Writing great SEO blog content is often an important strategy for businesses online. Not only is a well-curated blog a good way to build and add expertise to your brand, it is one of the most effective ways to drive targeted traffic to your site.

But one of the questions we hear frequently from businesses is “what do we write?” It’s easy to stare at a blinking cursor and feel like you have nothing to offer, and even if you did, you wouldn’t know how to integrate keywords into your blog post for maximum value.

Blog content ideas are easier to generate than you might think. It starts with two, hyper-focused foundations that we always use in our first talks with clients (and you can use for yourself). When you know these two principles and revisit them regularly it’s far easier to generate content that works for you.

Here are the foundations we start with to create SEO blog content.

Two Keys for Writing Blog Posts that Work for Your Business

1. Understand Your Goals

As our title suggests, this step is paramount to writing blog content that converts. Not understanding goals is also one of the biggest reasons business owners experience burnout or fatigue with blog posts or articles. If you don’t know your end goal with blog content, it’s hard to justify continuing the effort and hours while juggling the other parts of your business.

So dedicate some time to really knowing and understanding what you’d like the blog function on your website to do. Do you want each blog post to lead to direct contact from a qualified lead? Do you want the body of your work to speak to your overall brand expertise? Do you want the questions you answer to build trust before clients purchase? Is your blog part of your overall customer service strategy?

Whatever your goals (and you might have a combination of short and long term goals), use these goals to drive what kind of content you’d like to produce.

For example, a blog with the business goal of generating qualified leads - you might initially curate and create articles that, short term, serves as an expanded FAQ for customers - starting with the keywords, phrases and questions customers use and ask most frequently, and build out posts around those first, then expand into deeper dives on products and services later. In the long term, they’ll continue to write these “evergreen” articles, while also adding articles with a more specific focus. Think about writing some key “how tos” or even “X product vs Y product” for your most popular products and services to start, then move to topics that cover other products and services.

No matter what your goals are, understand that a curating and maintaining a blog is overall a long-term strategy. While you might see sharp jumps in visitors when you produce an especially helpful article, the body of the work as a whole is what will bring the greatest return.

Bottom line: don’t forfeit your monthly blogging strategy when things get hectic in your business. Keep your goal in mind and remember what you’re working toward. Consistency is key!

2. Understand Your Clients/Customers

While we could talk all day about the nuances of search engines and Search Engine Optimization, we ultimately produce content for the people who use search engines. When working with clients, we specifically are producing content for the right people for that particular business.

Producing content without your customer fully in mind every time you write is a lot like shouting into the void. Your customers and potential customers are bombarded with information all day, every day. Your job is to understand who they are, what they want, what problems they have and how your product/service solves that problem, and what they actually care about.

This step will not happen in a day. It will be a combination of solid keyword research (you can learn a lot about your customers by what they search for online), plus those interactions you have with them on the phone, in person or over email. What questions do they ask the most? What are they afraid of? What do they say they are most grateful for when you meet their needs?

The right SEO blog content is always written for people first. Optimization just means that you’re naturally including keywords and phrases so the right people find your business.

Once you have determined and solidified these two key components around your blog strategy you should have at least five or six ideas for blog posts you can generate in the next month or two. In order to consistently generate blog content beyond those first five or six posts, however, you’ll want to have a few other tools in your toolbelt, such as:

• A quarterly blog content calendar (this can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet and can include future dates, titles and keywords you’d like to target)
• A block of time each quarter to explore your analytics (what blog posts had the most visitors? What seemed to resonate with your customers? Which keywords did your audience use most to find you?)
• A block of time each quarter to generate new ideas for your content calendar
• A block of time each year to review your blog goals and what your customers want

These key components can help you build a blog that works for your business long term. And with practice and consistency, the content will be easier to produce each month.

SEO Blog Content in Columbus, Ohio

At Two Wheels Marketing, we focus on helping you reach your business goals. We have a diverse range of marketing skills with a focus on helping the right customers find your business at the right time. If you’re ready to learn more about how SEO blog content can help your business grow contact us today!