Want to get the most out of your business blog this quarter? It’s time to do a basic blog audit to check your blog is ticking all the fundamental boxes, and find areas of improvement to work on over the coming months.
Here are five simple things you can look for, starting right now.
Posting Frequency
How often are you posting on your blog? And more importantly – are you being consistent? Your readers and customers are looking for reasons to check back with you for more useful information. Providing them with great content is paramount, but you also need to post on a reliable basis to maintain their interest.
Brand Voice
Whether you have one author or many contributing to your business blog, check also for consistency of brand voice. Is everyone speaking the same language in terms of tone and style? Are you all conveying consistent key messages?
Having numerous people contribute to your blog is great because it keeps content fresh and interesting, but the voice those posts are written in shouldn’t be so different as to seem jarring to readers.
Calls to Action
If you’re blogging for business, chances are you’re blogging to drive sales or enquiries or conversions of some sort. Look over your past posts and see how often you’re including a call to action in your content. Better yet, use Google Analytics to measure how those calls to action are being received.
An easy way to monitor the success of specific calls to action is to utilize a link monitoring tool, such as Bitly or Google URL Builder, and keep an eye on which calls to action are generating the most clicks. Figure out what’s working best for your audience, then apply that to future posts.
Internal Links
Internal links are important in helping spread ‘link juice’ or ranking power around a website, but they’re also crucial to the user experience, and to help drive conversions.
You can view more information about your website and blog’s internal links via Google Webmaster Tools, though it also pays to eyeball a few of your previous posts to get a feel for how your readers would experience your content – and how they might navigate around your site to different posts and products via internal links. Consider:
- Am I including internal links in my posts?
- Am I linking to useful and relevant content and products, or simply linking for linking’s sake?
- Are my internal links on relevant product names and keywords (rather than on less useful/ trustworthy ‘link here’ text)?
Eye-Catching Imagery
Most bloggers recommend the use of images to capture reader attention, break up copy and further illustrate each post’s subject matter – but there’s another very good reason to ensure you’re adding images to your blog posts.
An increasing number of web users are heading straight to Google Images to search for products, services and instructions, which means it’s vital to not only include images with your blog posts, but to also label those images correctly with relevant and keyword-rich headlines and alt tags.
