By Dylan Tatum, Special AFS Contributor
It’s easy to think of blogging as supplemental rather than beneficial. Blog content can serve as a stopgap measure to let clients know about an upcoming event or as a piece of decoration for your website, but most business owners don’t think about their blog as a mechanism for actually generating revenue. In fact, blogging is an important tool in your repertoire—when done correctly, it can produce huge long-term results for your business.
Not only can a well-groomed blog motivate visitors to linger on your site, but it can convey a sense of personality and trustworthiness that is tough to sell on functional copy and design aesthetics alone. Plus, adding new content to your site is a great signal boost for your SEO, which means your site will rank higher in your area’s Google listings, which means you’ll attract more visitors and get more leads.
Posting a blog every week or two may not pay immediate dividends, but with a little dedication and a smidgeon of elbow grease, your blog can help net you high-quality leads and fresh new clients that may otherwise have gone elsewhere.
To get the most out of your blog, there are a few key details to remember:
Write To Convert
Your goal is to keep visitors on your site, engage with them, and eventually motivate them to either submit their information or make a purchase. Keep your content relevant, ideally focused on one or two long-tail keywords.
A long-tail keyword is a short phrase that explores a niche, such as “eating healthy on a budget” or “how to get a workout at home,” evergreen topics that provide you with the opportunity to build your SEO by blogging about content relevant to your industry. You’ll also build your trustworthiness and professionalism in the eyes of readers, connect with more high-quality leads, and keep traffic moving through your website rather than away from it.
Due to the way Google’s algorithms index and rank websites, you’ll want to make sure your chosen keywords are included in the title of your post, in the URL, and in the meta description (the content excerpt that shows up beneath each search result). Utilizing the alt text of images to highlight keywords can help you sweeten your SEO pot, too, without drowning your readers in keyword soup.
Including your keywords organically in the body text of your blog is good, too, but remember: don’t throw your keywords around where they don’t fit just to tell Google what you’re about! Overuse of keywords can be flagged as “keyword stuffing” and actually hurts your SEO.
Provide Calls to Action
As visitors engage with your blog content, you create a multitude of opportunities to sell them on your services. Let’s say they’ve just read a post about a member’s success story from your gym or martial arts studio—now, at the bottom of the page, you have the opportunity to present them with an accessible buy-in to get those same results. Learning how to build effective lead magnets can help you convert visitors into leads and grow your business, and you can think of blog posts as fishing rods that help you cast out your bait.
Blogs are also an awesome way to create a network of backlinks throughout your site. Backlinks are incoming links directed at a web page and are great for your SEO. As you link back to your blog content, schedule, sign-up forms, et cetera, you’re not just keeping visitors on your site—you’re also actively building healthier and more robust SEO.
Including your keywords organically in the body text of your blog is good, too, but remember: don’t throw your keywords around where they don’t fit just to tell Google what you’re about! Overuse of keywords can be flagged as “keyword stuffing” and actually hurts your SEO.
Cultivate An Authentic Voice
Okay, so you’ve got your topic in mind and you know how to make your page easy for Google’s algorithms to read. Now, how do you get people to read it?
It’s easier than it sounds. You’re already writing towards your visitor’s intent—if your article is called “Top Ten Tricks To Lose Weight Fast,” then we can assume that whoever clicks on your blog is interested in weight loss. They’re invested in the topic and they’re actively seeking information. All that’s left for you to do is be professional, concise, and true to your brand.
People tend to respond best to accessible language, so avoid unnecessary complexity that may alienate readers. No matter your level of expertise, try to keep things simple—rather than soliloquizing about the role of overpronation in tibial stress, talk about proper running technique or how to avoid shin splints. Keep your paragraphs short. Make your blog a conversation. You want to be knowledgeable, likable, and trustworthy. You want to communicate your authentic self.
And remember, always proof-read before you post! Grammar may not be dazzling, but having visitors perceive you as professional and intelligent will do nothing but good for your conversion rates.
But I Don’t Have Time!
Don’t worry! You don’t have to post a blog every single day. At 97 Display, our team of SEO specialists monitor the performance of our clients’ websites over time, and so we’ve learned to always highly recommend blogging as a secondary method to kickstart SEO. All it takes is one or two posts a month to feel the results over time. Some platforms, such as our custom-built interface, will also allow you to schedule out blog posts that you’ve written ahead of time, so you can make things easier by automating the process while you focus on your clients!
Plus, once you have it, much of blog content is evergreen. Lists and guides are always in high demand. Even quick, narrow topics—such as a monthly shoutout to a thriving client or a dedicated staff member—can go along way towards showing potential leads that you care about your customers and your team, which will, in turn, build trust in your brand.
At the end of the day, all new content is good content. You’re adding value to your business. And not to say that all old advice is good advice, but speaking of evergreen content, I think these words are worth heeding: work smarter, not harder. When you invest time into a blog post, spending a couple of extra minutes to SEO-optimize your content and create lead magnets is definitely worthwhile. Every little advantage adds up, providing your website with a wider funnel to draw in traffic, convert visitors into leads, and work toward the ultimate goal of growing your business over time.
For more about blogging for your fitness business or to talk to a Website Specialist about additional ways to boost your website traffic visit 97display.com/afs and request more information!
Dylan Tatum is the Copywriter at 97 Display, the leading website solution for Martial Arts and Fitness businesses. Dylan specializes in creating SEO-rich web content and crafting email nurture campaigns that bring “dead leads” back to life. In his free time, Dylan uses his talent and passion for writing to create novels.
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