You’re a brand new blogger, and you just got done writing your first handful of posts. 

Incredibly proud of your accomplishment, you check your analytics after a week to see how many adoring fans viewed your post and left insightful comments. 

Your heart drops a little as you realize that not a single person has read one of your posts. 

At this rate, you won’t be able to quit your day job and retire to Bora Bora anytime soon. 

This is a common occurrence for new bloggers, and it serves as a bit of a reality check. 

Creating content takes a lot of work, and if you want to make any money, you need to know how to monetize your blog properly. 

In addition, the best monetization strategies only work if you consistently generate lots of targeted traffic. 

The good news is that you’ve just identified your two main problems: A) no monetization strategy and B) no way to generate lots of organic visitors from your target audience. 

At The HOTH, we have the remedy for both. 

We’re search engine optimization (SEO) experts, which is the best way to drive lots of vetted traffic to your blog. Not only that, but we’re here to teach you the most effective ways to earn money blogging, so stay tuned. 

Generate Targeted Traffic with SEO 

Why is SEO so effective at driving traffic to your blog?

While it’s a bit cliche to mention at this point, it’s still true that 93% of web experiences begin on a search engine. 

Anytime users are looking for the answer to a question, want to find a product, or want to educate themselves – they take to search engines like Google and Bing (you’ve likely done the same). 

Whenever they reach the search results pages (SERPs), the #1 result generates the most clicks BY FAR. As this graph illustrates, the number of clicks for positions #2 – #10 is significantly lower, and it only gets worse from there. 

That’s why businesses compete so hard to obtain the #1 spot for their most relevant keywords (the search terms related to their products and services). 

As a blogger, your goal is to rank as high as possible on the SERPs for keywords related to your niche.

To find which keywords to target, you can use our free keyword planner tool. 

It’ll let you know which keywords your audience is searching for the most which you should use to inform your content strategy. 

What do we mean by that?

Well, if you notice that your audience is searching for a particular keyword, it’s a sign that they want a piece of content surrounding it. As such, whenever you publish a blog post on said topic, you know that your audience will want to read it. This is called matching search intent. 

SEO encompasses a lot more than we can fit in this article, though, so be sure to learn more from our guides on Technical SEO and On-Page SEO. 

With a proper SEO strategy in place, you’ll generate enough traffic for the following monetization strategies to work their magic. 

Show Me the Money! 

Now that our mini-SEO crash course is complete, it’s time to learn the most effective strategies for monetizing your blog. 

After all, you probably didn’t start a blog strictly as a hobby. 

No, you want to start a lucrative side hustle or earn full-time income, so let’s learn how. 

Senator, we run ads 

A great way to start generating revenue from your blog is to allow advertisers to take up space on your website. 

There are many digital ad networks that you can leverage to run targeted ads on your blog, which can be profitable. 

Google AdSense is the most popular of these networks, but there are a few requirements to become eligible. As long as you treat your blog like a professional business, you shouldn’t have trouble qualifying, even if your blog is relatively new. 

While display ads are an excellent way for new blogs to start earning a few dollars, they do affect your user experience, so don’t go too crazy. 

Affiliate marketing programs 

Becoming an affiliate is arguably the best way to profit from your blog, given that your niche has a desirable (and profitable) affiliate program. 

When you become an affiliate of a specific business, you’ll receive an official referral link. 

From there, you can promote their products on your blog using said link, and you’ll receive a cut of the profits. 

Not bad, right?

Also, Amazon Associates is a MASSIVE affiliate program, and since their website sells virtually everything, the chances are high that you’ll be able to promote something that falls within your niche.

Pro tip: Always hit your affiliate links with a nofollow or sponsored tag, as this is in accordance with Google’s guidelines. 

Selling digital products and services 

Are you the GOAT SME (subject matter expert) in your field?

Then, you should write an in-depth eBook and sell it to your readers. 

Or you can offer virtual coaching/consulting services, which are both excellent ways to make money. 

The best part?

There are no percentages here, as you get to keep 100% of the profits. 

Oh, and how could we forget the mother of online monetization, online courses?

Piecing together an online course in your area of expertise can be extremely profitable as long as your curriculum provides real value. 

Platforms like Udemy are great for developing online courses if you don’t have the resources yourself. 

Creating a paid community 

This tactic is for blogs that already have established followings, as it’s not a good idea for brand-new blogs to create a paid section right off the bat. 

Yet, if you have a loyal following of readers, you can offer paid membership where they gain access to exclusive perks like:

• One-on-one sessions with you 
• Additional videos and educational resources
• Unique newsletters packed with insider info 
• Webinars, workshops, and reports 

Earn Your First Dollar Blogging Today 

Now that you know multiple ways to earn money from your blog, what are you waiting for?

Start running a few tasteful ads, become an affiliate, and start drafting an eBook so you can transform organic visitors into dollars in your bank account. 

If you need expert help setting up a killer, SEO-friendly blog, don’t wait to check out HOTH X, our renowned managed SEO services.      

The post The Best Ways to Monetize Your Blog (Pumped-Up by SEO)  appeared first on The HOTH.

This reinforces the need for search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns so that your content can reach the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages). 

Yet, one of the biggest challenges with SEO is how often it changes. 

Thanks to constant Google algorithm updates and newly emerging search trends, SEO tactics fall in and out of favor all the time. 

If you don’t routinely optimize web content, holding onto top SERP rankings will be next to impossible.

In the current era, recent developments like the prevalence of AI chatbots, E-E-A-T, and slower indexing times are drastically changing the way SEO works – and you need to keep up with them if you want your content to continue to rank. 

However, some tried-and-true optimization tactics have yet to go out of style, like conducting targeted keyword research and creating excellent content that provides value to your audience. 

There’s a lot to know about optimizing web content, which is why we put together this comprehensive guide containing 5 steps to optimize any piece of content to perfection. 

Along the way, you’ll learn how SEO and content optimization has changed in recent years, so stay tuned to get the scoop on the latest developments. 

Why is Optimizing Web Content Necessary?

What does it mean to ‘optimize’ a blog post, video, or web page?

Optimization involves making enhancements to a piece of content with a specific goal in mind, which is usually to improve its performance on search engines like Google. 

Higher SERP rankings aren’t the only reason you may want to optimize your content, as you can also optimize for higher conversions, click-through rates, and a better overall user experience. 

It all depends on what your primary business objectives are, such as increasing revenue or improving brand awareness. 

Also, routine optimization is a necessity due to the ever-changing nature of SEO. 

Unless a piece of content is evergreen (meaning that it continues to stay fresh & relevant for readers), you’ll need to update it with new information periodically. 

Not only does this ensure that your readers always receive the most accurate, up-to-date information, it makes your content eligible to remain on Google’s SERPs. 

Since Google only wants to provide its users with the highest quality, most accurate information, its crawlers only rank content that’s relevant and recent. 

Give underperforming content a second chance

Another reason to optimize your web content is to tweak and improve an existing piece of content that isn’t as performing as well in the search results as you’d hoped. 

It takes a lot of time and money to produce high-quality content, so it’s worth doing what you can to optimize a post that doesn’t meet your expectations. 

After all, it could be something simple like an indexing error that caused your content to disappear from the SERPs. 

Once you rule out technical issues like noindex tags, indexing errors, and duplicate content – it’s time to take a cold, hard look at the content you produced. 

Ask yourself the following questions to help determine the root cause of the issue:

• Are you targeting keywords that have decent search volume and relatively low keyword difficulty scores?
• Does the piece feature a readable format with keyword-rich headings (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.)?
• Were you able to provide unique insights about the topic derived from your own personal experience and expertise?
• Do your title tag and meta description accurately reflect the topic you explore in the content?
• Is the piece of content more than 700 words? 

If you answered no to any of these questions, then you’ve definitely got some optimization to do. 

The good news is that if you’re able to fix whatever’s holding your content back, you’ll enjoy higher SERP rankings and increased online visibility. 

How Has Content Optimization Changed in Recent Years?

In a field that’s known for constant changes, the last few years have been especially ripe with new developments affecting SEO.

AI chatbots took over the world while Google released back-to-back updates to their algorithm and Quality Rater Guidelines – just to name a few changes. 

Here’s a look at the latest SEO developments you should keep in mind when optimizing web content.

Link Spam Update 

In December 2022, Google released their latest Link Spam Update, which used a souped-up SpamBrain (their AI-based spam prevention system) to negate the effect of paid backlinks on SERP rankings. 

While paying for backlinks was always against Google’s guidelines, it was standard practice for many SEO experts – even those who favored white-hat techniques. 

The update’s effects were drastic on websites that used paid or unnatural backlinks, as many site owners reported significant ranking drops.

Going forward, website owners must focus on strictly organic link-building techniques, such as guest posting, link insertions, and relationship-building. 

E-E-A-T (Quality Rater Guidelines update)

Around the same time the Link Spam Update rolled out, Google updated its Quality Rater Guidelines. 

Most notably, they added an extra E to their famous acronym, E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).

The additional E stands for experience, which means websites and reviews that display first-hand experience and knowledge of topics are favored by Google’s quality raters. 

To ensure your content remains at the top of the SERPs, optimize your content by including anecdotes, real stories, and first-hand accounts that reflect your knowledge on a topic. 

The AI revolution 

AI chatbots were already taking over the world at the beginning of 2023, and it’s only been gaining momentum since. 

The entire internet has long been buzzing about ChatGPT, AI image generators, and AI content creation software.

Bing famously integrated ChatGPT into its search engine, which is already changing the way users approach search engines. 

While traditional SEO still works for now, it’s bound to change quite a bit in the near future. 

In the meantime, you can use powerful AI tools to make optimizing web content a lot easier. Tools like Copymatic will enable you to automatically generate blog posts, landing pages, and even entire websites. 

Chatbots can provide quick answers to any questions you may have while creating content – saving you the need to browse multiple web pages. 

Reduced crawling and indexing 

In order to reduce their impact on the environment, Google significantly reduced the amount of crawling and indexing it does to discover new websites. 

Their thinking is that excessive crawling and indexing powered by non-renewable sources is contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. 

Not only that, but Google plans to neutralize its carbon footprint entirely by 2030, and reduced crawling/indexing is a part of that plan. 

What does this mean for SEO?

It means that crawling and indexing your new web pages will take even longer than before (it was already a lengthy process). 

While search engines like Bing and Yandex have incorporated IndexNow (an open-source protocol that enables instant indexing for participating search engines), Google has yet to implement such a solution. 

That means it’s more important than ever for site owners to publish high-quality content, seek out high-authority backlinks, and grow their social media presence to speed up the indexing process. 

Pro tip: The indexing process can be especially slow for link-building tactics like guest posting, so incorporate some link insertions into the mix. That’s because a link insertion involves adding one of your backlinks to an existing piece of content that’s already in Google’s index. 

5 Steps to Optimize Web Content 

Now that you’re up to speed on what’s new with SEO, it’s time to look at the most effective content optimization techniques to help you reach the top of the SERPs. 

Bear in mind that we’re only going to cover on-page optimizations, so if you’re interested in diagnosing and repairing technical issues, check out our in-depth technical SEO checklist instead. 

If you have a piece of content that’s underperforming due to on-page reasons (or if you’re creating a new piece from scratch), follow these 5 steps to optimize it for SEO fully. 

Step #1: Targeted keyword research 

The keywords that you target will make or break your SERP rankings, so you need to be smart about the ones you choose. 

Researching keywords is how you uncover topics relevant to your target audience, which will guide your entire content strategy. 

It’s more important than ever to find topics that are not only relevant to your audience but also cater to your expertise and first-hand experiences. 

Google’s algorithm is extremely adept at finding content that’s irrelevant or out of place, so you shouldn’t pursue a keyword simply because it has a lot of search volume. 

For example, if a website that sells car parts starts publishing trendy food recipes, it’ll stand out as irrelevant to Google. 

To find keywords to target, you can use our free keyword planner tool. 

It’ll provide essential keyword metrics like search volume, CPC, keyword difficulty, and current search trends.

Look for keywords that reflect your expertise, have high search volume, low keyword difficulty, and an upward search trend. 

Step #2: Proper keyword placement 

A mistake beginner SEOs make is to overuse their keywords, which stands out to Google as keyword spam. 

You want to use your keywords organically and in a few key locations, including:

• The title tag and meta description 
• Headings (especially H1 tag) 
• In the alt text for any images 
• Organically several times throughout the piece (including common variations) 
• In the first 100 words of the content 

If one of your blogs is underperforming on search engines, confirm that your target keyword appears in these areas. 

If they do and you still aren’t making any progress, it could be that you’re targeting the wrong keywords (in which case you’d need to refer back to step #1). 

Step #3: Use relevant and engaging visuals 

It’s been common knowledge for a while now that blogs featuring visuals perform better in the search, improve dwell time, generate more backlinks, and make posts easier to digest. 

That’s especially true if the visuals you use serve as supplementary aids to your content. 

Infographics, videos, and relevant images/illustrations are all great examples of visuals that make blogs more SEO-friendly. 

However, you should stray away from irrelevant images, even if they are visually stunning. 

Unless an image is able to add something or relate to the post’s subject matter, you shouldn’t use it. 

Also, every image that you use needs alt text (containing your target keyword) that describes what the image displays. This is helpful for users that are visually impaired, and alt text enables search engine crawler bots to know what the image shows (and how it relates to your content). 

Step #4: Use inbound and outbound links 

Your goal is to keep users engaged in your content loop for as long as possible, and the best way to do that is to interlink to related posts on your website. 

Using internal links is a great way to improve your dwell time and user experience, as you can direct readers from one post to another (or to a product/landing page) by using inbound links. 

As an added bonus, internal links help search engine crawler bots understand the structure of your website, which leads to better indexing. 

Whenever you’re creating a new post or optimizing an existing one, create a list of related content that you want to link to within it. 

Also, outbound links to authoritative sources (like research papers, government agencies, and educational institutions) will improve your SEO – so use them whenever possible. 

Step #5: Provide real value to your audience 

This last step is the most important, and it’s the least likely to go out of style. 

Above all else, you should do your very best to provide value to your target audience. 

That means publishing how-to’s and ultimate guides covering skills they want to acquire, keeping them up-to-date with the latest developments in your industry, and providing some good old-fashioned entertainment. 

As long as you do that (and ensure no technical SEO issues are holding you back), nothing can stand in your way of becoming a valued thought leader in your field. 

Concluding Thoughts: How to Optimize Web Content 

SEO has changed a lot in recent years, and it will only continue to change going forward – especially with the advent of intelligent AI chatbots. 

For now, creating as much value for your audience as you can through your content is still the way to go. 

Do you need expert help developing an airtight SEO strategy for your business?

Then don’t wait to check out HOTH X, our managed SEO services, and HOTH Web Copy, our enormously effective content creation service.

The post 5 Steps to Optimize Web Content Like an SEO Expert appeared first on The HOTH.

Why is it so popular?

Besides the novelty appeal of chatting with a superintelligent AI, ChatGPT has proven to be an extremely versatile tool capable of copywriting, content creation, writing code and solving problems, and even writing college essays that receive passing grades. 

SEOs have also discovered a new capability of the powerful tool – using ChatGPT for keyword research. 

With the right ChatGPT prompts, it will help you brainstorm new keyword ideas, uncover related keywords, categorize queries by search intent, and so much more. 

While you shouldn’t rely on ChatGPT to handle your entire keyword strategy (it does still have some noticeable limitations, like not being able to access key SEO metrics), it is an excellent addition to your usual set of keyword research tools. 

In particular, ChatGPT can help you think outside the box and target specific keywords that you would have never found otherwise. 

It also makes generating keyword lists a total breeze, as it can organize & categorize your lists any way that you want. 

However, you need to know the proper way to use ChatGPT for keyword research – as using weak or vague prompts can lead to some wonky results. 

That’s why we put together this special guide for conducting proper ChatGPT keyword research, so read on to learn how you can use the powerful AI tool for higher search rankings. 

How Does ChatGPT Approach Keyword Research?

First, it’s crucial to understand a few things about ChatGPT, particularly what it does and doesn’t have access to. 

When it first came out, OpenAI’s ChatGPT did not have access to the internet and had only received training for online data up to September 2021. 

However, as of March 2023, ChatGPT can now access the internet in some cases. 

That means that it’s now capable of producing insights on the latest trends and events, including which keywords are trending on search engines. 

That’s great news for SEOs, as the keyword information you receive from ChatGPT is up to date. 

The catch?

ChatGPT DOES NOT have access to crucial keyword metrics like search volume & keyword difficulty – which is why other keyword tools are still essential. 

Where the program truly shines is its ability to automatically generate lists of relevant keywords, organize those lists, and uncover related keywords. 

Additionally, you can use ChatGPT’s keyword research techniques for any industry or niche, and they’ll still work. 

Here’s a look at the keyword search functions ChatGPT excels at the most. 

Brainstorming keyword ideas 

ChatGPT is at its best when brainstorming relevant keyword ideas for your core audience. 

Not only that, but traditional keyword research tools like Ahrefs often have dozens of sites (often ones larger than yours with better domain authority) competing for the exact same keywords. 

What’s great about ChatGPT is it’ll provide you with unique and largely unused keywords that still hold relevance to your target audience, which can provide you with a massive advantage. 

That’s because these types of target keywords will have next to no competition, so if they have a decent search volume – you’ll be the only game in town. 

The trick is to get creative with your prompting. 

For instance, if you want to get a comprehensive overview of a topic close to your target audience, you could write a prompt like this:

If you were writing a book on artificial intelligence, what would your chapter layout be? 

While this isn’t an exact list of keywords per se, it’s a high-quality breakdown of the most important aspects of artificial intelligence and contains some great ideas for content and long-tail keywords. 

You can also get more specific with your approach by asking for keywords outright:

Generate 15 keywords for artificial intelligence. 

This type of prompt is excellent for uncovering related queries for a seed keyword, which can help you think outside the box when building keyword lists. 

In the example above, all 15 keywords are directly related to artificial intelligence, and upon further vetting, you’ll be able to use them in your content for better search rankings.  

The alphabet soup method 

A classic keyword research method is to use the autocomplete feature on Google Search. 

Whenever you start to type a phrase related to your niche into Google’s search bar, its autocomplete feature will pop out a number of keywords that it thinks you’re about to type. 

This is a goldmine for SEOs, as these are real keywords that your audience types into Google on a regular basis. 

Well, you can replicate the same technique using ChatGPT. 

By entering a prompt similar to this:

Show me a list of keywords that include the term ‘artificial intelligence,’ and the next letter starts with b.

Alt tag: A screenshot of ChatGPT generating a list of keywords.

As you can see, we now have a list of unique keywords to vet using other research tools, and it only took a few seconds to create. 

The keywords you find using ChatGPT will also inform your content strategy, which will spice up your content marketing efforts. 

For instance, by plugging the keyword ‘blockchain and artificial intelligence’ into our free Google keyword planner tool from The HOTH, we can see that it has a decent search volume and is on an upward trend. 

That means creating a blog post or video centered around the keyword has the potential to bring in lots of organic traffic. 

Now we have a desirable keyword and a content topic to work on, and it only took a few minutes of prompting ChatGPT to uncover it. 

Using questions to find keywords 

Another tactic you can use to uncover keyword ideas is to get ChatGPT to generate a list of questions related to a search query. 

That will help you find common questions asked by search engine users that are directly related to your products and services. 

All you need to do is write a prompt like this:

Generate a list of questions about search engine optimization. 

These questions are all excellent content topics and long-tail keyword ideas. 

Of course, before you incorporate them into your SEO strategy, you’ll need to vet them through other keyword research tools. 

If you’ve been drawing a blank on topics to blog about for your website, using this technique is a goldmine for uncovering relevant questions to base blog posts around. 

For example, the question, “How can website owners optimize their content for search engines?” is an excellent title for a blog post, video, or even an infographic. 

These questions also provide clues for specific keywords that you can target – especially if you continue to prompt ChatGPT about them. 

Question 7 can easily be converted into the keyword ‘keyword research best practices,’ which has a high search volume and is currently trending – making it an excellent candidate for creating content. 

To take it a step further, ChatGPT can provide a list of related keywords that you can use in the piece you create: 

Now you’ve got 10 strong related keywords to use in your new post. 

Generating keyword ideas based on buyer personas 

Another way to use ChatGPT for keyword research ideas is to use your buyer personas (also called customer avatars). 

What are those?

Buyer personas are detailed profiles of your typical customers, including shopping habits, age, occupation, hobbies, and more. 

The idea is to build a customer profile based on your existing customer base by analyzing your data and demographics. 

Ideally, you’ll wind up with the perfect fictional representation of one of your customers, which you can use to enhance your digital marketing strategies – including keyword research. 

Also, you can use ChatGPT’s powers to discover keyword ideas that your buyer personas search for online.

You can even get the chatbot to tell you which types of buyer personas are interested in your niche focus. 

Here’s an example:

Now we have six examples of personas that are interested in artificial intelligence products, which is great news if you haven’t created a customer avatar yet. 

Continuing to prompt ChatGPT (peeling back the onion) 

Another perk of ChatGPT is that you can continue to ask further questions based on previous prompts. 

With that in mind, we can use this feature to get the program to tell us common questions these buyer personas would have about AI. 

Now we’ve got some specific questions each buyer persona would ask, which is a goldmine for coming up with content ideas. 

Yet, our ultimate goal here is to develop a list of keywords for each persona, so let’s continue prompting ChatGPT. 

And voila, we have a convenient table listing A) our buyer personas, B) their common questions, and C) a list of keywords/long-tail keywords to target in your content. 

It’s this type of continued prompting that makes ChatGPT such a powerful tool for keyword research. In just a few minutes, you can compile a super-useful table like the one you see above for your keyword strategy. 

Classifying and Categorizing Keywords 

Another way you can use ChatGPT for keyword research is to have it classify and categorize your keywords based on different factors. 

For instance, knowing the search intent behind every keyword you target is essential, but that’s not always easy. 

There are times when you won’t be sure what the intent is behind a keyword, which is where ChatGPT comes into the picture. 

You can get the chatbot to classify keywords based on search intent in a convenient table, which makes categorizing your keywords a total breeze. 

Let’s use the 10 related keywords we had ChatGPT generate for the seed phrase keyword research best practices:

Now you know the intent behind each keyword, which will let you know where to place them in your sales funnel. 

For the example given, the intent is all informational/navigational, which are great keywords for attracting prospects at the top of your sales funnel (TOFU). 

That’s not the only way that the chatbot can categorize your keywords, though. 

Here’s what it generated for us when we asked it how else it could categorize our list of keywords:

And with that simple prompt, the chatbot categorized our keywords based on the aspects of SEO that they pertain to the most – which is useful if you aren’t sure what each keyword means. 

Extract Keywords from Competitor Content

Do you have a competitor that consistently outranks you in the SERPs?

If so, then one of the best things you can do is analyze the keywords they’re targeting, as well as how they use them throughout their content. 

Yet, it can be a bit tricky pinpointing the exact keywords a competitor uses in a piece of content, but ChatGPT makes it easier than ever. 

As an example, we entered a few paragraphs from our blog post on Bard AI and asked the chatbot what the primary keywords were: 

These are some of the viable keywords found throughout the text sample, and you can use this tactic to uncover your competitor’s keyword strategies. 

Reverse-engineering competitor content like this is a great way to find ways to outdo and ultimately outrank their content. Don’t forget about this technique when using ChatGPT for keyword research. 

Wrapping Up: Using ChatGPT for Your Keyword Research 

To summarize, while ChatGPT doesn’t contain up-to-date SEO metrics like search volume and keyword difficulty – it is an immensely powerful tool for brainstorming keyword ideas, categorizing, and uncovering keywords from competitors. 

As long as you use ChatGPT in tandem with other keyword research tools, you’ll buff up your SEO strategy in a big way. 

In particular, using ChatGPT for your keyword research will help you save tons of time while generating and organizing lists of keywords. 

Do you need help conducting successful keyword research at your company?

Then don’t wait to check out HOTH X, our managed SEO services (including rigorous keyword research). If you’re a newer website, our managed content packages are your ticket to building brand awareness & generating more traffic, leads, and sales – so don’t wait to try us out today.      

We also offer HOTH AI Content Plus where we leverage AI tools for you to help you get amazing content without sacrificing quality.

The post Using ChatGPT for Keyword Research: What SEOs Need to Know appeared first on The HOTH.

Yet, the online landscape has changed significantly in recent years. 

The introduction of social media platforms like Twitter & Tik Tok has revolutionized how people search for information online, not to mention the advent of intelligent AI chatbots like ChatGPT. 

These technological advances have caused some to declare that blogging for SEO is no longer relevant (some even go as far as saying that SEO is dead). 

But are these allegations true? Will producing blog content no longer yield more organic traffic, leads, and conversions?

It only takes a little bit of research to discover that, yes, blogging for SEO is still alive & relevant in 2023. 

In a recent poll by Orbit Media, 80% of surveyed marketers reported that their blogs still deliver strong results. There are more than 600 million blogs online out of 1.9 billion websites, which means blog pages comprise a significant majority of the internet. 

WordPress powers most blogs, featuring 409 million readers that generate 20 billion page views per month. 

These stats prove that blogging for search engine optimization is still alive and well, so stick around to learn how to leverage blogging for your business. 

Do People Still Read Blog Posts?

With everyone glued to their phones on Tik Tok and YouTube these days, it may seem as if nobody reads blogs anymore. 

After all, why read a blog post when you can just watch a quick video?

The main reason why blogs aren’t obsolete is the continued prevalence of Google search & other search engines. 

Search engines are still the #1 way to find information online, and a majority of search queries lead to blog posts. In fact, there are roughly 5.6 billion searches on Google each day, with 94% of them landing on organic search results. 

What comprises a majority of the organic search results?

You guessed it, blog posts. There are blogs that answer questions, review products, teach new skills, and so much more. 

For example, say you want to find the best Italian restaurant in your neighborhood. You do a quick Google search and land on a blog post listing the top 10 Italian restaurants in your town. Just like that, you sought out and consumed a blog post – even though you probably don’t consider yourself an avid blog post reader. 

Most people assume they don’t read blogs because they’re picturing travel blogs and opinion pieces. 

In actuality, it’s highly likely that you regularly consume blogs. Any time that you’ve searched for information online and clicked on a result, it was most likely a blog post. 

As long as people continue to use search engines to find information online, blogging will still be a viable & profitable practice, especially for SEO strategies. 

Does Blogging Have a Future?

While blogging is still alive & kicking right now, will it continue to stay that way down the line?

After all, it would be a shame to dump a ton of time and resources into creating an in-depth blog only for it to become obsolete in a few short months or years. 

The good news is there’s no sign that blogging’s effectiveness will go away anytime soon. 

As stated previously, as long as people need to find information online, blogging will remain alive & well. 

Yet, that doesn’t mean that the same techniques & types of blog posts will always work. 

For instance, blogging in 2023 looks very different than it did five or 10 years ago. 

In the past, businesses could get away with spamming tons of subpar blog posts filled with keywords to get to the top of the SERPs. Little by little, Google has made updates to its algorithm to only rank trusted, high-quality websites at the top of its search results. 

In fact, there are over 200 factors that Google considers when ranking websites. These ranking factors include everything from the quality of content to trustworthiness and more. 

As of 2023, Google (and other search engines) value high-quality content that exhibits first-hand experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and high levels of trust. 

This is represented by the E-E-A-T acronym announced in Google’s update that occurred in late 2022. 

As long as you get your bloggers to produce content that adheres to the E-E-A-T acronym, there’s no reason why you can’t find success with blogging for SEO well into the future. 

Does Blogging Still Deliver Results? 

Ultimately, blogging for SEO is about delivering the results you want to see for your digital marketing campaign – such as higher SERP rankings, more organic traffic, and a higher conversion rate. 

While we’ve shown that blogging is still relevant in today’s age, does it still deliver the goods in terms of an ROI?

This is another resounding yes. 

According to in-depth research from Hubspot, 82% of marketers see a positive ROI from consistently blogging. They also see 126% more lead growth than businesses that don’t blog at all. 

Once again, your success will come down to your approach. 

You won’t find much success if you use outdated, ineffective blog techniques. However, you’ll be raking in profits if you focus on writing relevant, informative blogs that provide an optimal user experience. 

Also, you’ll need to write SEO-friendly copy that contains focus keywords in all the right places. Gone are the days of spamming keywords, so you’ll need to place them organically in the following locations:

• Your meta description & title tag
• Your H1 heading (the blog post title)
• Alt text for your images 
• Hyperlink anchor text 
• Multiple times in the body text 
• Your outro 

Blogging for SEO won’t be very effective without following the best practices for on-page SEO, so bear that in mind when working with writers. 

Link-building is another core aspect of SEO that you need to include in your blogs. High-authority backlinks & internal links will give your SERP rankings a much-needed boost, so include them wherever possible. 

Antiquated Blogging Tactics to Avoid in 2023 

If you want to find success with your blog in today’s age, there are some outdated practices that you should avoid at all costs. 

As stated previously, Google has been meticulously updating its search engine algorithm for years now, and it’s made many blog practices of old obsolete. 

Do your best to stay away from these ancient blog SEO techniques to avoid manual penalties & missing out on potential traffic. 

YMYL niches 

This tactic isn’t out of date; it’s just such a crowded & oversaturated space dominated by large enterprise-level companies with deep pockets. 

What’s YMYL?

It’s an acronym that stands for ‘Your Money, Your Life,’ and it refers to the financial and healthcare niches. Any business that offers advice or products that will affect your health or your bank account qualifies as a YMYL business. 

Granted, if your business is in finances or healthcare, you won’t be able to avoid YMYL. 

Yet, if it’s possible for you to focus on another niche besides what’s included in YMYL, you’ll have a much easier time finding success with blogging for SEO. 

That’s because YMYL websites receive additional scrutiny from Google’s crawlers & algorithms than other sites do. 

Why is that?

It’s because Google’s reputation is on the line every time it ranks a YMYL site in the top 10 results. If they rank an untrustworthy site at the top, users may wind up losing money or adversely affecting their health, which is bad news for everyone involved. 

Clickbait titles 

In the past, nefarious marketers noticed that they could rake in a ton of clicks (and, in turn, ad revenue) by creating outrageous (often very misleading) titles for their posts. 

Clickbait was born, and there’s been an intense battle between search engines & click baiters ever since. 

While clickbait was at one time effective for generating quick boosts in traffic, it’s become so frowned upon by search engines & users that it’s no longer worth it. For one, posting clickbait will be devastating for your reputation, especially if you’ve been creating high-quality content otherwise. 

All it takes is one clickbait title to start losing readers for good. 

Google has also become quite good at cracking down on clickbait, so it’s not even a good way to boost traffic. 

In particular, Google will be able to find out if your readers had a positive or negative experience with your blog. So if you deceive users into clicking on your posts with clickbait, you’ll tank your user experience, which will eventually spell disaster for your SEO profile. 

Text-only blogs 

The days of writing a few paragraphs of plain text and hitting publish are long gone, as you’ll lull readers to sleep if you don’t use any visuals. 

Besides images & videos, your blogs need to be extremely easy to read. 

That means breaking up long paragraphs with bulleted lists, short sentences, bucket brigades, and other copywriting tricks. 

High-resolution images are a must for any blog post, regardless of the topic. At the bare minimum, you should at least include one featured image at the beginning of a post and one at the end. Ideally, four to five relevant, high-resolution images will do a lot to make your blog more engaging. 

Infographics are another fantastic visual addition that not only provides eye candy but also adds to your content in various ways. 

You can use infographics to display statistics, give directions, teach a new skill, and more. 

Also, including any related videos is always a good idea. They could be videos from your personal catalog, or you can embed relevant videos you find on platforms like YouTube. 

Pro tip: Never include a video in your post if it serves as a replacement for your blog. For example, if you’re writing a blog post describing how blockchain technology works, you wouldn’t want to link to a one-hour YouTube video explaining everything about it. That’s because your readers could simply watch the video instead, rendering your blog post obsolete. 

As a rule of thumb, only link to videos if they add supplemental information to your blog, such as a quick 30-second video defining what mining crypto is and how it relates to the blockchain. 

Spamming dozens of posts 

In the Wild West days of SEO, websites would spam a ridiculous amount of blog posts for specific keywords in their niche. 

The thinking was to become the #1 authority in a specific niche due to the sheer volume of posts they have on it. 

These were the days when there wasn’t too much information online, so it was possible for websites to hold a monopoly of sorts for certain niches and industries. 

This led to websites creating truckloads of posts at a time, with the quality of each post suffering as a result. It was a time of quantity over quality, and some companies still adhere to this principle. 

Yet, in today’s age, there are thousands of websites for every niche, and they all contain top–tier content. As a result, attempting to spam dozens of blog posts won’t yield any fruit. Instead, you’ll just waste a ton of resources creating subpar blogs that hold no value to users or search engines. 

Quality matters more than quantity in the modern age of SEO, so you’re better off producing one high-quality post instead of five low-quality ones. 

Personal blogs 

Before social media influencers and vlogs on YouTube, there were hordes of personal blogs that detailed the author’s daily routines. 

These ‘slice of life’ blogs were more akin to journals than they were content marketing posts. 

This type of blog typically deals with family life, traveling, photography, or entertainment reviews. 

While most personal blogs were created for fun, some were monetized and quite successful. It’s not impossible to score big with a personal blog in 2023, but it is highly unlikely. That’s because this style of content has migrated to other platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Tik Tok. 

The Role of AI in Blogging 

A recent advancement that has bloggers concerned is the prevalence of AI chatbots and AI-powered writing tools. 

AI writing services offer users the ability to generate entire blogs at the push of a button. The text they generate is humanlike, free of errors, and SEO-friendly. 

So will AI programs soon make human writers obsolete?

While ChatGPT and AI-powered writing tools are undoubtedly impressive and very useful, they still aren’t capable of generating original insights, nor can they exhibit first-hand experience. 

In general, you can get away with fully automating short-form blog posts that are more informative in nature. 

If you’re going to write a long-form post containing advice, reviews, or human emotion, you’re best to stick with human writers. 

However, the real potential lies in combining AI-powered tools with human writers for superior productivity, efficiency, and accuracy. 

For instance, a freelance writer that uses AI tools will never experience writer’s block. 

That’s because if they ever get stuck, they can let the AI take over and generate a few paragraphs. There are also AI tools for brainstorming ideas, outlining posts, and writing product descriptions – making them excellent tools when blogging for SEO. 

AI does show tremendous potential for content creation, and once the language models become a bit more robust, the sky’s the limit for what you’ll be able to automate. 

Either way, blogging for SEO will still be around for years to come, even if AIs are writing a majority of them. 

An Omnichannel Content Strategy 

Believe it or not, many marketing experts claimed blogging was dead when platforms like Twitter and YouTube became popular. 

The thinking was that everyone would turn to social media for information, making blogging an archaic form of content. 

Of course, now we know that didn’t happen. 

Not only did blogging outlive social media, but it also continued to thrive in spite of it. 

Additionally, many bloggers discovered that their content could also work on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, & Twitter.

How’s that?

There are several ways to make your existing blog content work on other platforms. For instance, if you have a successful tutorial blog post, why not use it as a script for a short YouTube video?

Now one blog post has transformed into a post and a video, expanding your reach to include YouTube. 

Or, if you want to generate more traffic for one of your blog posts, you can link to it in a Twitter or Instagram post to encourage your followers to give it a read. 

In other words, you should use social media to bolster your blogging efforts, not replace them. 

Push notifications 

Then there’s the power of push notifications from social media platforms, which you can use to generate more traffic for your blogs. 

What are push notifications?

A push notification occurs whenever an app sends a user device a message when the app isn’t open. You’ve seen them in action if you’ve ever seen a notification from Facebook or Twitter on your phone’s lock screen. 

Whenever someone subscribes to your content on a social media platform, they’ll receive a push notification whenever you upload something new (assuming that they have notifications enabled on their phone or another device). 

So if you’ve got a new blog post you want to promote, creating a post linking to it on Twitter will trigger push notifications for all your followers. 

The same is true for YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok, and other social platforms. This will drastically increase the chances that you’ll see a boost in traffic for your blog post. 

You can also use push notifications directly from your blog with a plugin called Subscribers. 

It will enable you to accrue subscribers and send them push notifications straight from your website. It’s the same app that Neil Patel used to generate $670,000 in revenue from using notifications alone. 

Other Channels to Help Build Your Blog 

Besides push notifications & social media platforms, there are other channels that will help you build your blog as well. 

These include:

• Newsletters. Starting a newsletter is a great way to drive traffic to your blog posts. Your newsletter should contain updates relevant to your target audience, as well as links to your latest posts to learn more information. It works similarly to a push notification, although your subscribers will receive an email instead of a notification on their smart device. 
• Podcasts. People love listening to podcasts during their commute to work, and they’re also a great way to promote your website, business, and blog. You can interview guests from your industry or simply discuss relevant issues in your field by yourself. Podcasts are inexpensive to produce and can yield impressive results, so starting one is well worth your time. 
• Guest posts. A fantastic way to build brand awareness and acquire high-authority backlinks is to write guest posts for other blogs in your niche. Make sure the guest post you write is unique and contains relevant information, as spamming guest posts won’t get you very far. As long as your guest posts are high-quality, you’ll receive a boost in traffic and a backlink to help your SEO profile. 
• Microblogging. Another way to build an audience is to engage in microblogging, which refers to writing brief blog posts to promote your brand. Platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Medium, and Instagram are great places to microblog. You can also use text messages & images to create microblog posts. 

How Does Blogging Affect SEO?

Now that you know blogging for SEO is still relevant and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, you’re probably wondering how writing blogs affects your SEO profile. 

After all, how does creating blog content translate into higher SERP rankings, more leads, and higher conversion rates?

It turns out there are many ways that blogging for SEO is beneficial to your digital marketing strategy, including better index coverage, improved click-through rate (CTR), lower bounce rate, backlinks, internal linking opportunities, and more. 

Let’s take a look at all the top ways creating blog posts will positively affect your SEO strategy. 

They satisfy all forms of search intent 

More so than any landing or product page, you can create content for the most keywords with blog posts. 

What do we mean by that?

It has to do with the different stages of your sales funnel. For product & landing pages, you’ll want to use keywords with transactional intent. These are keywords for users at the bottom of the funnel, meaning that they’re ready to make a purchase. 

What’s great about blogs is you can use them for every stage of the sales funnel. 

When it comes to keywords, there are informational, navigational, and transactional search queries – and with proper keyword research, you can create blogs for each type. 

As an example, the long-tail keyword ‘what is CNC’ has informational intent. At this stage of the customer’s journey, they’re interested in educating themselves about computer numerical control. 

What type of content can you produce to match their search intent?

You guessed it, a well-written & informative blog post. 

Conversely, a little later down the line, the prospect is ready to buy a CNC machine for their business. They now have transactional intent, which you can satisfy with another blog post that has a concise CTA at the end linking to your available CNC machines. 

In short, blogs are a simple yet highly effective form of content for matching all forms of user search intent. 

A higher organic click-through rate (CTR)

Your click-through rate refers to how many users click on your website in the SERPs compared to how many times it shows up in user search results. 

A low CTR means most users skip over your web pages in favor of others, which isn’t good for your SEO profile. 

Arguably the most reliable way to raise your organic CTR is to produce lots of high-quality blog content. If your blog post titles are attention-grabbing, relevant, and exciting – users will begin clicking on your web pages over competitors, raising your CTR as a result. 

How do you find out your CTR and other key SEO metrics?

The quickest, easiest, and most affordable way to do so is to use Google Search Console and Google Analytics, two free tools from Google that allow webmasters to monitor how well their sites are performing. 

More clicks mean more leads & sales, which is the end goal of any SEO strategy. 

They enable you to target SERP features 

Another reason blogs work so well for SEO is they allow you to target SERP features on Google & other search engines. 

SERP features are special elements that appear above the top paid & organic results in what’s known as position zero. 

These include featured snippets, knowledge panels, video carousels, image packs, local packs, map packs, and more. 

Position zero is a powerful spot to hold on Google, and it’s a surefire way to give your SEO profile a much-needed boost. 

SEO tip: To increase your chances of landing a featured snippet, you need to answer a frequently searched question within the first 100 words of your post and format it in bold. 

Excellent link-building opportunities

Another major reason why blogs are integral for SEO is the amazing opportunities they provide to include internal links & external links. 

Well-written, informative blog posts also attract backlinks from other content creators online, which is a huge plus. The more backlinks you acquire from trusted websites, the easier it will be for your web pages to reach the top of the SERPs. 

Link building is one of the very most important aspects of SEO, and you can make a very strong argument that it’s the most important. 

That’s because even with the best content in the world, a subpar backlink profile will make it incredibly difficult to crack the top 10 on Google. Backlinks matter big time to search engines because they’re evidence that the content you produce is accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

As such, you’ll want to ensure that you only gain backlinks from trusted websites. If you generate a ton of backlinks from blogs that have poor domain authority, it will hurt your domain authority as a result. 

To discover if a website has a desirable domain authority score, you can use our free domain authority checker tool. 

The importance of internal & external links

Besides backlinks, internal & external links are also crucial for your SEO profile. In particular, you should include internal links in every blog post you produce. 

A healthy internal linking structure makes crawling your website easier for search engines, which can help you rank higher. 

Not only that, but cleverly placed internal links can keep readers within your content loop, improving your bounce rate and dwell time. 

You need to ensure that every page on your website has a link pointing to it; otherwise, you’ll have orphan pages. These web pages have no links pointing to them, making them nearly impossible to find online. 

External links are also important, as they help lend credibility to your blog posts. Citing sources and linking to trusted websites will boost your online visibility, so try to include external links wherever possible. 

Better index coverage

You won’t find any success with SEO if your pages aren’t indexed, which is why blogs are so crucial for staying visible on search engines. 

Whenever Google indexes your website, it adds it to the list of web pages it has for specific keywords & search queries. The more frequently Google indexes your site, the better online visibility you’ll have. That’s because a ton of your web pages will be in its index, making them eligible to appear in the SERPs. 

That’s why you need to continuously post new content to your website to encourage Google to crawl your website more often. 

If you rarely post anything new, Google will have no incentive to update your website in its index, and you’ll likely disappear from the SERPs. 

Blog posts are the perfect type of content for SEO because they’re inexpensive to produce, audiences love them, and they encourage Google to frequently index your site. 

Final Thoughts: Is Blogging for SEO Still Relevant?

Every few years, a handful of marketers will claim that blogging is dead. It’s been happening for years now, and it hasn’t been true yet. 

While some forms of media may be more convenient (Facebook & Twitter), and AI shows enormous potential; you just can’t beat the power blogs wield for educating, informing, and converting readers online. 

Do you need help producing S-tier content for your business?

Then don’t wait to check out our renowned content creation service at HOTH Blogger. If you need more comprehensive help with your content, check out our HOTH Managed Content service.  

The post Is Blogging for SEO Still Relevant? appeared first on The HOTH.

Without a well-designed homepage, your website will never perform as well as it should.   

The remaining article will look at what makes a great website homepage content and the best practices to ensure you take full advantage of this valuable virtual real estate. 

Ready to learn?

What Is A Website Homepage?

Think of your home page as the starting point on a potential customer‘s journey.  

When they type in your domain name, your home page is the default page that loads in their browser.   

Most homepages contain important information and facts about your business.

In fact, 64% of the website visitors want to see the company’s contact information on the homepage.

Although it’s typical to have a navigation bar to lead visitors to other pages on your website, a call to action (CTA) is also vital to success. 

Additionally, here are a few tips for improving the functionality of a killer homepage:

• Keep your website design fresh, simple, and unique
• Make it mobile-friendly
• Social media buttons for easy sharing
• Showcase your products and services
• Consider your page load speed
• Keep your homepage organized
• Content is vital to success
• Consider your color scheme
• Use relevant, targeted keywords

A well-designed homepage must hit your website visitors‘ pain points and show that you know how to help them. 

For example, 36% of customers click on logos to reach the homepage, so a well-designed website should have a clickable logo that sends users back to the homepage. 

Unless you can solve their problem, potential customers will never make a purchase. 

You solve their pain points by addressing:

• The problem or challenge your target customer is suffering from
• Asking what they need and giving it to them
• Asking questions that lead to answers
• Providing clear, simple solutions that can be digested while scrolling

What are the Benefits of Having a Homepage?

Some web experts describe your website’s homepage as the “welcome mat” of a nice home, inviting potential customers inside.  

The more inviting the mat, the more potential customers enter. 

Remember, when visitors first land on your site, they have no idea what they will find inside.  

A well-designed, bright, bold homepage with well-written web content (including testimonials) will convince them to enter because it makes a fantastic first impression.

Here are a few benefits to having a knock-out homepage:

• Online presence 
• Increased SEO efforts
• Increased credibility
• Content marketing expansion 
• Boost in advertising

Here’s the thing about most internet searchers and website visitors; they aren’t interested in what you do so much as what you can do for them. 

Putting several excellent benefits your services or products provide front-and-center is vital on your homepage.  

A short list of some of your top benefits that are easy to read, engaging, and compelling will go far in converting visitors to customers. 

What Should Your Homepage Content Contain?

Several sections are essential when crafting an engaging, inviting, and persuasive homepage. 

A digital marketing content strategy is critical for the success of any website, let alone a homepage. 

Some elements of a website’s homepage are more vital than others, but all are necessary to get the highest conversion rates, time-on-page, and CTR.  

They include:

• The Opening header
• Subheadline
• Call to Action (CTA)
• Supporting Image
• Benefits
• Social proof
• Navigation
• Content offer
• Features
• Resources
• Success Indicators such as case studies

More than anything, your homepage content makes that critical first impression on a new visitor. 

You have about 10 to 20 seconds to do this, so getting your homepage content strategy right is critical. 

If a visitor lands on your website and isn’t wowed, impressed, or intrigued by what they see, you’ve lost the race before they even fired the starting gun. 

Methods to ensure a high-quality homepage:

It’s highly unusual for a first-time visitor to a website’s home page to make a purchase. That’s why having a link to your resources is vital. 

That gives your visitors relevant information and, more importantly, improves their time on the page.. 

Here are some methods to make sure you have high-quality homepage content:

• Ensure your website can load quickly
• Use an introductory video to grab their attention
• Highlight your most engaging content to engage searchers
• Give visitors an excellent mobile experience (Google may penalize you if you don’t)
• Use a heat map tool to see exactly where searchers are looking on your website

Providing excellent resources also helps you establish credibility as an expert in your market or industry and improves your homepage user experience. 

Additionally, there’s no denying that potential customers like getting free stuff, especially when it’s something that can help them solve a problem, learn something new, or simply make them laugh. 

An e-book, white paper, how-to guide, free trial, contest, checklist, whatever. If it’s free and fits their current need, it should be on your homepage and ready to download.

How do I write my website’s homepage content?

Within moments of landing on your homepage, visitors already have a generalized first impression of your business. 

Your homepage content needs to give them a clear understanding of who you are and what you do. 

You also want to invite them to explore; if they don’t like what they see, you’ll get a high bounce rate. 

If, however, you wish to write your homepage content yourself, here are some excellent tips for doing it:

1. Star with a “Hero Message.” This bit of content is a “hook” message that gets people to pay attention. It should be short, specific, and instantly understood.
2. Write about what your potential customers want to know, learn, hear, etc. Remember, it’s not about your company; it’s about them, their wants, needs, desires, etc.,
3. Write short, concise, easy-to-digest bits of information rather than long-form info that takes too much time to digest.
4. Explain, in laymen’s terms, how you solve your customers’ problems and pain points.
5. Provide proof that what you say you can do, you can do.

Website’s Homepage Headline and Subheadline

Your homepage headline must be clear, concise, and simple. 

If a visitor needs to stop and think, your headline has failed.

For example, LifeHacker has a website headline we love; “Do Everything Better.” 

It’s short, super-easy to understand, and gets its point across instantly. 

Here are a few excellent tips to craft an excellent headline that works well:

• Make your headline unique, something that’s not been done before.
• Be very specific with the words, phrases, and terms.
• Give away something useful. People love free things. 
• Use adjectives that grab people’s attention.
• Always state the obvious. Don’t make people work to figure out what your headline is saying.
• Don’t be afraid to use emotionally-packed words.

Nearly as important as the website headline, the sub-headline should discuss a common pain point that your products or services solve. 

It should also describe how your product or service will improve a visitor’s life. 

A Primary Call to Action (CTA) is Fundamental to your Website Homepage Content

One of the primary goals of your website’s homepage is to move potential customers further down the sales funnel.    

One of the best ways to do that is with a call to action or CTA. As the name suggests, a CTA should compel a visitor to take action in a specific way. 

Ideally, a CTA  should be 4-5 words maximum, which is not a lot of word real estate. 

Some of the best homepage CTAs are used frequently, including:

• Try TheHOTH for Free
• Click to Make an Appointment
• Sign Up Today
• Download Our Free eBook
• Create Your Free Profile

Your call to action should be in a different font and color and be bold to make it stand out on your homepage. 

An Eye Catching Supporting Image Grabs Potential Customers’ Attention

Research shows that about 65% of the general population learns visually. 

That means, to retain information, 65% of people need to see it. 

It also means that a supporting image is critical on your website’s homepage. A supporting video isn’t a bad idea, either.  

Think about your supporting image as the front page of a menu at a fine dining establishment. 

When you see that picture, your mouth starts watering, and your brain starts thinking about all the yummy food you’re about to eat. 

That’s some powerful stuff, we think you’ll agree, and it’s why your homepage needs a high-quality supporting image front and center. 

Here are a few tips for picking the right images for your homepage content:

• Pick a high-quality hero image
• Keep your images relevant
• Showcase real people if you can
• Optimize for an SEO homepage design
• Choose the correct file type

Social Proof and Testimonials are Gold for a Website Homepage

Social proof is today’s “word of mouth” advertising and a necessity on every successful homepage. 

You can scream from the mountaintop how wonderful your services or products are, and some people might believe you. But, if you have several customer testimonials and include their pictures, many more people will believe what you’re saying. 

Here are a few suggestions for gathering social proof:

• Here are a few tips for getting social proof:
• Use endorsements
• Display your reviews and testimonials
• Give your customers incentives for writing reviews
• Create surveys or case studies and share the results

This last essential element for your website’s homepage is similar to social proof but even

more powerful. 

Awards, accolades, and recognition by famous people or celebrities all show web searchers that, hey, this business has it going on! 

Maido, one of the top 50 restaurants in the world, lets visitors know it right on their homepage. 

Social proof can sometimes be more powerful than testimonials, but a good mix is best.

Homepage Navigation Reduces Bounce Rate Significantly

Navigation is essential on your homepage to reduce its bounce rate, the number of people who click on your home page but never click on another page afterward. 

Like a well-drawn map, your home page should give visitors a straightforward menu they can use to go to any other page they desire. 

It should be well structured, easy to find, and even easier to use. 

Well-designed navigation will keep your bounce rate to a minimum and ensure visitors see more than just your homepage. 

Final Thoughts

Like the display window of a department store, your website homepage has a very specific purpose; draw customers inside where you can charm them with your wares and convert them into customers.

Need some expert advice? 

We got you! 

Book a call today!

The post How To Make an Unforgettable First Impression with Your Website’s Homepage Content appeared first on The HOTH.

With that said, let’s discuss some of the different types of infographics you can use in your content strategy right now!

Ready to begin? Let’s go!

What Information Should an Infographic Include?

Infographics are a great way to simplify length or complex data.   

You want your audience to be presented with visually appealing images. 

You want your readers to understand what they are looking at right away. 

That’s why it’s always best to include descriptive titles and subheadings. 

Additionally, infographics should include the following:

• Good graphics 
• Valuable information
• Relevant and current data

Here are some other key components to great infographics:

• Do keyword research
• Your target topic
• Informative statistics
• A bold and appropriate color scheme (check out the color wheel for guidance)
• Attention-grabbing graphics
• Keep your infographic organized in a sequential story
• Specially format your facts

What Colors Should an Infographic Include?

Infographics should be a part of your content marketing, as it is the fourth most used type of content marketing.

In fact, infographics and other visual content can increase website traffic by up to 12%. That’s one reason why 65% of businesses use infographics for marketing purposes. 

With that said, a monochromatic color palette is best for infographic designs, especially if it reflects your brand. 

Here is some information you may want to know before designing your infographic:

• Color or hue
• Value (lightness and darkness)
• Tint
• Shade
• Tone

What are the 8 Different Types of Infographics?

As you begin to learn how to make data visualization infographics for your brand, you’ll soon realize that certain types of infographics can help communicate different types of data and information to your target audience. 

Not only do infographics boost your organic traffic, but they can also boost your SEO efforts and increase your online presence on different social media platforms. 

For example, comparison infographics can help your audience understand different aspects of different products or services. 

Here are 8 different types of infographics you can use in your content marketing strategy: 

Statistical infographics

If your relevant niche uses visualization survey results to present data from multiple sources or back up an argument with data, then you may want to consider creating a statistical infographic. 

A statistical infographic uses your data as the main focus. The layout and visuals can help you tell your story with your data results.    

Your storytelling can include charts, icons, images, and eye-catching fonts. 

Here are some tips for creating statistical infographics:

• Pick a relevant template that matches your topic
• Customize your icons and charts to match your data
• Pick icons that reflect the themes of your statistics (for example, if your statistic is relevant to time, you could add a clock)
• Place the icon next to your important statistic to emphasize the importance of it
• Choose font styles and colors that are easy to read and match your color scheme 

Informational infographics

An informational infographic template is one of the best infographics for clearly expressing your message or communicating a new idea or concept. It helps to give an overview of a topic.

An informational infographic is divided into sections with detailed headers, numbering each section can help your infographic design flow better. 

Most infographic designers agree that people tend to like infographics with numbers placed in the titles. 

Here are a few informational infographic tips: 

• Do your research
• Use visuals that match your message
• Make it memorable for your audience

Timeline infographics

Timeline infographics are great for visualizing the history of something or expressing important dates of events, such as a project timeline. 

Because people tend to make sense of time, a visual with a timeline format can help create a clear picture of different timeframes. 

Visuals such as lines, icons, pictures, and labels can all help to highlight and explain points easier. 

Here are a few tips for making a timeline infographic:

• Choose a timeline infographic template 
• Create the framework for your timeline
• Add dates, text, and images
• Use color, fonts, and decorative graphics

Process infographics

A process infographic is a great template design if your goal is to:

• Break down super complex information
• Provide summary steps of a process
• Help your audience visualize a procedure

It would be best to use process infographic templates to help you explain different phases of a clinical trial or explore difficult concepts for the average person. 

Here are some tips for creating a process infographic:

• Know your story
• Gather clean, easy-to-explain data
• Consider your headlines
• Keep it simple

Geographic or map infographics 

A geographical or map infographic is the best choice if you want to present demographic data or display location-based information. 

The reason for choosing a map infographic for this type of graphic design is as follows:

1. Because it helps illustrate trends in a specific location
2. Helps you share visual stories of a place
3. Communicates survey results or product statistics based on location

Here are a few tips for creating a map infographic:

• Choose a geographic infographic template
• Understand the usage of maps in geographical terms
• Use different types of charts
• Using icons in your geographic infographic template

Comparison infographics

The comparison infographic is a popular infographic style that you see in many blogs, social media posts, and even emails. 

It’s commonly used to help provide clarity when deciding between two different products or services. 

It’s a good idea to use this visual element style if you want to:

• Encourage your audience to see different perspectives
• Compare pros and cons
• Show similarities or differences
• Display information in chronological order

List infographics

Studies suggest that the human brain loves lists.

Another study also suggests that the human brain is known to release dopamine when you achieve goals. 

Because dopamine improves attention, memory, and motivation, achieving any goal with visual representation can have positive results. 

With that said, infographics that are created in to-do list format can be a great choice for:

• Sharing a collection of tips
• Supporting an idea or a topic with points
• To summarize your presentation

Resume infographics

An infographic resume or sometimes referred to as a visual resume can help job seekers gain employment by showing their skills and experience in visual format. 

A resume infographic is often used when:

• Someone wants to set themselves apart from other potential employees
• Catch the eye of a recruiter and leave a good impression
• Showcase specific sections of your resume such as certain skills, projects you’ve been a part of, and teams you’ve worked with

How Do You Make an Infographic?

The first thing you should focus on is how your template looks in a visual way. You should pick one that is appropriate for the data that you are representing. 

The important part is to pick a template that specifically works with the type of data set you are trying to display. But, more on that later. 

If you are choosing to use PowerPoint rather than a browser design platform, then a quick Google search will give you a list of free templates for you to choose from.

Here are a few examples:

Side-by-side comparison infographic

Side-by-side comparison infographic templates can help prove your point of view by comparison. 

This type of design can help explain the key differences between two competing concepts. 

Flowchart Infographic

A flowchart infographic template design is good for presenting new workflows to your team members or your organization. 

This style of design helps describe a process that may work across your industry.

Graph-based infographic

A graph-based tool is great for content creators who plan on publishing a high volume of data visualization and statistical information. 

This is a great template to use for expert-level audiences as well. 

Image-heavy infographic

Lastly, image-heavy infographics templates help you design content that reveals trends and information rather than just numbers and figures. 

This type of design is particularly popular among content creators. 

Here are some tips for creating your infographic:

• Identify the audience for your infographic 
• Collect your content and data early on
• Cite your sources
• Customize your infographic
• Include footers, headers, and relevant font colors and sizes
• Include your logo and sources 
• Add an embed code and social media button so it can be easily shareable

Best Infographic Design Tools

If you aren’t someone who creates infographics on a professional level, using Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator may not be the best choice. 

Especially since programs like Photoshop and Powerpoint have a heavy learning curve and Adobe products aren’t cheap. 

Not only does it take a while to learn the programs, but you may not have the technical hardware to run the programs such as a good graphics card or graphic drawing tablet. 

If you’re just beginning to design your own infographics with little to no graphic design background, here are the top content marketing tools that make infographic creation easy:

Visme

Creating an infographic with Visme is fairly simple. 

You use customizable content blocks and edit them in the infographic section. 

It’s a neat addition to the software because you’re able to adjust different pieces of content without changing the entire project around. 

Visme is a great program because not only can you create professional-looking infographics, but you can make almost any other design. 

Features it offers:

• Visual assets
• Templates
• Data visualization
• Brand kit
• Text and fonts
• Content block library
• Easy vertical adjuster
• Team collaboration

Venngage

Venngage is a good tool to try out. They got started with offering infographic designs but have slowly expanded their templates. 

Here are a few features their website offers:

• Visual assets
• Templates
• Data visualization
• Brand kit
• Text and fonts
• Team collaboration

Canva

Canva is an all-in-one high-quality content creation tool. It’s actually considered by many to be one of the best infographic tools available right now. 

Infographics aren’t the only template they offer, they offer social media post creation, video creation, animation, and even banner design. 

Canva is one of my personal favorites and can be used by beginners and pros alike. 

Features Canva offers:

• Visual assets
• Templates (but you can also create your own)
• In-depth design details
• Text and fonts
• Team collaboration

Piktochart

Piktochart is an awesome tool that is geared towards mostly infographic creation and design. 

Unlike many tools on this list, Piktochart is more similar to Visme as to what they offer businesses. 

Other tools can sometimes be for more blogging and social media purposes, but Piktochart has been a long-standing favorite for infographic creation and is often up to date with popular graphic design trends. 

Features Piktochart offers:

• Visual Assets
• Data Visualization
• Text
• Adjustable Content Blocks
• Design Components

Snappa

Snappa has a colorful and unique approach to designs and offers mostly social media graphics, however, there are some infographic designs and it might be worth trying out if the above tools aren’t giving you what you’re looking for. 

Features it offers:

• Visual Assets
• Data Visualization
• Text
• Background Remover
• Buffer Integration

Infogram

Infogram is mostly used for data visualization. Their key offers are about charts and elements to visualize any type of content. Apart from vertical infographics, they also offer social media templates. 

Features it offers:

• Visual Assets
• Data Visualization
• Text
•  Interactivity
• Elements

That’s All Folks!

Understanding the types of infographics can help increase your brand awareness, SEO efforts, online visibility and so much more!

And The HOTH now offers infographics as part of your HOTH X managed SEO campaign. 

In fact, the majority of marketers are expected to rely heavily on visual content in 2022. 

Need a little help with all this? 

We got you! 

Schedule a call now and sign up for free. 

The post Types of Infographics appeared first on The HOTH.

If not, you should be, as infographics improve reading comprehension by 50%, and content with visuals increases information retention by 78%. 

That’s a big deal, especially if you’re in the ever-competitive B2B marketing space – where influencing key decision-makers with insightful content is a must. 

In fact, many marketers are using infographics as part of their content marketing for how effective they are at conveying information. If you’re in the B2B space, leveraging infographic design is a must in order to stay competitive. 

It’s not just B2B companies either, as infographics work wonders in nearly every industry, including healthcare, education, government, and every type of business. 

Infographics are also invaluable for SEO tactics like building backlinks. 

There are many different types of infographics, and you’ll need to determine which will work best for your needs. For example, if link-building is your goal, an infographic containing statistics related to your field is a great idea – as other bloggers in your industry will want to link back to it. 

If you’ve never created an infographic before, you may not know where to start. Read on to learn about the most popular infographics examples to get your creative juices flowing. 

What Makes an Effective Infographic?

An infographic combines visual design elements with essential information like statistics, figures, maps, tutorials, and more. They’re fun and engaging ways to visualize (and skim) vital information. 

Infographics have been around forever, with the earliest examples being maps, star atlases, and rock art. 

It’s proof that humans have long been visual learners, as we can retain 65% of visual information instead of only 10% of what we hear. 

In a nutshell, the goal of an infographic is always to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell.’ Any way you can convey a piece of information visually (through an illustration, chart, or graph) will have more power than writing it as text. 

These visuals will make complex information more digestible and help retain your reader’s attention. 

That’s why the best infographics use clever graphic design techniques like an appealing color palette, graphs, pie charts, and other visual elements (which can increase readership by 80%). 

In fact, the proper use of color in infographics makes readers 80% more motivated to read the content. For example, a step-by-step guide infographic will be easier to digest if each step has bright colors, bold text, and a helpful illustration. 

Developing infographics for your content 

While infographics have countless benefits, they don’t create themselves. Instead, creating a beautiful infographic takes quite a bit of time and effort. 

You should treat creating infographics just as you would a blog post, whitepaper, or eBook. 

If you don’t have an in-house graphic designer, you may want to hire one specializing in infographics. There are also infographic makers out there, such as Canva, which makes developing infographics easier for the layperson. Canva even has infographic templates you can customize to create something original. 

Like any marketing strategy, you’ll want to consider your target audience‘s needs and business goals before putting an infographic together. 

For example, what type of content is your target audience looking for? 

Do they want to know how to do something, learn eye-opening statistics, or how to get somewhere?

Knowing this will help you determine which type of infographic will work best for your audience. The next step is to determine how the infographic will help you meet your business goals. 

Your infographic should contain highly desirable information for your target audience if you want more traffic. If you’re going to increase conversions, your infographics should cover the benefits of your product and how it will solve customer pain points. 

10 Infographics Examples to Spark Your Creativity 

Now that you have your audience and goals in mind, you need to settle on a type of infographic to create. There are many different types of infographics out there, so it can seem a bit overwhelming at first. 

Yet, these 10 infographics examples cover just about everything, from timelines to comparisons and more. Without further ado, here are some of the best infographics examples you can use for data visualization. 

#10: Comparison infographics 

Do you want to show how your product is superior to a traditional version? If so, a comparison infographic is what you want. 

It’s where you use graphic elements to compare the similarities and differences between two things. It doesn’t have to be a product comparison, either. You can compare careers, financial institutions, and just about anything else. 

Comparison infographics work best for:

• Increasing conversions by showing how your product or service beats the competition 
• Gaining B2B leads by illustrating how one process compares to another 
• Generating traffic by educating readers with an apt comparison of two ideas 

The most popular comparison infographic templates feature multi-column layouts, which is ideal for comparing two things. Conversely, there are also comparison chart infographics, which use a visual table for comparisons. 

Which type should you choose?

As a rule of thumb, the multi-column layout works best when comparing two things. The table layout works great when comparing multiple items, such as the signup rates for different SaaS platforms. 

#9: Statistical infographics 

Eye-opening statistics and digital marketing go hand-in-hand. There’s no better way to convince a prospect of something than by sharing a relevant statistic that proves your point (we did it in this article multiple times). 

Yet, if you have a lot of statistics to share, typing them out as vanilla text is a sure-fire way to bore your audience and lose readership. 

That’s where statistical infographics save the day. Fun colors, typography, graphic icons, and relevant illustrations will make digesting statistics far easier. 

You can focus on a single study or include a ton of relevant statistics relating to your subject matter. 

Statistical infographics are great for:

• Convincing customers of the effectiveness of a product or service
• Educating readers on essential topics 
• Building links by generating backlinks from other bloggers eager to share your statistics
• Building customer trust by sharing accurate, reliable information 

Your prospects will appreciate being able to learn lots of vital stats and figures about their niche in one convenient location. If you’re in the B2B field, statistical infographics can help you build trust with your leads, as 52% of B2B decision-makers say they’re definitely more likely to buy from a brand once they’ve read their content. 

#8: Timeline infographics

Do you want to take your potential customers on a journey? Then the timeline infographic is the perfect format for you. 

A timeline infographic will convey the passage of time to show how things have changed or how one thing leads to another. 

Timeline examples include:

• Illustrating the steps of your buyer’s journey 
• Educating readers on your company history
• Illustrating how a certain product or service works (if it takes time to start working, such as a weight-loss supplement)  
• How to do something (i.e., steps to take care of your cat)
• Displaying a timeline for a project 

As you can see, you can do a lot with a timeline infographic. You can use them to educate customers, build trust, and increase sales. They should be your go-to if you want to convey the passage of time. 

#7: Process infographics 

If your goal is to convey how a process works to your readers, you need a process infographic template. 

Process infographics make heavy use of flowcharts and diagrams to present information. They’re great for step-by-step breakdowns of how to complete a task, such as how to close down your property at night. 

For this reason, process infographics are great for training employees. If there’s a task that your staff struggles with, such as forgetting essential steps in closing down at night – a process infographic can be the remedy. 

They can also help simplify decision-making, which is advantageous for B2B companies. You can use a process infographic to let decision-makers know how smooth your operation is, convincing them to try out your service. 

Process infographics shine at educating and informing readers, so bear that in mind when considering them. 

#6: Informational infographics

If you need to break down a complex concept to your audience, then an informational infographic is just what the doctor ordered. 

An informational infographic uses a mix of typography and visual elements to summarize a topic in a fun and engaging way.

These types of infographics tend to rely more on text than others, so they need an appealing color scheme and helpful visuals to break up the information. 

Also, it’s pretty common for an informational infographic to be a standalone piece of content. Instead of adding it to a blog post or whitepaper, you can simply let your infographic do all the talking for you. 

We’ve done this plenty of times at The HOTH, like with this example of 10 Common Local SEO Mistakes that you can use for design inspiration. As you can see, the infographic is the entirety of the content, and it uses a mix of colors, graphics, and text to convey its message. 

Thanks to the quality of our own infographic, it was able to generate 3 dofollow backlinks from other bloggers in our niche. It also concisely lays out common local SEO mistakes, which is helpful information for our target audience. 

#5: Geographic or map-based infographics 

Map infographics are excellent tools for conveying location-based statistics, such as the percentage of homeowners in Georgia based on age demographics. 

You can also highlight geographic trends or provide a travel guide for a specific state or region. 

If you want to convey information to your prospects that have to do with a specific location, an infographic is one of the most engaging ways to do so. 

Your color scheme will matter here more than others, as you’ll want to make heavy use of bright colors on your map to make it stand out. The more visually appealing that you can make your map, the more likely viewers are to engage with it and share it on social media. 

#4: Interactive infographics 

If you have the ability, creating interactive infographics adds extra layers of intrigue and personalization to your content. 

What kind of interactivity can you use?

You can develop just about anything with a talented graphic designer by your side. There are moving infographics that use animations and videos based on user interactions. 

There are also clickable sections that display information whenever a user interacts with them. 

Some infographics even have search bars and filters that users can manipulate to see specific types of information. 

Of course, creating an interactive infographic will take more time, money, and effort than a static one, but the results can be worth it. Consider these quick statistics as proof:

• 88% of marketers say that interactive content has helped differentiate their brand
• 79% say that utilizing interactive content improves message retention
• A majority of marketers say that going interactive is the best way to repackage existing content 

So if you’re looking for a way to increase your engagement and retention, creating an interactive infographic will help you achieve both. 

#3: Anatomical infographics 

Sometimes you want to give customers a visual representation of one of your products so they can see how all its components work together.

That’s what anatomical infographics are perfect for, and you can use them in virtually every type of industry. 

To visualize how they work, think about Anatomy class in school. Instead of breaking down the components of the body, you explain the components of:

• A product 
• A service
• A recipe 
• Your organization 

An anatomical infographic will help your prospects easily visualize a complex process or product, thanks to the clever use of brand colors, illustrations, and typography. 

#2: Infographic resume 

Are you looking for a way to stand out from the crowd when applying to a coveted position? Then you should make use of a visual resume or infographic resume. 

Just as infographics spruce up dull blog posts, whitepapers, and eBooks – so too can they enhance career resumes. 

Instead of going for the traditional text format, you can include fun illustrations of yourself and your unique skills. 

These types of resumes tend to work best for positions that value creativity and innovative thinking. An infographic resume can transform your education, skills, and work experience into a stunning visual story of what you bring to the table as an employee. 

#1: Hierarchical infographics

Lastly, you can use infographics to lay out a hierarchy. These types of infographics often take the shape of a pyramid for this reason. 

You can use a hierarchical infographic to:

• Break down the employee structure at your organization 
• List your products in order of quality, price, and effectiveness 
• Educate readers on a hierarchical process at your company 

If you’re onboarding new employees, a helpful infographic going over the hierarchy at your company can be a big help. Also, don’t forget to use colors and illustrations to make your hierarchical infographics as appealing as possible. 

The Importance of Infographics in SEO 

If you’re engaging in a content marketing/SEO campaign, you’re missing out on a massive secret weapon if you don’t use infographics. 

They’re the fourth most common type of content found in digital marketing strategies, and it’s not hard to see why. 

The first and most apparent is how an infographic enhances content and makes it more digestible. If you’ve got a lot of complex information to cover, including just one infographic can make a massive difference to the amount of traffic you generate with the post. 

Infographics for link-building 

Earlier in the post, we mentioned that one of our infographics was able to generate 3 backlinks for us. That was no mistake, as it was one of our goals all along. 

Infographics are backlink-generating powerhouses due to their tendency to go viral. 

That’s why you should create infographics for this very reason. If you want to boost your domain authority significantly, building a robust backlink profile is the way to do it. The ‘link juice’ that you generate from backlinks can grant you a noticeable boost to your search engine rankings. 

To create an infographic that generates backlinks, ask yourself what other bloggers in your space are looking for the most. 

Do they need science-backed statistics to help sell their products, or would an anatomical breakdown of a product provide more value?

You’ll want to do some research to pinpoint which type of infographic would work best for your needs. 

Concluding Thoughts: Infographics Examples 

By now, you should have a better understanding of the effectiveness of infographics. You should also have a sense of which types of infographics will work best for your content. 

We covered 10 common infographics examples, but that doesn’t mean that’s everything an infographic can do. 

In fact, there are countless ways you can use the infographic format to convey information, so don’t limit yourself to this list. 

Do you not have the time to come up with ideas for infographics? If so, don’t wait to check out HOTH Blogger, our professional blogging service where we write engaging posts that you can transform into infographics.   

The post Popular Infographics Examples to Inspire Your Creativity appeared first on The HOTH.

Content optimization best practices are always changing and evolving. That’s why it’s vital to keep up with how Google understands keywords and content so you can compete with your competitors.

The cold hard truth is so many other businesses are marketing their products and services just like you are, so you may not win a link even if your products deserve it. 

So, how do you start getting high DA, natural links to your site? You need something worthy of linking to! 

By creating quality content and using topical SEO to optimize it, you can begin the process of internal link building to your product pages to keep the traffic consistently flowing. 

Let’s begin a walk-through of what is quality content, what topical SEO is, and show you some examples of highly linkable content so you can start attracting those holy grail links!

Ready? Let’s go!

How Google’s Algorithms Are Changing and Why It Matters

SEO has traditionally focused on optimizing content for specific target keywords. Common SEO advice would be to create content and pages based on 1 specific keyword. 

Other old-school SEO practices also include dividing up pages based on different keywords. For instance, having one page for “guitar chords” and another page for “guitar tabs” even though the user intent is the same.

But with all the new updates to Google’s search algorithms (thanks to machine learning and AI), Google’s search standards have changed over time and SEO basics don’t work like they used to. That’s one of the reasons it’s so important to stay updated on Google’s SEO changes. 

Because Google’s organic search is responsible for 59.2% of the world’s web traffic, Google’s ultimate goal is to match the user query with the best possible answer. 

In the past, Google would do that by using keywords, basic SEO content, and links as a way of matching which is still true to an extent. But, that presented some problems that we’ve seen them try to tackle in the last decade. 

So, Google set out on a mission to create new ways of rating a piece of content. They want to be able to rate that content on a scale of how likely it is to answer that user’s query.

As a result, Google has developed algorithms to understand the connections between words, entities, topics, etc so they can understand the search intent.

Hummingbird, which was one of Google’s major updates that rolled out in 2013, became a total rewrite of Google’s algorithm. This update made Google able to understand the connections between entities and natural language search, analyzing and ranking content in terms of topics instead of relying on exact match keywords. 

Google’s BERT update was released in 2019 and is considered the largest change since RankBrain. BERT made serious changes to the way Google’s AI treats the intent of search queries better. It’s the newest update for Google’s algorithm but isn’t expected to be the last. 

Actually, most Google experts estimate that Google’s search algorithm changes around 500 to 600 times a year! That’s at least a couple of times a day. 

While most of these changes don’t make much of a difference, some updates change SEO significantly.

What Is Topical Authority?

In essence, Google places value on a source’s authority as a subject matter expert. That is, how deep and comprehensive a source’s coverage of a certain niche is. 

In practice, it means your site should be filled with content that effectively answers all possible questions a user may have about a certain topic, concept, or subject that you are targeting.

What’s more intriguing, topical optimization could potentially be a more powerful ranking factor than keyword optimization and backlinks combined if used correctly.

Topical Authority best practices

Here are some good practices for topical SEO: 

• Stay relevant to your topic
• Use Google as a tool for keyword research
• Do a topical analysis
• Build topic clusters 

This part may seem a little obvious; however, staying on topic and keeping relevance to a search query is super important for Google’s crawlers. 

You can always use a free Chrome Extension called Keywords Everywhere, which I’ve used myself for research. Keywords Everywhere pulls different keywords from Google’s API and show you their search volume. In addition, you can also use our free SEO tool The HOTH’s Free Google Keyword Planner. 

Topical clusters are simply groups of related content that collectively cover a larger subject. They also create a strong internal link building foundation.

What is Quality Content?

The term “high-quality content” gets thrown around so much in the SEO community that it can almost make you roll your eyes. 

So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty – what exactly is quality content and can you create it for a great user experience? 

In this context, your digital marketing goal is to get links to your site, improve organic traffic, and reduce bounce rate, so let’s break down what types of content actually achieve that. 

Simply put, great content that is high quality is content creation that answers essential questions being asked by the target audience, provides research, important news, or presents a controversial opinion.

Quality content pieces are linkable assets on your site that are so good other websites naturally refer their audiences to them.

Let’s break down the top content writing types that attract links:

How to Write Quality Content

One of the largest challenges that businesses and bloggers face is writing content that’s both appealing to people and optimized for search engines. 

It makes your content both interesting and optimized, your website needs to go above and beyond just writing content. Your posts need to accomplish two goals. To solve a problem, and keep your audience engaged. That is sometimes easier said than done. 

Here are some tips for writing great, high-quality content:

• News content,  infographics, or updates on new products and developments
• Authoritative content that answers questions people search, like “What is [topic]”
• Controversial opinion pieces that take a stand on one side of an argument
• Original research that provides unique insights
• Content that centers around a trending topic and provides practical information

All these types of content are both high ranking, shareable, linkable, and hold value to your marketing strategy. 

Let me give you some examples and explain how they work:

Authoritative content

Try creating content that answers questions people actually want to know more about. Authoritative content such as ultimate guides and “how-to” articles are referred to often by publishers.

Actually, 78% of consumers tend to trust a brand more if they create more customized content. 

Why is this the case? Because authoritative content tends to provide valuable information in a way that makes it easy to reference. 

Editors don’t mind linking to this content because it provides their readers with additional value and help you appear in organic search results. 

Let’s say you wanted a link from a publisher like Forbes: a website with high domain authority that has high search engine rankings and thus a high-quality backlink for your site to get.  

The HOTH offers a Domain Authority Checker Tool to help you determine metrics and what sites have the best DA and rank on results pages. You can also check your metrics by using Google’s Search Console and Analytics.  

This is the content strategy for getting great backlinks in play:

Not only do you get a boost from the link, but any traffic that clicks through to your content also can continue on to your sales content!

You’ll get more backlinks and thus more traffic and sales by putting up authoritative content on your site and making it easy to find your products from that page. 

Controversial Opinion Content

Depending on your niche or industry, there are topics under debate that people may fall sharply on either side of.

You can take advantage of the emotional component of taking a stand and write a piece that argues for one side. This may be a risky SEO strategy but can work for some businesses. 

This gets linked to by searchers and from people who agree and even those who don’t agree but want to present an opposing view to their audience. 

Extra points if you can present a controversial opinion on a trending topic. It is probably best to research the best ways to be controversial without causing any company problems to your business. 

You don’t necessarily need to be this dramatic in your piece, though the emotional response it gets can help your DA and trustworthiness. 

An argumentative piece can be as simple as stating your opinion on problems that your audience is having and calling those problems out.

Research content

Research pieces present information in a useful and numbers-driven way. Like authoritative pieces, research content answers questions, but you answer those questions by using hard evidence to back it up. 

Research content can take a number of forms. For example, you can conduct original research to present statistics, data, and analysis that offer unique insights.

You can also aggregate a number of research pieces from external sources and generate a new “study on the studies.”

For example, a case study by SearchEngineLand on how Google reviews impact local SEO rankings managed to attract a large number of backlinks in a matter of days.

If you do the work to come up with meaningful statistics that provide insights into your niche topic, this research content is primed to serve as a reference and get backlinks.

News, updates, and trending topic content

If something new comes out or there is a trend on the rise, your ability to provide news or updates to the audience can come in handy.

Whenever Apple comes out with a new version of the iPhone, you can be sure that about 10 million+ pieces of content will come out to talk about it. But you can provide an update on something more specific to your niche.

For example, we keep our readers up to date on Google’s Update history.

This page has received a steadily increasing number of referring domains:

Now you have an overview of the quality content that works to get quality backlinks to your site!

If you want to try a tool that helps you come up with ideas for content, try our Headline Generator Tool.

How To Find User Questions and Answer Them 

To get an article to rank higher for a target topic, you first have to identify the most popular kinds of questions people ask about it. 

Here’s how:

Use Google to find questions

Let me use a random SEO keyword phrase as an example.

Go to Google and type “mobile SEO.”

Head straight for the “people also ask” section.

From these results, you get a basic idea of the top things people want to know about mobile SEO, such as:

• What is mobile SEO?
• What does it mean to make your website mobile friendly?
• How can you make your website SEO friendly?
• Why is mobile SEO important?

You can also look at the related searches section. 

Since the related searches section looks more like keywords than actual queries (questions), you have to interpret what the user intent is based on these keywords. Doing so will let you form new question phrases you can add to your list of queries. 

For example, when you see the keywords “mobile SEO Google”, it is unlikely that the user cares about whether or not Google has optimized its website for mobile SEO.

Probably, they are curious about:

• What is Google’s take on mobile SEO?
• How important is mobile SEO to Google?
• What tools & tests can I run to make sure my website is mobile optimized?
• What is the current state of mobile SEO?

Obviously, this process is more subjective than a perfect science, so try to be as comprehensive as you can. You can clean up any clutter later.

Collect all the queries you’ve gathered so far based on the People Also Ask section, including question interpretations based on keywords in the Related Searches section.

Now, not all searches come with the people also ask box, though, and you wouldn’t want to limit your ideas to a single platform, so a good additional source for fielding question ideas would be Q&A sites. For example, Quora.

Use Quora to find user questions

Quora is a community-curated question-and-answer site with around 100 million users. Quora is known to prioritize the quality of answers over volume, which makes it a better place for us to harvest our query ideas.

Again, let’s use mobile SEO as an example again. Type “mobile” SEO.

Go to the right navigation bar and click “Questions.”

This filters the results so you’ll see all the questions ever asked in the Quora community about your keyword.

You can also see info such as the date it was posted, number of follows, views, and comments, which lets you know how important those questions are to the users, which means they may be valid ideas for content creation. 

When you flesh out a topic in-depth, you’ll have a much better chance of ranking, as well as the opportunity to rank for many more keywords!

As you can see, the idea is pretty straightforward: Pick a topic, find all the questions related to the topic, answer these questions fully, and publish your article!

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you do this, you can check out our Blogger Service. 

Refine your questions

Now that you have your initial list of questions, it’s time to whittle them down into those that make the most sense to tackle in your article.

First, pick the ones that you think are the most pressing questions for your target audience and weed out the ones that are not relevant.

For example, your target audience is business website owners trying to decide whether they should invest in mobile SEO for their websites. So the questions from Quora about using switchboard tags for mobile SEO, as well as other questions relating to back-end development for SEO, are best saved for an article targeted at developers.

Next, your goal is to produce content that is “evergreen”, so don’t include time-sensitive queries, such as “why is mobile SEO important for 2022?” or “Is there a brilliant mobile SEO checklist for 2022?”. The average lifespan of a blog post is about 30 days, however, some high-quality posts can stay on Google’s top rank for 2-3 years, so it is best to keep your content up to date but not date sensitive. 

Third, there may be some redundancies where you have queries that are phrased differently, but that lead to the same answer.

Let’s explore this example, the questions “Where can I find mobile SEO tutorials?” and “Which are the best websites for learning mobile SEO?” are looking for pretty much the same things, so just combine them.

Lastly, there might be some questions you want to edit on account of them having typos, being unnecessarily long-winded, or which need to be rephrased for better clarity.

How To Classify User Intent Of Your Questions

Now that you’ve refined the list of questions to tackle, it’s time to classify your questions by user intent type to help you organize the order of the questions in the article.

For this article about mobile SEO, you only need to concern yourself with two user intent types:

• Informational – where the user is looking to find specific information; and
• Transactional – where the user’s intent is to complete an action such as to purchase, download, register, or sign up for something.

It would be best to create some notes for informational and transactional-type questions.

With that bit done, it’s time to build your article structure according to the order of questions you should address. This can include headings and subheadings such as H1, H2, and H3. 

How To Structure Your Article Using The Questions You’ve Gathered

To earn the reader’s trust, begin the article by answering questions that provide specific information, starting from the broader questions followed by the more detailed ones.

Follow or pair these with the relevant transactional questions to create an article that could provide real monetary value either through affiliate links or by pitching your own services.

For example, the question “What is mobile SEO?” Is the most encompassing of all the questions and should be the first header. 

• A detailed question that should fall under this first header could be:
  What are the differences between desktop SEO and mobile SEO?

Other broad questions that should serve as main headers for your article are:

• Why is mobile SEO important?
• How effective is mobile SEO?
• How can you make your website mobile SEO friendly?

When you’re done organizing, you should end up with an article framework that can help you engage your audience, and answer any questions they may have on that particular topic. 

How To Start Getting Free Links

What’s awesome about starting with linkable content is that over time, you can start to attract free links naturally!

Once your content starts to rank, it’ll be seen more in search results and attract additional links as a result of the increased exposure.

Why does it work? Because your content is an easy-to-find reference!

For example, journalists write articles and need content to refer to that supports their piece. They might look for examples, answers, quotes, and studies.

If you rank at the top of the results and provide what they need in your content, it’ll be you they refer to.

This is the SEO version of “the rich get richer.”

So you essentially multiply the value of your content by getting free links in this way.

How do you start getting some free links?

Rather than just sit there and wait, there a few simple things you can do to kickstart the number of links your content is getting.

Promotion

Promotion is a key tactic to getting the initial links that you need to rank.

To get started promoting your new content, share it on social media and tag prominent people in the post who might be interested in it. If those people decide to share your content, your reach can grow exponentially.

Thank you! The new #Digitalscoutings Top 100 #SocialMedia and #Marketing #Influencer #ranking is out. Thank you all for your #inspiration and support! https://t.co/xQoPG7rMnc @davekerpen @madalynsklar @guykawasaki @hnshah #AI #ML #VR #AR #BigData #iot #Cloud #smm /Team pic.twitter.com/2Bk4brRPsp

— Dr. Robin Kiera (@stratorob) July 12, 2018

You can also try taking out a press release and sharing it with news organizations as another promotion tactic.

You can also try taking out a press release and sharing it with news organizations as another promotion tactic.

Outreach

Do some direct outreach. If you want your piece to get a link from someone prominent, why not reach out to let them know you made it?

If they check out your content and like it, that’s free promotion for your piece.

There are different ways to do it, such as through email or social media messaging. You can even use The HOTH’s Backlink Checker Tool to see what sites are giving particular kinds of links.

Influencers are inundated with requests for links. So don’t even ask for the link. Just make them aware of the content.

For example, we emailed Brian Dean to let him know that we mentioned him in a piece of content about blogger outreach and he shared it on Growth Hackers.This earned us a backlink and an additional 3k views from our target audience of online marketers.

We were then contacted by a podcast for an interview on the Blogger Outreach article.

Being on this podcast earned us yet another link from the episode’s page, along with traffic from the show’s listeners.

Link Submission

You can submit your content to relevant sites as part of a promotion strategy, including:

• Growth Hackers (Marketing)
• Hacker News (Tech)
• Slashdot (Tech)
• Quora (General)
• Reddit (General)
• HubPages (General)
• Blog Engage (General)

There are more submission sites out there, and some are relevant only to specific industries. Submit where it makes sense for you.

How To Interlink For More Sales

So you have the quality content piece. You’ve promoted it to get some initial links pointing to it from other sites.

Now you want the traffic and link juice to flow to your product page – and you do that by internally linking!

When you link from your standout content piece to your sales pages, you can turn that traffic into purchases which boosts your conversion rates. 

As I mentioned in the beginning, this is the better strategy for getting people to your product pages, since product pages don’t attract a lot of links.

Internally linking can actually help your product pages rank as well!

This case study from Ninja Outreach shows how internal linking increases traffic.

This one resulted in 40% more traffic as a result of strategically placed internal links:

Interlinking also provides opportunities to turn traffic into sales. 

Why does this work? People who search for terms like the ones you’d use to create quality content are often midway in the customer buying cycle. They just need a bit of a push to start considering a purchase.

Here’s an example from our own site. Let’s say someone is looking to get links with blogger outreach:

1. Someone searches for how to do outreach and lands on our guide for doing blogger outreach
2. They read the article and learn some valuable knowledge they were looking for
3. They like and trust us for sharing that useful info
4. I’d first like to mention that we provide a guest posting service/blogger outreach service and link them to our Guest Posting sales page.
5. Both pages get an SEO benefit, and the traffic that landed on the guide turns into customers after being sold on a solution to their problem!

Sure, some might use the information and leave. But if they are a busy business owner who would be a good prospect for us, chances are they’ll read this article and realize that outreach and guest posting is a lot of work and we can help.

So we make sure to mention our guest posting service at the beginning and end of the article to ensure that they at least check it out.

Let’s Wind It Down

That’s a ton of information, am I right? 

Quality content and topical SEO can be a little confusing, especially for anyone just starting out or who doesn’t have the time to boost their website or business as much as they’d like to. 

That’s okay if you’re a bit overwhelmed, we got you! 

Now that you’re able to confidently answer the question “what is quality content?” you’re ready to take the next step. Don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our professionals for any SEO or PPC questions you may have. 

The post What is Quality Content (and How You Can Use Topical Authority to Optimize It) appeared first on The HOTH.

If you’re ready to learn more about how long-form content can help boost your ratings, you’ve come to the right place. Below we will discuss why you need long-form content and how it improves your SEO. We’ll also offer some tips on doing it effectively. 

Ready to begin? Keep scrolling!

What Is Long-Form Content and Why Does it Work?

Although definitions of long-form content vary, most digital marketers would agree that it includes any blogs or articles over 1,000 words. Online businesses can post long-form content with word counts as high as 2K, 4K, or even as high as 8K. 

Longer content is usually centered around being more useful, informational, and comprehensive than short content. This earns more backlinks and authority which increases your rank in SERPs. 

The average user’s attention span on a website is around 10 to 20 seconds long. You may have heard that short content with quick bullet points that are easy to read, and go straight and to the point is the best way to create content. 

And, because 10 seconds is such a short amount of time you may wonder how long-form content performs. Surprisingly, long-form content does very well on both social media and web pages.  

If done right, a few pieces of long-form content can increase your search rankings faster than most short-form content (blogs or articles under 1K words). It’s a good idea to start adding a few to your existing blog schedule or update some of your old content. 

Long-form content takes time and effort. It requires planning, research, and a ton of thought just to make sure that there’s enough information to make it authoritative. 

As an example, I wouldn’t suggest creating a heading or title tag such as, “The Ultimate Guide” if you aren’t going to write over 1,000 words. It’s always best to match your content with the extent of your information. 

This would also apply to a quick blog post regarding an event. That type of topic shouldn’t be as long and as extensive as a how-to guide. 

Long-Form Content vs Short-Form Content

Short content or, “snackable” content is usually around 200 words. It gives your audience a quick bite of your company, product, or service. It also can help you gain trust and become a somewhat recognizable brand. 

Some examples may include but aren’t limited to tweets, event reminders, quick videos, and infographics. 

Short-form blogs are good at grabbing your target audience’s attention with interesting information or offerings (such as a one-time free trial). But, long-form blogs are designed to educate visitors about your products or services and to preemptively answer their questions. 

One of the best ways to use short content is to just keep it simple and memorable. Focus on one idea and explain everything quickly. Keep it direct and straight to the point. 

If your content is good, you don’t always need to have a long, drawn-out story because your audience only really needs a few certain elements and they can figure out the rest. 

Short content is great for social posts and information that doesn’t need explaining. However, if you are creating tutorials, how-tos, or step-by-step content, it would be best to stick to long-form content. 

Long-form content is seen as authoritative and trustworthy. Businesses usually use this type of content writing. These pieces of content grasp the attention of a highly invested audience who want to learn about what you have to offer them. Long-form articles are in-depth, comprehensive, and cover everything your audience needs to know. 

One benefit of using long content found in a case study by BuzzSumo, is that longer content gets more shares and proves people generally find value and like well-researched posts that are packed with useful information. 

Businesses that are invested in adopting inbound marketing typically need gated long-form content. This includes white papers, webinars, and more expansive content such as e-books. 

What this does, in the long run, is build long-lasting, long-term customer relationships. B2B sales use longer content because, in the earliest stages of a marketing cycle, the audience has very little awareness of products or services. 

This helps to pull in a potential lead and turn it into a qualified customer. 

How to Know If You Should Use Long-Form Content

Long-form content demands critical thinking. It is intended to be read and digested as opposed to a quick read or a skim. It is deeply researched and contextual. It’s not just another blog post that jams keywords into a page as much as possible. 

It provides the reader with as much information as possible on a particular topic. Besides the word count, there’s a lot that goes into long-form content. 

But, how do you know if your niche requires long-form content as opposed to quicker, less informational content? 

Long-form content tends to have a fantastic lifespan. If you are looking to publish content that will be relevant no matter how much time has passed, then long-form content is for you. 

Does Blog Length Really Matter?

Have you ever wondered why SEO blog services like The HOTH give you the choice of selecting 500 words, 1K words, 2K words, or more? 

It’s because blog length does matter and it’s important to figure out what length is the most advantageous for your website and marketing strategy. 

The assumption for so long has been that online readers prefer short pieces of content and snippets, but data on long-form content is proving that’s not so accurate. People also enjoy long-form content (if it’s done right). 

Hubspot found that blogs with a word count between 2,250 and 2,500 earned the most organic traffic. One reason for this is that larger blogs contain more keywords. 

On top of that, a study by Pew Research shows that users spend twice as much time on articles over 1,000 words. They found that short and long articles both attracted the same number of visitors, yet people would actually keep reading the longer pieces versus navigating away to something else. This has huge implications for your site and your bounce rate. 

Does Long-Form Content Affect Social Media Shares?

As I briefly mentioned above, social shares happen more frequently with long-form content than short content. A study by Moz concluded that articles that are over 1,000 words are more likely to earn social shares than shorter posts. Posts that are even longer than 1,000 words tend to increase in shares depending on the higher word count. 

In addition, a different study by Neil Patel found that longer posts received an average of about 68% more engagement on Twitter and about 22% more on Facebook. 

The correlation between content length and social media shares is similar to content length and backlinks. So, these statistics suggest that the everyday social media user values content length if it is informational and you optimize it with helpful content. 

Should You Use Long-Form Content for Landing Pages?

Long-form content doesn’t necessarily need to be articles or blog posts. Basically, the purpose of a long-form landing page is to make sure that your audience is as informed as possible about your service, product, or brand. That allows them to feel comfortable and confident enough to spend their hard-earned cash. 

A giant success factor is the role of targeting. Hubspot research has discovered that businesses with over 40 landing pages generate twelve times as many leads as businesses with just 1 to 5. So, consider this when deciding whether or not long-form content would be a good idea for your company. 

That isn’t to say that short landing pages won’t convert potential buyers. You may even be able to persuade your product with stories or emotional and instinctual images.

But, science suggests that most of your potential customers won’t convert unless they understand your product and also feel comfortable. 

That is such a crucial thing to understand about long-form landing pages. They are there to completely get rid of any hesitation or anxieties about buying a service or product. You need to have trustworthy content before your leads will buy what you’re offering. 

In fact, conversion rate experts at Moz stated that long-form landing pages boosted sales by about 52%. 

The key here is that there are many reasons why webmasters or designers won’t include long-form landing pages on their websites. Many of those reasons are because it doesn’t seem user-friendly or it might come across as scammy. 

Regardless of the reasons, using long-form content on your landing pages may actually improve your sales depending on what your audience needs from your brand. 

How Does Long-Format Help SEO?

Besides sharing information with your potential customers, SEO-optimized blogs are also designed to rank for keywords. 

Good long-form content will rank for way more keywords than a 500-word blog. One study also found a direct correlation between the length of content and the number of backlinks a website receives. 

Writers of long-form content need to conduct extra search engine research, go more in-depth, and ensure their final version is high-quality. Doing this will improve a site’s domain authority, which results in more backlinks over the long term. 

Here are a few SEO tips to focus on for long-form content:

• Focus on your targeted keyword or phrase
• Optimize your copy with SEO methods
• Boost your readability with headlines and links

Keywords are a given when it comes to any SEO content, but long-form content gets ranked higher because it contains more keywords without overstuffing. Think about it like this, the longer your content is, the more keywords you can insert into it. This helps you rank in Google and other search engines, but it also increases your organic traffic. In fact, homepages featuring long-form content also experienced an increase in conversation rates by more than 37%.

Optimizing your content with SEO methods such as meta descriptions and alt text can raise your chances of ranking in search engines. It is not always an easy task and businesses that spend more than $500 a month on SEO are around 53% more likely to succeed in ranking. 

The Google algorithm also favors long-form content because it caters perfectly to E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness). It rewards this type of content with higher rankings. 

Now that you understand how long-format content can help your SEO, let’s go over a few tips on how to create your own blogs that will get the algorithm’s attention: 

Tips and Tricks on Writing Quality Long-Form Content

There are just so many benefits of long-form content that it would be silly not to consider creating some for your niche or business. If you’re interested in developing content marketing and some long-form content for your website, here are some things to consider. 

Start off by carefully researching your topic and relevant keywords. You’ll need a lot of reliable research because long-form content is more in-depth. Focus on finding long-tail keywords as well. A great place to start is with The HOTH’s Keyword Planner.

Research

Organize and structure your blog or article. We recommend outlining before you write so you’ll know where everything goes. Outlining and having a word count goal is a fantastic start to any content.

Researching your niche, information, and picking the most relevant keywords can open up the opportunity to rank well in search engines for your preferred niche. High rankings in search drive traffic to your website and give you the ability to promote your services or products with content creation. 

Short Paragraphs

Write short paragraphs and divide your content into different sections using H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, or H6 subheadings. Don’t forget your other SEO information like alt-texts or meta descriptions.

By organizing your topics in your content strategy, you can increase readability and boost your content rank because Google search sees your topics as easy to identify. This can help improve your authority. When you write in small paragraph chunks, usually around three sentences, you increase easy scrolling and searchability. 

The Hook

Hook the reader with an engaging introduction that will ensure they read the entire piece. This may be an interesting statistic or something they’ve never heard of before. 

Link baiting is a common practice among marketers, the concept has been around for a long while. Marketers have figured out by trial and error that emotional hooks that entice people to “like” or “share” a link to content increases engagement and overall traffic. 

Now that you know that your writing needs a good hook, how do you write one?

Here are a few ideas to start with:

• Be bold! Create a statement that begs for attention
• Be witty and show your personality
• Use a fresh twist
• Tell an emotional story

Use a bold statement in your hook. If you think your article has some great ideas that will help your audience do something better. Tell them so! They want to hear it. 

Be witty, by using a simple play on words or a fun headline, you may increase your click rate and boost your traffic. Just make sure to keep your audience in mind. 

Use your personality and add a fresh twist to some of your headlines or long-form content. If you’re writing a how-to post or tutorial, creating a welcoming atmosphere that builds a relationship with your readers will help to create returning customers. 

Lastly, telling a story with your content is a good way to keep your audience engaged. It makes your readers invested in your service or product. Testimonials and letting your audience know how your service works or how much your business cares can boost your trustworthiness and your sales. 

Style

Your writing style should be accessible and conversational. SEO writing is quite technical and is a way to write content that is easy for search engines to see what the content is and whether it is of high quality.

It is always a good practice to keep your audience in mind along with search intent. It’s important to make sure that your style of writing goes along with what your readers want to see. 

For example, if your style of writing is packed with slapstick humor, but your audience is more conservative, it may not sit well with them.

Style guides for your writers are also a great idea for creating long-form SEO content. Because SEO is such a technical style, it would be best to hire a professional writer or service like The HOTH that understands the best methods. Many businesses will hire a writer, send them a quick brief, and expect a masterpiece. 

While that sounds like a great idea, the fact is you aren’t giving them exactly what they need to write a great long-form piece. Many small businesses can’t really afford to have a hit-or-miss content writer because of how much SEO can cost in the long run. 

Outlines, SEO strategy, and the desired writing format with loads of training can get your writers where they need to be without your business suffering. 

By giving them a style guide, you are setting your team and your business up for success. You can also prevent inconsistent or inadequate work by giving out your guide. This saves time, effort, and won’t eat at your budget. 

Images and Graphics

Another ranking factor is images and infographics. Add images or graphics where you can to break up the text. These can also make it easier to digest complex information. 

If you make your posts pop with images you’re more likely to keep an audience engaged with your content. People are visual! Adding an image (or a few) along with your blog posts can make quite an impression. 

A fast tip for easy marketing and promotion would be to blast your blogs across your social media channels such as Pinterest. High-quality images attached to pins add an additional avenue of traffic. 

Social Media

Speaking of Pinterest, social media is a powerful tool that can aid you and increase the reach of your audience and content by promoting sharing. Post each new article on your social media accounts and use a descriptive call-to-action. 

Because the power of social media is in sharing, it is important to have share buttons on each blog post. 

If you wish to have more control over how your links appear when they are shared, you can implement Twitter cards for Twitter, or you can use Open Graph for Facebook (this can come across as a more technical side of SEO.) 

By using this practice, you can improve your traffic and you may even boost some of that sought-after click-through rate. 

Monitor Your Activity

Long-form content writing is complicated and will take some time to work out the kinks. Stay on top of your SEO content. It would be best if you monitor your efforts with Google Analytics or other free tools. 

It’s a great way to keep track of your page views, average time spent on a page, and bounce rate. If you aren’t creating your long-form content correctly, you will be able to tell through these metrics. 

If you happen to see a drop-off in addition to low time spent, that’s a red flag. You can then adjust your content creation, keywords, etc. until you see an improvement in your numbers. Graphs are a great way to keep track of your SEO performance. 

Quality

Focusing on quality is the most important thing you can do. Not only should you provide rich information to the reader, but the writing should be error-free. 

Most business owners can get away with asking staff who have no writing experience to crank out a few short blogs here and there. But, if you want to include long-form posts on your site you should have them written by a professional. 

That brings us to the most important part of this blog. The HOTH offers an affordable and effective blog product that can help online businesses get long-form content. 

Need Help Crafting Long-Form Blogs?

Many businesses don’t have the time or experience to craft long-form content. And that’s ok! 

With our most popular SEO product, HOTH Blogger, you can order professionally written and researched blogs about your specific business ranging from 500 words all the way up to 5,000! Our writers are selected from the top 1% of all applicants. 

Each blog is optimized for SEO with the right keywords to generate traffic and our team of digital marketers can even publish it to your site. 

These flexible options through HOTH Blogger allow you to add a few long-form blogs while you continue posting shorter pieces on a consistent basis. You can get the best of both worlds!

Are you ready to start adding long-form content to your site and watch your rankings grow? 

Reach out to one of our experts today! You can also sign up for free for additional content and resources! 

The post Why Your SEO Strategy Needs Long-Form Content appeared first on The HOTH.

The first thing we tell new clients is to develop a plan to post consistently at least once per week. As for blog length, that depends on a variety of factors.

This article will break down the differences between short-form vs. long-form content. We’ll cover what’s good and what’s bad about each, as well as give you some tips on how to optimize your blogs.

Keep scrolling if you’re ready to get started.

The Role of Content in SEO

Many first-time clients don’t quite understand what big role content plays in SEO ranking. Ultimately it’s high-quality content that will push you to the top of the search engine result page (SERP).

What is content exactly? A basic definition is that it’s anything that needs to be expressed to an end-user.

Content isn’t just blogs or articles. It also includes videos, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, ebooks, and more.

The Google search algorithm prefers content that demonstrates a site’s expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T). Therefore, this is what you should strive for with your content.

Law firms, for example, can demonstrate their expertise by writing blogs about new statutes affecting their clients. Individual lawyers in that firm can position themselves to be authorities in certain areas of the law.

Developing trustworthiness boils down to providing accurate information and being linked by other websites.

Satisfy all three of these E-A-T elements and your rankings will soar.

Short-Form vs. Long-Form Content: What’s the Difference?

While we discussed above how content takes several forms, for the purpose of this article we’ll talk specifically about blogs.

Blogs can be described as short-form or long-form. When you sign up for our service HOTH Blogger you can choose between both.

Definitions vary across the world of digital marketing, but short-form blog content is typically under 1,000 words. Long-form blog content is anything over 1,000 words. In fact, in some cases, it’s as high as 8,000.

The purpose of short-form content is to use relevant keywords, buzzwords, and present imagery to readers. Shorter pieces are designed to quickly attract new readers.

On the other hand, long-form content goes into great depth on a given topic. This form of writing requires critical thinking skills and isn’t skimmed. It typically includes a lot of research as well.

White papers and reports are other examples of long-form content.

Is It Better To Write Short or Long?

This is a question we get all of the time. The truth is there’s a place for both types of writing in your SEO strategy. Both serve a different purpose and both are effective when done right.

It depends on your goals and how much time you have each week to write.

As we said above, short-form is generally to attract visitors and long-form is to educate them. The subject matter is a big factor as well. Some topics are simply better long-form.

Most SEO experts would recommend having a mix of both. Short-form should outnumber your long-form content, but whatever you post over 1,000 words needs to be in-depth and authoritative to move the needle for your SEO.

Pros of Writing Short

Internet users are more likely to stop and read a shorter piece of writing. Everyone’s lives are so busy and the average time spent on any website is only 10 seconds or less. Something short is more likely to grab their attention.

Research has also shown that shorter content is more likely to be shared across social media. This includes infographics or memes.

Businesses need to post to their blogs consistently if they hope to maintain good rankings. From a logistical standpoint, it’s much easier to post several short-form blogs each week versus in-depth pieces.

The two negatives of short-form content include not making a significant impression on your reader and not ranking for as many keywords.

Pros of Writing Long

Writing long-form content is an investment for everyone involved. You as the business need to invest time and energy into a well-researched blog and the reader needs to devote their time to finish it.

SEO studies have shown that the Google algorithm tends to favor lengthy content, especially when it satisfies the elements of E-A-T. Are there any other reasons for this?

Long-form content ranks for more keywords and is more likely to be linked by another site (especially if it’s authoritative).

Posting long-form content is a great way to stand out over other businesses posting blogs of 300, 400, or 500 words. They can also better serve a niche audience who already possesses a certain level of expertise on the topic.

The biggest challenges to long-form content are short attention spans online and ensuring that what’s written is high-quality. You may have to hire a professional to write it.

How To Write Killer Long-Form Content

If you’re intent on posting long-form content to your blog, here are some tips to ensuring it’s high-quality:

1. Understand your audience and what they’re interested in reading
2. Use a narrative arc for your non-fiction writing to ensure there’s a sense of satisfaction at the end
3. Do a lot of research before you write and cite as many specific details as possible
4. Break up large chunks of text with headings, sub-headings, images, or graphics
5. Don’t forget to proofread your content and fact check if you think it’s necessary
6. Anticipate what users need so they are more likely to share your blog or link back to your site

This sounds easier said than done, but you want to produce high-quality content to outlast the algorithm.

It may take time to determine exactly what your audience wants but it’s well worth it when you’re able to answer their questions or concerns in strategically placed content.

Optimizing Long-Form Content for SEO

The last section of this article will cover how to optimize your content once it’s ready to be published.

Completing your on-page SEO is just as important as writing high-quality content. These elements are also part of the Google ranking system.

Before creating any content, it’s a good idea to establish your goal. Are you simply looking to educate readers about a complex topic, get more subscribers to your email list, or create something to be shared on Facebook?

You should also conduct keyword research before drafting blogs. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner or other paid services like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Compile as many keywords as possible and include long-tail keywords.

Write a compelling headline using the HOTH’s Blog Topic Generator. Even better, find a way to incorporate your brand or product name into the headline.

Once you start writing the content, use sub-headings like H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. Add alt-text to any images or graphics you include on the page.

This is a step some websites may skip, but fill out your metadata. Yoast SEO is a helpful plug-in for making sure it’s the right length and format.

Most importantly, make it very easy for readers to share.

Conclusion

We hope you’ve learned a lot about the differences between short-form vs. long-form content. An effective content strategy will include both.

Even more important than length is content quality. Whatever you post to your site should be well-researched and professionally written.

The problem is so many online businesses don’t have the time to write this kind of content and they don’t have a writer on staff. That’s why one of our most popular products is HOTH Blogger.

Our clients can easily order professionally written, SEO-optimized blogs ranging from 500 to 2,000 words. We even work with companies to publish the content for them.

Book a meeting with us if you’re interested in learning more about this product.

The post Short-Form vs. Long-Form Content: Which Should I Use? appeared first on The HOTH.