7 Tips To Help Improve Your Blogs Performance

Setting up a company blog seems easy right? Add some blog posts and watch the traffic roll in, phones ring off the hook, and sales shoot through the roof. While that sounds good in theory, it isn’t quite that simple. You need to get consistent with your blog posts, but unfortunately the same thing happens with most businesses that launch a blog. There are several reasons why blogs are unsuccessful. Most will post on a regular basis for a week or two and then run out of topics and begin to update the blog sporadically until they just stop all together.

It is important that you pick a publishing schedule that will help meet your goals. It will take some testing to determine what update schedule will benefit your business. After some testing you can determine how many visitors and leads you can expect from your blog posts. Once you determine your publishing sweet spot you can plan in advance and schedule posts weeks in advance. Once you get on a roll and begin producing blog content on a regular basis you don’t want to ever miss a publishing deadline.

Once your blog is up and running at full speed there are additional things you can do to enhance the performance even more. Here are seven tips to help you optimize your blog for even better results.

1. Use short titles that won’t get cut off by the search engines.

Not only will a long blog title take your website visitors too long to read and “get the point” – but it will also not fully show up in search results. The ideal title is about 55 characters long. This keeps it short and sweet, making it easy for your website visitors to glance and spark their interest. It also ensures that your full title will be displayed in the search results.

2. Don’t forget to include your target keyword in your title.

There is a big difference between optimizing your blog posts and creating pure spam and keyword stuffed titles and content. If you can include your target keyword in the title of your blog, then great. If you can include it towards the front of the title, then even better. You always want to write for your readers, so make sure that the title does a good job at quickly letting them know what the post is about. Your blog post title needs to entice your readers to click on it – focus on that first, and if you can get your keyword worked into it consider it a bonus.

3. Test several CTAs within your blog.

The goal of your blog is to ultimately generate leads. You never want to just stay stagnant without testing different variables, such as CTA location and color schemes. If you are attempting to collect emails, then test the location of your submit box. The sidebar, at the end of posts, and within the post are all popular locations. If you are trying to generate phone calls then use a call tracking program and test different locations for the phone number and see which one pulls a higher call rate.

4. Have a second CTA to catch visitors that are not interested in your main CTA.

On our website we have an offer located below our main CTA as well as in our footer. Not every visitor is going to be interested in your main call-to-action so have something in place that will appeal to the other visitors. This will help you build your subscriber list faster. Relying on just one CTA will cause you to miss a lot of leads.

5. Interlink your blog posts.

Make sure to link to other blog posts that you feel the reader would be interested in as well. This helps to keep visitors on your website. If they stay on your website longer it increases the odds of them converting. There is also a SEO benefit of interlinking. If you point links at pages that are already ranking high in the search results it can help to push them up even further.

6. Don’t be afraid to edit old posts to point to your new posts.

If you have older posts that have a lot of authority you can always edit them and point a link to your new post. This can help it to rank higher in the search result much faster. It is also a good way to push traffic that lands on the old post ranking high to your new content piece.

7. Highlight special content in your posts.

If your blog post contains something special, such as an infographic, video, or some other unique component make sure that the blog post points this out. Using brackets to highlight aspects of your post can help to draw attention to it.

Use these tips above to help improve your blog. You can also learn from reading your competitors blog, as this can help you identify some strategies to test. The biggest problem most blogs run into is being consistent. Once you select a publishing schedule it is important that you stick with it. Don’t commit to publishing content if you cannot keep up with that schedule.

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