!) this year without any paid advertising, and a launch strategy that relies on nothing but content.
So you can see how well it works!
Once you know how many daily posts you need, look through your keyword research and highlight any terms that are most relevant for you until you have a list of at least one search term per post.
Now you’re going to write a headline for each search term…
How To Write Crap Headlines For Powerful SEO
Here’s the thing about writing headlines around a search term: you’re going to end up with a lot of weird headlines.
People are often completely illogical in the terms they type into Google (or whatever search engine they use), so the search terms your research spits out at you as being the best to focus on might not always make sense.
For example, my own list of search terms that I created for my daily blogging schedule looks like this:
That’s only about 50 or so terms on a list containing nearly 300. They’re alphabetised to make it easier to find things, and you can see that ‘content marketing’ takes up the first two words of a LOT of these terms.
That’s to be expected – I’m a content marketer.
But while some of these terms are perfectly logical, like ‘content marketing strategy’ and ‘content marketing books’ there are a lot of other terms on that list that aren’t as obvious. Some of them are seriously weird.
Some of them are needlessly repetitive, and seem to have a couple of search terms shoehorned together into a single long tail keyword, like:
Content is king content marketing
When this happens the easiest thing to do is use punctuation to create a natural reason for the rather clunky term. For example, ‘Content Is King: Content Marketing For Beginners’.
Then there are the ones that appear to make no grammatical sense when you first look at them, like:
Content marketing awesome
You kind of have to squint at these ones until you can see a way to create a natural headline that fits, for example ‘Is Content Marketing Awesome Or A Waste Of Time?’ or ‘How To Make Content Marketing Awesome’.
And if you really, really can’t find a way to write a decent headline with the specific keyword tweak it a tiny bit, and include the exact search term in all the other places it needs to be. LSI means a slight variation will still work, as long as the rest of the post is well optimised for the term.
The Best Headline Writing Hack Going
The easiest way to ensure you come up with good headlines that read well, captivate people, are attention grabbing and clickable, as well as SEO friendly, is to use CoSchedule’s free headline analyser. I’ve been using this for years and run every headline for my own content and my clients’ through it to make sure they don’t just include the right search term and make an effective SEO headline, but are genuinely good headlines.
Write What They’re Looking For, Not What You Do
There’s one other important think to remember: the titles and often even subjects you come up with to fit your search terms often won’t be things you’d choose to write about. They may not even be things you want to write about.
It doesn’t matter.
The point here is to write posts that will draw in your ideal clients. That means writing about what the search engine gods tell you your ideal clients are looking for.
Whether you like the topic or not is irrelevant. Whether it’s fun or interesting to you is irrelevant. It will be a relevant topic to you and your business – if it isn’t then something has gone awry with your research – but the relevance may see stretched, or forced, or as if it’s in the same ballpark but not quite there.
Try to remember that your ideal clients have all been on a journey to reach the point of becoming your ideal client.
Before they were your ideal client, they had very different needs and wants, and you would not have viewed them as a good match for your business at all. But sometimes, if you help people at an earlier stage in your journey find you before they’re stricktly ready for you, you can actually be the catalyst that transforms them into your ideal client.
In other words, SEO isn’t just about attracting your ideal client and converting them into paying customers. Sometimes it’s also about attracting people who might one day become your ideal client, converting them into your ideal client, and then converting them into paying customers.
I’ve said it repeatedly but I’ll say it again: content marketing is a long game.
A very long game.
So do your research, forge those crappy random search terms into the best headlines you can possibly create, and give your website a powerful SEO boost with a daily blog schedule – at least for a month or two.
Seriously, you won’t regret it!
One Last Thing…
For some quick and easy SEO hacks check out my recent blog post, and for a more detailed guide look out for my post next Tuesday. In the meantime, if you want the SEO benefits of daily blogging haven’t got the time or inclination, don’t worry – you can easily hire a copywriter to create a big batch of SEO posts and schedule them for you. To the outside world, it will seem you’re blogging daily, in reality all you have to do is find the right writer, tell them your goals, and leave the rest to them! Check out my Bitchin’ Blog Bundles for the perfect solution to SEO blogging needs…