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Your Quick Guide to Winning Blog Posts

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Guest Post by Josh Wardini, Editorial Contributor and Community Manager at TechPriceCrunch

According to Tech Price Crunch, there are more than 600 million blogs globally. Competing in such a saturated market is difficult, but not impossible.

In this post, we’ll look at quick tips to get you started.

Understand What Your Audience Wants

When you decide to create a post, you may spend some time thinking about what your topic will be. That’s mistake number one. Instead, shift your thinking to what your readers might want you to cover.

What issues are they dealing with? What concerns have they raised? Are there pain points that your content may help them solve.

Starting each post with a reader-centric mindset allows you to create useful content. It sets you up as an expert resource for your visitors.

Choose the Right Form of Content

Writing out a quick blog post is simple enough. If you’ve got 15 minutes to spare, you can quickly type out a 300- or 400-words. That’s a worthy goal, as long as it’s what your visitors want.

An audience of young executives with little time to spare will love the quick bites of information. Readers with more time on their hands might prefer something with a bit more depth to it. Also, consider changing up the content between short-form, long-form, and video.

Create Stellar Content

The golden rule for standing out is to create content that stands out. Your content must be flawless to impress visitors. Make sure that written articles are:

  • Well-written
  • Adequately spaced out so as not to look cluttered
  • Interesting
  • Relevant to your target audience

If you’re using video content, make sure that it’s of good quality.

Final Notes

Create content that you’re proud to put your name to. Search engines are no longer fooled by key-word stuffed mediocre work. The algorithms look for signs that your content is useful to audiences. The best way to convince search engines is to provide valuable content for your visitors.

About the Author

Josh Wardini, is the Editorial Contributor and Community Manager at TechPriceCrunch. With a preliminary background in communication and expertise in community development, Josh works day-to-day to reshape the human resource management of digitally based companies. When his focus trails outside of community engagement, Josh enjoys the indulgences of writing amidst the nature conservations of Portland, Oregon.

Benefits of SEO to Businesses

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Guest Post by Josh Wardini, Community Manager

SEO or search engine optimization is the process by which a business can optimize its website’s content to make it rank higher on search engines like Bing and Google. It goes without saying that most search engine traffic goes through Google (75%). Incorporating SEO practices can lead to the overall success of your website, helping you have the edge over your direct competitors.

In today’s competitive market, SEO has gained traction as one of the essential marketing strategies ever. It can increase your brand visibility, and provide you with free traffic from search engines, among many other things. Also, it improves the usability of the website, as well as the user experience.

Here are a couple of other advantages of incorporating SEO practices into your content marketing strategy.

Impressive ROI

SEO has proven to be more profitable than most other marketing methods one can employ. Still, do not set unrealistic expectations for yourself. That is because SEO might take six to twelve months and, in some cases, even more to show any results. If you have a dedicated budget that can only keep you going for only a few months, such a strategy is unlikely to yield any results. It is equivalent to throwing money out of the window. If 40% of revenue is generated from organic traffic, you can only imagine how much traffic you can drive to your website if you are diligent in optimizing your content.

On a long-term basis, it has been shown that it is a better investment than pay-per-click advertising (PPC). It brings in about 15 times more clicks than PPC campaigns. Also, it is approximately 5.66 times better than paid search. Although calculating ROI is not so straightforward, you can use analytics to set your short-term and long-term goals.

Quantifiability

This is one of the biggest perks of SEO. It provides you with a lot of data you can use to evaluate your progress. The only drawback is that it might be a bit tricky to single out relevant information. However, you will quickly get the hang of it. You can utilize different tools that can help you collect data, such as Google Search Console. It gives you detailed information about your website’s performance and allows you to check indexability status.

Google Analytics is another important data analytics tool. It provides you with information about your audience, sources of your website’s traffic, and your website visitors’ behavior.

Conclusion

SEO has proven to be an essential part of any marketing campaign. It is therefore fitting that businesses, no matter how big or small, are incorporating it into their marketing strategies. Compared to other paid search marketing tactics, SEO is cheaper and more effective in the long run.

It attracts more customers to your website. It also provides insights into your leads and their behavior. Optimization of your websites’ content helps you understand your customer’s behavior and buying habits to help you improve user experience.

Is Your Business Ready For Local Search?

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Guest Post by Josh Wardini, Community Manager

The world of SEO is undergoing some fundamental changes. For starters, recent years have seen a global shift to the internet use on mobile devices. Forecasts for this year and beyond only anticipate mobile trends to exponentially rise due to a number of factors.

Aside from mobile devices becoming increasingly available, virtual assistants like Siri and Google Assistant are getting smarter.

Plus, it’s hard not to get accustomed to the level of convenience that voice technology provides. Brands are continuing to develop everything from Alexa powered refrigerators to smart speakers with visual capabilities.

All of these combined have made it easier for people to rely on search engines for finding everything from how-tos to the restaurant with the best tapas nearby. And consumers are certainly making use of local search, with over 70% heading straight to a store once they’ve found the information they need.

Leveraging the Power of Local SEO

According to the research team at Serpwatch, almost a third of searches that happen on mobile are location-based. That’s a huge market share your business is missing out on if you fall behind on adapting your strategies.

This checklist will help ensure that you don’t. Read on for the fundamentals that’ll get you local-search ready.

Optimize for Mobile

A lot of local search happens on the go. So it’s crucial that your business is mobile ready too. Ensure that your website is properly adapted to smartphone views.

The same goes for your content. Structure articles in a way that makes information easy to digest. Keep in mind that users view videos on their phones mostly in portrait mode and use buttons with touch navigation. Invest in providing tailor-fitted online experience through responsive design.

Optimize for Voice

Your site might be optimized for SEO, but that’s no longer enough. Voice search queries are more conversational. You’ll have to tweak your strategies to include long-tail keywords. These are short phrases that more closely replicate natural speech. Instead of “carrot cake recipe,” the voice search equivalent would be more like “how do I bake a carrot cake?”

In that same vein, digestible content that’s neatly structured tends to show up more in voice search results. Loading time is another key aspect in voice search, with results loading much faster than desktop ones.

Clean up your Business Listings

Businesses fail when they overlook their listings. Various reports have found that not only do users search locally, they often act on the information they find. They’ll call the business number or even walk on over to the physical address.

Now, just imagine how it affects their perception of a brand when the information turns out to be incorrect. As it turns out, many industries fail on this particular point, from consumer protection companies to business attorneys, so make sure to exclude yourself by updating your company information.

Consider Signing up For Google Guarantee

As consumers, we love guarantees. Google leverages this in the Google Guarantee program. It offers a $2,000 coverage for “Guaranteed” businesses so that dissatisfied customers can always get their money back.

Imagine being on the business side of this deal. Not only does Google’s extra seal of approval add an “oomph” to your advertising, and the coverage makes hiring your company practically irresistible to customers.

Because Google is effectively staking its reputation on a business, getting that nifty green shield can be a trying process. It involves the business undergoing security checks, and not just online digital scan of some kind.

The inspection is on-site and includes social security number and criminal history checks. It extends to any employees that’ll potentially interact with customers. Once you pass inspection though, it’s worth it.

For starters, advertising through the program is charged on a per-lead basis – much cheaper than going through normal PPC ads.