I write blog posts for a several of reasons:
- Share small business marketing tips to clients, prospects and referral sources
- Announce upcoming events
- Create a steady stream of keyword rich content to help improve our search rankings
- Give visitors some insight into the personality behind the roundpeg brand.
While all of the reasons are valid, today I want to take a closer look at using blogs to improve search position. To do that, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your visitors and anticipate what words they might use to find your site. (It helps if your have good analytics, so you can see what words are being used)
We have been doing a lot of key word research recently using a new tool to help pick the best words and the results have been interesting. We are adding phrases such as small business marketing tips or small business marketing ideas to our new blog posts, because these phrases are each searched more than 1,000 times each month.
I don’t advocate keyword stuffing ( repeating the same phrase over and over) However, keeping a list of terms to include in your post is an effective marketing strategy for small business owners seeking to squeeze the most value out of every post.
How do you find the balance? I typically write the entire post and then go back and look for places I can rework a sentence or two to include some of the phrases I am trying to focus on.
One more tip: Try to use key words early in the blog post, title and excerpt.