It would go against everything you learned about writing in school, wouldn’t it? 

You learned about using a hook, literary devices that improved the flavor of the writing, and being creative with the structure of writing, to attract and engage readers. 

But if we practice these things consistently, even if we don’t always use the same devices or vocabulary, isn’t that a practice in scientific repeatability? 

The point is, there is a science to blogging. You can call it creative writing if you want, but there’s a method to this. 

Let’s break it down to the details. 

“Teach Me How to Blog”

To talk about the science of blogging, we need to cover a few basic principles that are necessary to build and then subsequently run a successful blog. Here are some of the most important maxims relevant to blogging. 

Know Thyself and Thy Subject 

Before you can decide on the type of blog you want to run, you need to know your own strengths. 

For instance, don’t plan on writing a killer blog teaching people how to play music if you can’t do so yourself. Don’t expect to pass as a proficient collector of military history if you lack experience and education in that sphere, either. 

The best approach is a natural approach. Don’t see dollar signs and let that drive your decision making. Many markets can be lucrative but that doesn’t mean you have the experience to capitalize on them. That’s just the cold hard truth. Blogging requires experience and demonstrable proficiency. 

So to keep this as basic as possible, pick something you know a lot about. Something you can write about, and lend opinions on, in such a manner that you feel comfortable doing so. 

Know Thine Audience 

The good thing about blogging is there are no hard rules. The bad thing about blogging is there are no hard rules. 

If you want to write about digital marketing one day and fashion trends the next, no one is going to stop you.

But you will confuse search engines, you will likely confuse readers, and you will most likely not cultivate a strong brand.

The thing is, you need not only to be aware of, but respectful of, what your audience wants to read. If you get started writing op-eds on current events and pivot to recipes, you’re going to lose readers. 

Therefore you need to be sensitive to the tastes, preferences and even prejudices of your readers and honor them accordingly. Rebranding may be possible but it will cost you. 

One other aspect of knowing your audience is being aware of opportunities for material.

Say you run a cooking blog.  Maybe for the most part your readers will want recipes, but every now and then there might be an opportunity for an informative piece on the history of a specific dish or ingredient. 

Or perhaps, you can exercise some flexibility and publish about cocktails every now and again. 

My point is there’s always opportunity. While you’ll want to be consistent with the material you cover, recognize that there are always different angles you can take, and one single idea or topic can yield countless actual blog posts.

Consistency Is Key 

If you launch a domain and start a blog website and after creating the website only publish once per month, don’t expect to get anywhere, at least not fast. 

Consistency is one of the most important aspects of blogging, and if you plan to grow through social media marketing or an email list (not through SEO) you really need to give readers something to work with. 

A good rule of thumb is to publish once per week at a bare minimum. It’s better to publish twice to three times per week, and some hardcore bloggers do so every single day. 

That’s a big ask, to be fair, but if you expect growth, you need to keep readers interested. 

Of course if your goal is slow growth through evergreen copy and SEO, you can disregard the urgency to publish frequency – with the caveat that it is still better to publish frequently than to be inconsistent about the whole affair.

Data and Reference 

While it is the case that original information performs well on the internet because it is an inherent authority unto itself (if what you’re writing original, you are the source; there’s nothing else for you to cite) in all other cases, making references and including links can be a good thing, not a bad thing. 

There are some SEO experts that would tell you to eschew external links but I am not one of them. Yes, it is true that outbound links transfer authority away from your website, but this only hurts your website if you’re linking away for information that is contained in your post. 

If your outbound link only corroborates a claim you make or a figure, then the link will actually validate your extrapolation or interpretation of that data. So, ultimately, if you can corroborate what you publish with data, links to, or references of other publications, that will increase your credibility rather than harming your efforts. 

The Science of SEO

For what it’s worth, there’s a little science to SEO, too. In this respect, what I’m referencing is how to format and structure the post for best results in the search engine, or, if your post is lucky, as a part of the search generative experience (SGE). 

I’ve posted about this numerous times and it’s information that’s also readily available on the internet, so I won’t burn too much space with it here. To be as brief as possible: 

• Include the main target keywords for which you want the post to rank in the title of the post. 

• Include main target keywords in your headers as necessary.

• Try to answer questions in the headers. 

• Write using concise, short, pointed sentences where possible. 

• Write your own meta descriptions.

• Enrich images with alt text and captions that answer queries and contain target keywords. 

• Compress images so they don’t slow the post down.

• Bullet digestible information as and where possible.

This is a very high level view of how to “do SEO.” For a more detailed breakdown, see my recent post, How to Structure a Blog Post for Best SEO Results. 

A Picture Tells a Thousand Words

High-quality imagery is also a must for successful blogs, and this couldn’t be about the science of blogging without addressing some aspect of the visual component of blogs. 

Here’s the deal. Your blog posts may derive the vast bulk of their value from your written word, but for better or worse, blogs are not just all about language. They are also about visuals. 

 My best advice for you is to take your own photography and make it relevant to the post. That ensures originality and you can optimize the images you like. Also, compress them before uploading to avoid slowing down your website. 

I’ve read (and heard it said) that stock photography can be used to run a successful blog, and that may be true, but my personal experience is that original images perform better, and also see a better chance of ranking independently in the “Google Image” search. 

Now, if you can’t take your own pictures, and aren’t willing to use stock photography, consider using an image generator. There are plenty of AI models out there that will do so and can make (somewhat) serviceable images for your blogs. That route is likely better than using stock photography.

The Proverbial Hook 

There’s one thing that pretty much all successful posts share in common. They attract, and then ensnare, attention.

In school, you may have learned this as a “hook” that writers use to attract attention and hold onto it. It could be an enticing opening line or a bit of bait in the first paragraph of a post that makes readers want to continue. 

It doesn’t have to be your first line, but it does need to be initial. In fact, it could be your title. You’ve heard titles called “clickbait.” Well, a good title won’t just command a click, it will deliver on the bait that it used to attract attention in the first place. 

But my point is this: good writing uses flavor and intrigue to keep readers engaged, and it starts with the strong opening salvo, whether it’s the opening line or the title. You can’t expect readers to stick around if you can’t even get their attention from the start. 

The Seasoning of Science Blogging

Now, once you’re into the meat and potatoes of your post, as we are here, it is important to remember that good writing is less often than not, formulaic. 

There is a time and place for technical writing and it is not usually blogging. Blogging can be scientific but the self-defeating realization of that is that “the science of blogging” often entails very precisely honed artistic acumen. 

My point? Use literary devices to add sweetness and savor to your diction. Personify your words till they loom larger than life. Don’t be afraid to let loose with the metaphors (similes?) till your writing seethes with motion like a boiling sea. Practice prideful pronunciation, proliferation, promulgation and proponency of your consonance. Let the liquor of language wet your lust for knowledge like the sweet nectar of revelation. Engage metonym and allusion and hyperbole and synecdoche and euphemism and juxtaposition and…polysyndeton. 

Have fun with it. There may be a “science of blogging” but it doesn’t have to be boring. 

Maybe Science Blogging Is More Art Than Science 

All in all, these are the rules according to the “science of blogging.” Know your audience, know your subject, know your own strengths as a writer, follow a few SEO best practices, and have fun writing. That’s basically what it boils down to – and remember, sometimes, science is more art than science. 

The post The Science of Blogging appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

The long and short of it is this: quality content will rank in time and generate views, whereas a thin, watery post that is structured according to SEO maxims will ultimately fall off the map. 

But a post that has good information and is structured properly? That is a thing of beauty. 

So if you got here looking for how to structure a blog post for best SEO results, here’s your primer. 

The Title 

While lots of ranking factors are important, if I had to assign a single most important one, I might say the blog title. 

This title is your one prime opportunity to let Google and search engines know exactly and succinctly what the purpose of the blog is. 

Shorter and to the point is better for SEO and probably for UX, too, so state your blog’s purpose as briefly and directly as you can.

If you have a target keyword in mind, include a perfect match of that in the title. If not, just be as concise as possible. 

Refer to the title of this post for inspiration. I took no poetic license. It won’t win me a Pulitzer Prize but “How to Structure a Blog Post for Best SEO Results” definitely sets a high bar for “what is this blog going to tell me about,” and there’s no arguing there. 

It just so happens that the title is a chance to get readers’ attention and vie for clicks, too, so keep that in mind. 

The Page Subsections 

Once you have a title squared away, try to break up your blog post according to digestible sections that are relevant to the subject matter, sort of like I’ve done here. 

You see, if you want to know how to structure a blog post for best SEO results, some things you’ll have to know how to do are how to optimize the title, page subsections, meta data, and a few other things. 

Now scroll through this post and see what my page subheaders are. See what I did there? You need to do the same thing. Break it out into steps if you can, and make each step its own subsection if you’re doing a how-to. 

One more thing: use header tags, and add them in manually if your page editor won’t do it for you. I mean <h2> and <h3> tags. Google scrapes pages looking for these as it indexes a page because it looks at the header tags for context relevant to the page. 

To Bullet or Not to Bullet 

Not every piece of content in the world lends itself to “bulletization,” and that’s just a fact. News articles, for instance, don’t generally yield good bullets. 

But a post like this? I could bullet the information in here. Let’s give it a go. Here’s the bulleted information for how to structure a blog post for best SEO results:

• Optimize your blog post title with exact match keywords

• Use H2 tags in your headers 

• Bullet information where possible

• Compress images and optimize with alt data

• Add keywords into your URL slug if possible when creating the page 

• Add a meta description for the blog after you write it 

• Add internal links from existing pages to the new post to boost authority 

• Answer as many user queries as possible, if they are relevant to the post subject matter 

Well, the proof is in the pudding there. This just happens to be a topic that can be summarized well through bullets, so it worked for me. It may for you, depending on what you’re writing about. 

Another thing: to a computer, bullets are code, and Google’s algorithm “understands” that bullets are used to concisely convey information. There’s a good chance that bulleted information increases the likelihood that your post will get a featured snippet, show up in the Google AI Overview, or in other search features. 

Image Optimization

Image optimization is another important area of blog structure that will impact performance, though it will mainly impact the post’s rankings in the “Image” section of the search results. 

This is something I covered fully in a recent post, “How to Get Images to Rank (Image Optimization Guide)”. Ultimately, it comes down to compressing images to increase page load speeds, and then adding alt text – plus a few other small things. 

Check that previous post for an easy to follow, step-by-step guide on getting images to rank, as this will impact SEO results. 

URL Optimization 

In my personal experience, this is probably the ranking factor with the most insignificant amount of pull when it comes to how to structure a blog post for best SEO results. Nonetheless, it is technically a ranking factor, so it behooves me to say a word or two on it.

For my own purposes, I generally just title blogs so that the URL slug is whatever the blog post title is. If your post title is optimized, your URL slug will then automatically be optimized, too, especially if you’re using WordPress. 

If your editor lets you make granular adjustments to the page URL slug, make sure you customize them before the page goes live, because if you change the URL slug ex post facto, then anywhere there’s a link on the web to that post, you just created a 404 on your website – and that is not good for SEO.

Meta Descriptions 

Meta descriptions, like URL slugs, are not a huge deal, and Google will automatically generate them from the text on the page if you haven’t specifically written and assigned one.

With that said, meta descriptions are a small ranking signal and they can affect click-through rates, so it’s in your best interest to write your own, include any keywords for which you want the page to rank, and say something to entice any viewers to click and read. 

A Note on Internal Linking

You may have heard it said 1000 times that links are important for SEO. Well, it’s true, and if you’re looking for how to structure a blog post for SEO results I have a hack that can help get your new post to show up in the search engine results pages faster than it would have otherwise. 

If you’re posting on a domain where you have editor access, and other posts you’ve already published, include a link from one of your posts that’s already ranking, so that it sends traffic to this new page. 

A link from an old performer to a new post tells search engines like Google that a “respectable” piece of content views a “new” piece of content as an authority, and may get it to show up higher in the SERPs than it would without the link. No need to thank me!

The Use of Bolding

Way back when (like 6 years ago, an eternity in digital marketing) when Google’s algorithm was a much simpler thing, SEO experts used to bold keywords and important search terms in their copy. 

Google would see that bold tag, go straight to that phrase, and then see that the keyword was embedded in it. That was like a double whammy (in a good way) and Google would be like “Wow, this page is really an authority on this keyword, better put it right at the top of the SERPs.”

Over time, this practice has fallen off as SEO “experts” have increasingly relied on this tactic to get copy to rank, which has resulted in a net increase of nonsense on the internet. And now, today, bolding doesn’t really matter as much as it used to. 

But it doesn’t hurt, either. What I did there was bold a piece of important information that, even though it doesn’t contain any important target keywords, is relevant to the query posed by this section. 

You may also notice that I bolded my bullets, above. It adds a little bit of emphasis, which doesn’t hurt and might help. It certainly affects the user experience, and arrests attention, and since time on page is officially a ranking signal, getting users to stop and stare doesn’t hurt me, it does help. 

So the takeaway here is that bolding keywords can’t be relied on as a strategy in its own right to get a piece of content to rank, but using bolding sparingly to emphasize important nuggets of information can be beneficial to blog structure. Notice that part is also bolded. So take that for what it’s worth. 

Large Paragraphs or Single Sentences?

A debate has been raging in SEO central since time immemorial: is it better to write walls of text or publish really short, one-sentence “paragraphs.” 

Honestly, it really depends. 

If you’re writing a study and publishing it to a scientific journal, you definitely want to follow accepted guidelines that generally dictate that one paragraph should propose and answer a single, small thesis. You can’t do that in one sentence. 

At the same time, we are writing for people to read what we publish. Most readers have short attention spans and skim, rather than read, entirely articles. 

It is this latter part that makes “short and sweet” paragraph structure appealing to search engines. 

Really, consider your audience. If you’re writing a recipe or a fashion listicle, keep it short. If you’re submitting to an accredited news organization or a medical journal, follow MLA or APA guidelines for paragraph structure, or whichever else applies to your publisher. 

Long or Short?

Another serious debate in the world of SEO has been whether or not long, exhaustive articles, or short nuggets of information were better. 

The answer is yes. 

I mean to say, they’re both excellent. What matters here is search intent. 

If a user looks up a post on “how to tie shoelaces” a 500-word post with pictures and captions is likely going to outperform a 10,000 word behemoth of an article that not only covers how to tie laces but also every different pattern and profile of boot and shoe. 

On the flipside, if you look up a “guide to the different styles of dress shoes” you’re probably going to get a lot of long posts in the search results. 

Again, it’s all about what people are looking for. There are some short posts that rank very well, and also many long ones. The only right answer here is this: think about the information relevant to your target audience, cover it thoroughly, and be done. 

If that requires 400 words, that’s all you need, seriously. But if you end up with a 7,000 word banger, that’s also good, as long as there’s no fluff. 

Blogs (or Other Content Creation) as an Immutable Component of Effective SEO

At the end of the day, if I had to give suggestions this granular for technical SEO, I’d pull my hair out. That’s only partly because I’m a copywriter. The main reason is that content is the definitive pillar of SEO. 

I can say confidently, and without exaggeration, that I’ve seen websites with a domain authority of zero hit page one with optimized content alone – without any technical SEO, without any backlink strategy, and without any keyword research. 

That is how important content is, and why it’s so important to understand what you need to do in order to get a blog (or other page) to rank organically. If you can, everything else related to search engine optimization will fall into place.

The post How to Structure a Blog Post for Best SEO Results appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

While this particular client is not laboring under the restrictions of some of our other clients that cannot leverage paid search or social marketing to their advantage, there were unique hurdles to clear here. 

Here’s how we did it and what the aftereffects were. 

The Client and Industry

This client is one that specializes in selling high-end, luxury fashion items – notably, dresses to be used for memorable occasions like high school homecoming, cotillion, and promenade dances. 

They are expensive, unique, and subject to the whims and vagaries of the fashion market. What’s popular one season might experience an even more meteoric rise the next – or it might fall out of common parlance like a byword. 

While there might be plenty of search volume associated with a particular keyword or fashion trend, what’s in this month might be wiped off the map next – which presents unique challenges for eCommerce SEO.

The thing about SEO is that it usually takes a long time, a year or more, to start generating appreciable results. The problem there is how to identify keywords and search terms that will be popular – or are more likely to be popular – in a year’s time?

That is – how do we find the evergreen keywords? In an industry like this, there are precious few. 

Despite the lack of technical challenges in this industry, the unique circumstances surrounding the industry made it particularly difficult to settle on a coherent fashion SEO strategy. 

The two keys to success here were keyword research and the copy.

Special Considerations 

The strategy we ultimately settled on was one that was custom tailored for this client and its unique considerations. 

Namely, we bifurcated our strategy to create two main larger groups of target keywords. One large group consisted of high-volume, short-tail keywords that should in theory be evergreen – even in the fashion industry. 

The other was much more closely targeted and aligned with specific fashion trends and even fads. This approach enabled us to create a unique cultivated approach that would leverage the long-term benefits of SEO in multiple ways, despite the inherent risks associated with shifting consumer preferences. 

Here’s why. 

The one cohort of search terms and keywords was sufficiently broad that, even if and when trends shift, it will still bring them visibility for those general clusters, expressly because of their nonspecificity. 

For instance – take the keywords “prom dresses” and “evening gowns.” These two keywords are non-targeted according to trend, only according to event. This enabled us to build authority for this client for those event-related keywords without getting too specific. 

They’re also general enough that they offer us the flexibility to use those keywords in much more specific pieces that actually do follow the current trends. 

Presumably, “prom dresses” and “evening gowns” will still be in demand in five or even ten years, even when the trends shift – and this approach has enabled us to position this client with perfect precision. 

The other prong of this strategy was one that focused on much more targeted search terms – like “red prom dresses” and “Cinderella prom dresses.” It’s a lot riskier and the volume associated with these keywords could shift dramatically from month to month, but it’s a winning approach nonetheless. 

Let’s say we hit the mark and red prom dresses are popular this year (or next year). By leveraging content focusing on those keywords, the client will be perfectly positioned, and get the visibility and traffic right when they need it. 

Now let’s say that keyword flops this year and for the next few. At some point, red prom dresses will be back in – and at that point, the client will have all the authority they need, plus historical content, to compete for it.

So it’s basically a win-win, even though it’s a very long-term strategy that isn’t guaranteed to bear fruit in the short term. Either way, it worked, as substantiated by increases in organic metrics. 

The Role of Targeted and Optimized Content 

Secondary to the bifurcated keyword strategy aforementioned was the role of high-quality, engaging content in this campaign. 

Our copywriters had to take some time to get familiar with the client’s vertical and then compare notes with the copy being published by other industry competitors, especially those with high organic rankings for the desired target keywords.

From there they could back-form a content strategy that would outperform the best work of their competitors, outpacing their visibility in the search engines. 

Without giving away any secrets about the topics and trends they covered in the content stream for this campaign, suffice it to say that standard “SEO” copy would not cut it. 

This copy had to be more akin to content marketing copy that was specifically optimized not only for the user experience but also according to SEO best practices. 

Addressing popular trends in prom styles and fashion, as well as trends in dress design, as they became ascendant, was the only way to generate authority, and therefore visibility, for this client. 

Which is precisely what our copywriters did – and in time, the results showed. 

The Results 

Probably the best indicator of success for this client has been the positive movements in some of their target keywords, as you can see below. 

Many of their target keywords, as you can see, are in the page one, spot one position, which is largely the cumulative result over the better part of the last two years.

Google Search Console also tells a compelling tale. While we can’t see back all the way to the beginning of the campaign (GSC only lets you look back 16 months), you can see that there has been positive growth in both impressions and clicks over that time period, particularly in the latter few months. 

This is even more considerable when you weigh the reason for it; this is a seasonal spike directly associated with the prom-related keywords we’ve made targets for this campaign. The spike is not aberrant; it is by design. 

All of this is to suggest that, in a word, our industry-specific fashion SEO services are highly effective when paired with a unique strategy that is tailored to meet the needs of the client in question.

Industry-Focused SEO Services That Perform 

These are the sorts of results that data-driven, strategic eCommerce SEO services deliver for clients, even though in extremely competitive industries. If you’re operating in the fashion industry and are wondering how SEO services can benefit your business, get in touch with our SEO experts for more information. 

The post Fashion SEO and Organic Successes: A Case Study appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

But mostly, I’ve learned about copywriting; what works and what doesn’t work, and how to get my work to perform. The vast, overwhelming majority of my work gets posted to websites with low domain authority scores that don’t focus on the UX afforded by the blogs. 

Which means the work rests squarely on me to generate traffic for those blogs. I need to find the keywords, search terms, and topics that are associated with genuine interest, convince Google to index and rank those posts favorably, and then, to get a live reader to click on my result and actually read the post. 

Sometimes it flops. And sometimes I write a post so good it gets thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of views per month. 

Here’s just about every little thing – call them copywriting hacks, if you will – that I’ve learned about how to get content to rank and get readers to show interest in my writing. 

Forget What You’ve Heard About AI 

AI is increasingly being leveraged by digital marketers, as well as by mediocre copywriters, because it is allegedly a panacea for all of creation’s woes. 

It is not. Granted, I have used and benefited from AI in the past but I have still not encountered a model that is effective at drafting copy that will perform. 

What AI does well is formatting; you can ask it to structure a blog and it will knock it out of the park. What it fails to do is get the information right. 

The problem, so far as I can see it, has nothing to do with “tone,” or “warmth,” although those are things commonly cited as issues with AI. Quite the contrary, large language models are becoming increasingly and convincingly realistic.

The issue is that it hallucinates. I’ve asked AI some pretty basic questions and been downright alarmed at how factually inaccurate the outputs have been. 

When we’re talking in generalities, this is not a big deal notwithstanding the fact that increased reliance on the outputs of AI models is probably going to bring down the collective intelligence of our species – but once we get to specifics, the issue is much broader, and much more serious. 

See, the majority of writing I do, I do for clients in the outdoor sphere. I have to furnish real information about shooting and fishing and outdoor sports in general. I simply can’t use AI for these things because (for whatever reason) it doesn’t give me accurate answers. 

I tell you the same thing. If you want your copywriting to rise above the rest of the average results in the search engine pages, write it yourself, the old fashioned way. 

Here, let’s put it this way. If you’re reading this post because you found it in the search engine results pages, that should substantiate my cautions against AI. 

I did not use AI at all for this post; not for keyword research, not for formatting, and certainly not for generative copy. 

Yet you, dear reader, found me in the search results and presumably are reading anyway. If that is not proof of my claim, I can say no more. 

The Value of Specificity  

Suppose you want to write a blog about – copywriting hacks. 

You need to give specific, actionable advice. Don’t speak in platitudes or generalities. You want to avoid telling people things they either already know in the backs of their minds or could figure out through minimal deduction. 

For instance, I’m not here to tell you that your copy needs to be personable and should be free of grammatical errors. Perhaps you weren’t actively thinking about that but even a little bit of cogitation would have brought you to that conclusion, with no help from me or anyone, else for that matter.

Taking this a step further, you need to actually write about something people need to know about and then tell them something they don’t know. 

So, for instance, let’s just say you wanted to teach your readers how to…clean a pair of leather boots. We’ll keep this in my wheelhouse since I specialize in writing about outdoor sports. 

I could tell you to brush your boots off and store them somewhere clean and dry. That’s true but it’s also kind of common sense. That means it’s probably going to be in every other article on the same topics. 

But, did you know that you should unlace your boots and meticulously clean out the tongue, where debris can hide? 

Did you know that if your boots are wet you should never place them next to a heat source like a furnace or a fire, which will dry the leather out too aggressively, and which can cause it to crack? 

Did you know that leather periodically needs not just to be cleaned, but conditioned with an oil like neatsfoot, which fills the leather’s pores, driving out water and keeping the leather fibers supple, so they don’t warp or crack? 

And did you know that compound neatsfoot oil should be avoided because it can be damaging not to the leather, but to the threads that hold the whole boot together? 

I could go on but I think you get my point. Whatever you’re writing about, make sure you are specific and carefully detail your observations. The more thorough you are in your exposition and explanation, the better your copy will perform organically, in the wilds of the internet. 

Understand Your Audience 

I won’t harp on this one too much because it’s a generality and I told you to avoid those. I will say a few words however since it is important to know your audience even though that’s sort of common sense. 

It’s often been said that an “SEO copywriter” can write about any industry, without any specific expertise. 

That is, lamentably, and categorically, true. I can write about theoretical physics or ballet, and I can structure that article according to best-practices for content marketing or SEO. What I can’t do is pass convincingly as though I know what I’m talking about – even if my research is good. 

Let me see if I can find an example. Take the following post on fly fishing basics. Here is an excerpt from this:

“These flies can be found in any specialty store in thousands of models. Knowing the right one to buy is related to the fish you are trying to catch and the type of water you are fishing.”

There are a few issues with this. One is that the writer calls fly patterns “models.” Anyone that knows a 3 weight from 5 weight will know that that terminology is staccato and, while not technically wrong, jarringly off-putting. 

Digging further, we have:

“Fishing freshwater fly requires you standing in the water, mostly in waders casting your rod in a way that imitates a dancing fly on the surface of the water.”

I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a worse, though technically not inaccurate, categorization of fly fishing. You most certainly do not need to wade in order to fly fish, and in some instances, it might be advisable not to do so – for instance, if you want to avoid spooking wary or skittish fish. 

Secondly, the manner of your casting, and the techniques you employ while doing so, have utterly less than nothing to do with the action of the fly once it hits the water. You cast to present (or place) the fly – what you do after is what gives the fly action. 

Anyway, I don’t want to get too deep into beating up a writer I do not know and probably never will. I’m just making a very important point that I hope you understand: if you want to understand your audience, you will need to do more than 5 minutes, or even an hour, of research. 

Here, let’s take a slightly different approach with a stock image that I found:

Look closely that image, and you’ll see that the “fisherman” in it is using a massive, conventional big game reel. Those reels are reserved for fighting the biggest and strongest of fish – sturgeon, tuna, swordfish, sharks, and species like that.

I don’t know what that guy in that image is doing on that little creek, but I know what he isn’t doing: fishing. To make matters worse, he has the reel basically inverted. It’s literally upside down. That’s the icing on the cake.

So you can see, lack of authority in a vertical doesn’t just come across in copywriting. Photographers are guilty of it too, and a photograph that doesn’t understand his or her audience will take glaringly unconvincing, even cringey, photos, like the one above.

Truth is, there is no substitute for experience, and this alone is the single best way to become a good copywriter. Know what you’re talking about; that’s how you’ll know your audience. 

Don’t Get Too Hung Up on Keywords

Let me be clear: keywords are important. They are still the single most important (and primary) way that Google determines whether to index a page and where to put it. That’s just the nature of the beast. 

But if you write something so damn good that readers find it, stay on the page, and even, dare I say, link to it, Google will get a lot more flexible with what it indexes that page for and where it places it in the rankings. 

Point is, if what you write is really good, it may eventually rank for keywords that aren’t even directly present in the article – or at the very least, which don’t appear in it as an exact match. 

Don’t get me wrong. Focusing on keywords is a good way to get started and it will help you build authority. But once you have a bunch of posts ranking on a domain, you can start to lay off the SEO-stringency a little bit. Write about what you want your readers to know about and what you know will provide interested readers with value. 

If you can do that, that post will most likely get indexed, most likely be ranked favorably, and if found, will more than likely generate positive interaction metrics like a high CTR and time on page. 

Here’s another proof-is-in-the-pudding moment. You found this post in the organic search results, right? I did no keyword research for it. Let that be a lesson.

Post Structure Matters 

Keywords don’t matter that much. Post structure does. 

What I mean, specifically, is that the way your post is laid out will have two big impacts. One is on how crawlers interact with it and thereby how it gets ranked, and the second is on actual user behavior. 

In the first instance, a post that is laid out appropriately, sectioned off with headers that break up all the relevant sections, Google and other search engines will look on it more favorably than one that is just a solid wall of text. 

Granted, a solid wall of text can still rank well, if it contains good information. But if you write in stream-of-consciousness, you will be fighting against the current. 

Secondly, breaking up your post into short, digestible sections (as I have done here) and according to subtopics, readers will find the whole thing more palatable, too. The chances are that some of them only landed on your post looking for one small specific thing you were writing about and will skip reading the whole thing just to home in on what they want and read that section. 

Breaking up your posts makes them friendly to skimmers and also makes it easier for readers to find the most relevant (or just the most interesting sections). 

Pose Questions, and Answer Them, in Headers 

On the topic of post structure, the single most important piece of actionable advice I can offer is this: take advantage of headers by making them into questions, and, where possible, answers. 

For instance, let’s say I wanted to write a post about how to get an article to show up in the search results. 

My title might be something like:

• How to get your post to rank in the search results.

It’s simple, straightforward, and structured like something someone would actually type into the Google search bar. 

Then, in that same post, I might have some of the following as subheaders: 

• Insert keywords in your H2s and H3s
• Answer common questions in the headers 
• Take questions from the people also ask section 
• Skyscrape the titles of the top 5 entries in the SERPs 

In each case, the header is offering a small bit of digestible and highly actionable information. Direct and succinct, they are all perfect in their own way. 

Know What Tools to Use for Inspiration 

You can learn from what posts are performing currently in the search engine results pages, whether you wrote them or not, to make your writing better. 

Here are a few ways to gain some inspiration:

• Look at the top several posts in the search engine results pages. Look at the title, the topic, then dive into the post and see what sorts of topics they’re covering and questions they’re answering. Use that information to fill out your post. This will increase its chances of ranking well. 
• Look at the People Also Ask section of the search results. This will show you what questions you need to answer in your post. Answer as many of these as possible to increase the chances that you show up. 
• Log into Facebook or Instagram and see what posts a company you follow has created. Consider taking the subject matter of a post that got a lot of attention on social media and reconfiguring it into a blog to increase the chances that it ranks well and gets attention. If it did well on social media there’s a good chance there’s buzz on search engines surrounding the topic. 
• Use tools like “Answer the Public” and other social listening tools that will give you some insight into the sorts of topics that are trending around search terms, as well as what questions people have. 
• Look up a keyword you want to write something about, find a forum entry that’s in the search results, and reverse engineer a long-form blog post or news article about what you see people talking about in the forum. It’s effectively guaranteed to be interesting information since people are talking about it of their own free will and volition.

These are just a few of the tools that you can use to come up with questions that you can then answer in your copy surrounding a topic cluster. 

Use Facts and Figures 

I can write an article about basically anything without including any facts or figures, but the more figures you can include, the more convincing your article will be because it will be inherently substantiated by data. Just make sure you understand the implications of the data you’re publishing because, as they say, figures lie and liars figure. 

Anywhere you can get away with including data, be sure to do so. It will benefit your writing and Google will be more likely to respect your post as an authority. 

Fall-Back on Proven Post Techniques and Formats 

Sometimes, you need to write something that you expect to perform and are just fresh out of ideas and creativity. As a copywriter I can sympathize. I pride myself on interest and proficiency but I’ve still been there. 

On those days, I just use what I know works. Here are some ideas you can put into practice that don’t take too much effort. 

• Create a list of FAQs and answer them all in sequence as thoroughly as you can. This is a proven format that offers a lot of value and has a good chance of generating a lot of visibility. 
• Create a listicle of “best of” products, practices or ideas.
• Write a how-to on some process; it could be basic and high-level or highly detailed and specific. The concept is a proven performer in both cases even though specific is usually better. 
• Write a Q&A on the topic. 
• Do a review of a specific product or technique relevant to the topic. 
• Write a checklist for people looking to get started with something relevant to the topic about which you want to write. 
• Write a high-level “Everything You Need to Know About…” type of guide. 

This is of course just a short list of ideas, but they are all low-hanging fruit and proven to work by results. 

Learn from Your Past Posts 

As a copywriter, maybe you don’t spend too much time in Google Analytics or Google Search Console. Let’s change that. 

These are arguably your two best tools as a copywriter, hands down. In them, you can see which of your posts is getting visibility, what it’s ranking for, what its average position is, and how many clicks it’s getting. 

Through Google Analytics, you can glean even more information, such as the number of sessions and how long people are spending on the page. If you write for eCommerce clients, as I do, you can even see through GA4 if the blog page has any conversion value. 

If you see that a post has no sessions and no time on page, well, little explanation is needed there. For some reason or other, it flopped. I hate to be the guy to tell you this, but you’re going to have posts like this. Don’t let it discourage you. 

On the flipside, Google Analytics will also show you which of your posts are top-performers, how people are landing on those pages, and how they’re interacting with the page once they get there. 

Filter by time on page or sessions, then see which blogs have the best user engagement metrics. Those blogs are performing for some reason or other – visit them and see what you wrote about (if you can’t remember) and then structure a new blog on a totally different topic, but using the same format or technique. 

You will find that you can write more and more effective blogs down the line by learning from which of your past entries did not perform – and which did. 

Leverage the Authority of Those Previous Posts 

Here’s a quick copywriting hack, and one that I won’t beat to death. If you have a post that is performing well and are planning on writing a post for that same domain, go into that previous post and embed a link in there to your new post once you get it posted. 

That will leverage the authority of a post that is already ranking, and ranking well, to transfer some authority to the nascent post in order to give it a leg up in the world. 

Just use this copywriting hack sparingly, because you don’t want to ruin the UX of an old but good post with a bunch of outbound links to new posts that readers might not be too interested in – yet, at least. 

Be Sparing with Outbound Links 

Last but not least, here’s one more copywriting hack – not quite a copywriting technique – to apply to your articles. 

You can use outbound links to increase the credibility of your post, but be very sparing with them, especially if you’re taking ideas from the post to which you intend to link. 

Google will see that and then will sort of see your post like a copy, even though it might not be. Therefore, use outbound links as little as possible because you want your post (not some other) to be the authority. 

By the way, this does not mean not to use outbound links. Just keep them to a minimum and use only where they will make your post better and more believable. 

Want More Copywriting Hacks from Yours Truly?

There you have some of the best copywriting hacks – if I can call them that – that I’ve learned in my time as a professional copywriter. All I can tell you is I’ve leaned on all of them at some point or other and they have definitely helped me produce copy that generates sessions, time on page, and leads for my clients. They can do the same for you. 

If you’re looking for more actionable information, check out: 

• How to Get Images to Rank
• How to Write to Get Featured in a Google AI Overview
• How Do Blogs Help SEO?
• Answering User Queries for Better SEO
• How Many Blog Posts Does It Take to Get Traffic?

Alternatively, you could get in touch with one of our SEO specialists and they may be able to help you out.

The post 12 Copywriting Hacks to Improve the Performance of Your Work appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

But since we’ve had quite a long runway to look back on now, we can see more clearly why quality content matters in SEO. 

There are lots of ways to gauge the efficacy of SEO, and in the (relatively) short term, link building and basic on-page optimizations will get the ball rolling. 

But once you’ve been at it a year or more, you really have only one option for sustained, long-term, rankings: quality content. 

Fluffy nonsense just doesn’t cut it, especially in an industry like the one served by White Mountain Knives. The greater knife community is entirely unforgiving of low-quality content and thin fluff. Frankly they have no time for it, and nothing but scorn. 

What White Mountain Knives needed to support their improved rankings and continuously growing domain authority was expert content production from a team with a seasoned, experienced writer on hand – one that knew both the outdoor industry as well as a lot about knives – ahem. 

That has been the secret to our long-term success on behalf of this client, which will be broken down here. 

The Positive Feedback Loop 

Content supports SEO in lots of different ways. The most straightforward way is that it populates a website’s pages with copy that’s keyword optimized. When optimized properly, a page or blog post can also contain internal links with telling anchor text as well as a structure with optimized headings. 

This is true for on-page copy as well as for copy on CMS pages, like blogs and other evergreen pages. 

Yet optimized copy goes much farther than the basics. A truly informative piece of evergreen content will go above and beyond simply indicating to Google that the page (or another page on the same website) is an authority not only on the keyword itself but on all relevant, related subject matter. 

For instance, news, blogs, and other articles can educate customers on new product releases, uses for existing products, maintenance protocols, how to make repairs or customizations, or just on certain skills. 

You only need to look through the blog on White Mountain Knives’ website to see that there are posts dedicated to product reviews, steel chemistry, blade profiles, knife maintenance, and other highly relevant topics. Most of these deal with specific brands to increase visibility for the keywords targeted, but others focus on more generic topics that offer insight and convey authority, benefiting the overall domain. 

In fact, after a year or two, the only way to keep SEO results going is with good, content-marketing level copy that goes far above and beyond keyword-optimization by answering important questions and providing important insight that just can’t be gotten anywhere else.

This is something I’ve written about at length before. You can learn more about it in my previous case study: SEO and Content: The Different Ways Content Is Important in SEO.

To summarize, there are tons of ways in which content supports and SEO campaign and for which there is no substitute: 

• It improves keyword density 

• It transfers authority to target URLs

• It captivates attention and engages customers 

• It can increase time on page and pages per session
• It results in greater over contextual authority for the general domain 
• It can promote items and specials, resulting in cross-selling opportunities (even blogs sometimes have page value)

So where is the proof of this? To see it in action we have to take a closer look at the growth of White Mountain Knives’ blog over the past few years. 

Blog Posts and Important Metrics 

Access to Universal Analytics is no more, so unfortunately, I can’t go in and show you this, but when we started doing SEO for White Mountain Knives, there was exactly zero traffic to their blog. Zero – none. It had monthly visits of 0.0 across the board. 

That continued through the first year, more or less, and it wasn’t until we were a few years in that results started to snowball. 

The image below shows blog traffic to White Mountain Knives’ blog over the past year and a half or so, when GA4 became accessible. 

Unfortunately, GA4 makes it hard to see growth, because the user interface is inferior to UA and shows traffic to top blogs rather than all traffic to pages categorized under the blog slug. Nonetheless, you can see that we’re way past the point of getting zero traffic to the blog. 

In fact, their blog averages close to 1000 views per month, which is quite something for an eCommerce website that really does not rely on organic blog traffic at all. That would be a low metric for a website whose sole value proposition was content, but in this case we’re trying to improve their visibility for key products and categories. Any blog traffic is just gratis, and a testament to the insight and industry experience of the writer.

The interesting thing is that it’s not just that the blog gets organic traffic. What’s really telling is the time on page. You can see that over on the side of the image above. As you can see, there are several URLs that have time-on-page metrics of over a minute, with some close to two. 

That means that people aren’t just clicking. They’re reading, and that means they’re interested and the post is answering their questions. 

The Broader Impacts in SEO 

As I stated, the main purpose here was not to drive traffic to the blog – that’s just a little bonus that’s nice to have after the fact, and which benefits both White Mountain Knives and visitors that land on those pages.

No, our goal was to drive traffic to key target URLs for specific keywords (that I won’t divulge as that’s part of our secret sauce). Nonetheless, as you can see from the still below from Google Search Console, traffic is on a general upward trend for the past 16 months. 

Again, it’s a shame I can’t show you what UA looked like from the past four years or so. It tells a much more compelling story. But this is good enough. 

There are ups and downs in all SEO campaigns but you can see the general upward trajectory. Moreover, it’s important to note that average position (though you can’t see the trend from the image above) has also been on an upward climb.

And, as a final note, I would like to draw your attention to the click through rate, which has averaged, for White Mountain Knives, almost 4 times higher than the overall eCommerce average. 

That’s something that can only be done with expert keyword targeting (and which good content also helps).

The post How Content Supports SEO: A Case Study appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

I will break down all the details in this blog, starting from the bottom up.

What Is SEO?

Let’s start with the basics. I can’t imagine you’ve gotten to this post without having at least a baseline knowledge of what SEO is, but if that is the case, here: 

• SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and is a collection of practices that, together, make a website more favorable to search engines, for specific terms. Well-optimized websites are the ones that show up at the tops of the search engine results pages when you search something. 

SEO is also, all things considered, one of the most important digital marketing channels, and even in this era of influencer marketing, probably the best in terms of ROI. 

The one drawback to SEO is that it is exceptionally resource and effort intensive, and does not work quickly. Most websites that have what marketers might call “good SEO” have been working at it for many years. 

Moreover, SEO is organized into four main pillars:

• On-page SEO: This consists of concrete adjustments you can make to ranking signals on your website, such as title tags, headers, URL slugs, metadata, internal links, and image alt text. 

• Off-page SEO: This basically consists of reputation management and link building. Where social media management is involved in SEO, it can also be considered off-page. 

• Technical SEO: Technical SEO consists of page speed, site security, site structure, and other technical facets of a website that impact the user experience, such as the usability of the sitemap, whether or not integrations have been made properly, and so on and so forth.

• And content, which is the focus of this article

All content on your website, including product and category page content, meta descriptions, CMS and FAQ page content, and other evergreen content like “About Us” page content, can all be used by search engines for the purposes of indexation and assigning rankings (unless a page is expressly barred to web crawlers by the site admin).

This, of course, includes blogs, and since blogs generally constitute the most valuable content on a given website, they represent the best opportunity to make improvements for optimization. 

How to Optimize a Blog for SEO?

Now let’s talk about how you can optimize a blog for SEO.

The first and most important thing – the only thing that really matters, at the end of the day – is if the blog answers a question that people are searching for. 

For instance, you probably got here by searching for something that has to do with how to optimize a blog for SEO, right? 

Let me tell you a secret: I did little to no keyword research before writing this post. All I did was look up (in the search results) what sorts of questions people were asking Google about blogging and SEO and answered as many as I could. 

That’s the most important thing. 

It does help, however, to go after keywords that have high search volumes and low difficulty scores. This helps your blog post get to the tops of the search results sooner. 

These are the two main things you can do to give a blog a lot of value for SEO.

Here are a few insider tips:

• Enter your target keywords in Google and see what comes up in the top 3 to 5 spots, organically (skip the ads). Take what information is in those posts and use it to augment your own.

• Look at the People Also Ask section of Google for more content ideas. 

• Reflect on what customers have asked you about your products, compile some of these and publish the answers in a blog.
• Publish information about your products, experiences, or their maintenance or upkeep that doesn’t exist elsewhere on the web. There may not be a lot of search volume in the form of queries regarding this information, but publishing information that doesn’t appear elsewhere is basically a sure-fire bet that your post will be the only one that shows up for it in the results. 

These are four solid tidbits of advice for how to construct a blog for SEO. Now let’s talk about how to optimize at the post level, in the most granular level possible. 

What Tips or Tricks Can Boost a Blog’s Value?

To be as curt as possible, I’ve already told you everything you need to know about how to get a blog to work for SEO. 

But, if we’re talking about just the actual optimizations to ranking factors themselves, here are some other things you can do: 

• Include the target keyword in the post title.

• Include the target keyword in headers and subheaders throughout the post.

• Keep keyword density to about one instance per 500 words (not necessarily including headers).

• Include the keyword in the target URL.

• Before uploading any images, compress the files (there are lots of free image file compression tools on the internet).

• Use original imagery or something user-generated. Do not take images from the manufacturer or distributor.

• Draft copy that includes the target keyword in the alt text field of the image file

• Write informative captions for any images you include in the post.

• Include internal links in your copy to claims you want to back up, or to specific products.

• Adding external links to support a claim is not a bad thing. Actually, in my experience, it can actually help a post perform. Just try to keep external links to a minimum. You can also make them no-follow links if that makes you feel better. 

• Write your own meta descriptions and use them as an opportunity to advertise the post with a hook to draw attention. 

There are other optimizations you can make, but this is by and large the bulk of them, and by a long shot. If you do everything I said to do, there’s a good chance you can generate a post that’s done to a proverbial “T” for SEO.

IMPORTANT NOTE: You can make every single one of the optimizations I recommend in this section for SEO, but if you don’t make sure to target a lucrative keyword (that has search volume and reasonable difficulty) and if you don’t answer questions, there’s no chance that your post will do well. I know this from experience.

Answer the question first, optimize with keywords and other adjustments second. 

So How Do Blogs Help SEO?

In a nutshell, if you do everything I mentioned here, your blogs will probably rank effectively in the organic search results. People will see the listings, see that the page answers questions they have, and when all goes swimmingly, they will click and read. 

Some of them may even be intrigued by your products and services and convert into paying customers. 

The more organic leads you generate, the less you need to rely on paid search marketing like PPC services, or on social media marketing, email marketing, and even influencer marketing. 

So, in a way, blogging, when done effectively, can do more for your marketing efforts than any other single initiative. 

But it’s not just that blogging helps SEO. Good copy on your website can also substantially boost the user experience (UX).

Beyond SEO, Why Is Blogging Important?

Now that you know how blogs help SEO, it’s worth expounding on how blogging is not just about bringing in organic leads. 

Blogging – if the copy is well-written, accurate, and helpful in some way or other – is central to the user experience. Remember, not everyone that lands on your website is going to become a paying customer. Some of them just want answers. 

If your blogs are good and people read them, they will spend more time on your website. This metric is important for Google to analyze the user experience. Moreover, the more you blog and the better your copy is, the more users will trust what they find on your website. 

This will position your organization as an authority in your industry, a leader with experience and expertise, not just a company that sells something. That’s huge. People buy from brands they trust. 

Moreover, developing greater brand awareness will solidify your position in your market as a competitor and make it more difficult for others to vie for your business, even with effective social media campaigns and through other paid channels. 

All in all, blogging, when done right, will improve customer engagement, and that is never a bad thing.

What Else Can You Do to Optimize Content for Organic Visibility 

As important as blogging is for SEO, it is far from the only thing you can do to improve your overall SEO performance. 

Other things you can do include: 

• Scrubbing Google Search Console for broken links and removing them.

• Make sure your category and product pages use original imagery and copy, never take from a distributor or manufacturer.

• Integrate your homepage with your social channels.

• Work with an eCommerce web developer or use a plug-in to display your reviews on your homepage as well as on your product pages.

• Include target keywords in page titles, headers, and URLs, as well as elsewhere in metadata.

• Make sure your sitemap is updated regularly and submitted.

• Install and configure an SSL.

• Make sure your website’s pages load quickly (you can check performance on PageSpeed Insights or work with a developer to correct some of these issues).

• Include internal links on your website for cross-selling and upselling opportunities. 

This is, however, just a short list of items you can knock out to help boost your website’s overall performance for SEO. I’m not going to get too far into the weeds because I want to keep on the topic of blogging and SEO specifically. 

How Long Does a Blog Need to Be for SEO Purposes?

This is actually something I’ve personally addressed before, and at length. For the full breakdown, please see my previous post, “SEO Content Strategy: Is Longer Always Better?”

To keep things short and respectful of your time, the answer is no. Forget what you’ve read elsewhere. Longer is not always better. 

Here’s the truth: a post only needs to be as long as it has to in order to fully answer all aspects of the question it seeks to answer. That could be 250 words or it could be 10,000, and that is not an exaggeration. 

It’s also the case that a blog could be very high quality with only a few hundred words, and also very high quality with several thousand. The thing you need to keep in mind – the only thing – is search intent. 

A few years ago, prominent marketers all started to realize that one way to differentiate their content marketing in the face of increasingly stiff competition was to make it longer, since anyone with patience can do that.

Unfortunately, this flooded the front page of Google with content that was long just for the hell of it. As Google’s updates got more refined, they started to weed out the fluff that was on page one in favor of more concise, brief and accurate posts. 

Do not take this the wrong way: most topics warrant a post that will cover between 2000 and 3000 words. Scan this one, for instance, and you will see it is right in that range. 

I have not written this post to meet that criterion because it, itself, is a criterion, but because if I wanted to answer all aspects of the question “how do blogs help SEO?” I would have to flesh them all out. 

It’s just how the cookie crumbled. I could easily draw this post out to 5000 words but there would be no point. Similarly, if I tried to cram it all into 600 words, it wouldn’t answer any one question contained herein adequately, and would suffer for it. 

So let that be a lesson to you. When you sit down to write a blog, put length out of your mind. Draft your outline, and start writing. Once you’ve finished thoroughly examining the subject, you’re done. Doesn’t matter if the post is 500 words or 15,000. 

How Often Do You Need to Post to Get Traffic 

This is another question that I’ve addressed at length. For more detailed information, please see my previous post, “How Many Blog Posts Does It Take to Get Traffic?”

Unfortunately, in this case, there is no simple answer. A single blog can generate tens of thousands of views in a year, or none. Or, you could have 20 to 30 blogs that each bring in a few hundred per month, accounting for a total much higher. 

Consistency is good, but there is no hard or fast answer. Ideally, if you can, you should post one to two pieces per week, but that’s a hard pace to sustain, as it can account for more than 100 posts per year, and moreover, the more you post, the more burned out you will get. 

It’s better to not post than to put up something that you know is both fluffy and thin. However, it’s also important to be routine. Google doesn’t like to see websites that put up a ton of posts in a short period of time and then go radio silent for weeks or months. 

So, as long as you can be consistent – even once per month is better than nothing as long as you keep at it – and what you publish is quality, you’re doing everything right. 

The most important thing I can tell you here from experience is to be patient. Sometimes you will publish a post that you have perfectly optimized and which answers 15 high-value questions, and it goes nowhere. Sometimes you publish something and think “there’s no way this will perform” and it generates hundreds, thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands of views. There’s really no way to tell for sure without trying.

The other reason you have to be patient is that this will take several years. That I promise, personally. Nothing worth having comes easily, and you should expect to work hard at SEO blogging for about two years until you actually start to see appreciable results. 

Just keep working. The views, and sales (if applicable) will come in time.

Why Is SEO Important for Lead Generation?

The last question I want to attempt to answer is why SEO is important for lead generation. The reason is that blogs you write solely to answer questions will bring in viewers that might never have a need to convert. You’ll just have to be OK with that – it is the price of publishing free information. 

On the other hand, you will definitely attract some readers that might, under other circumstances, become paying customers. And, while you’re educating and engrossing, you’ll be passively building brand equity in their minds, whether they know it or not. 

Therefore, SEO blogging performs best when you pair it with other lead-capturing initiatives. Give readers an option to subscribe to the blog, ask for email or other contact information, or invite users to follow you on social media. You can then use those captured leads for remarketing purposes – and some of them, if all goes well, will end up loyal customers.

The post How Do Blogs Help SEO? appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

I have tried, and here are my top 4 easy, actionable tips that anyone can put into practice, right now. You don’t have to be a seasoned writer to succeed if you follow these tips. They’re practically foolproof. 

(Or, you could just take the easiest hack of all and hire us for SEO content writing services…)

…but if not, here are my best tips. Hacks, if you will. 

Hack the People Also Ask 

Got a keyword you want your website to rank for? It could be long-tail or short tail, doesn’t matter. 

For this purpose, we’ll use the keyword “SEO Services.”

Drop that in the Google search bar and hit enter. Scroll down the SERP a bit till you see this: 

This is called the People Also Ask section of the Google Search Results. In it, you will find searches relevant to yours that either contain the keyword you entered, or a relevant one. 

Think of it as sort of, like, Google’s Frequently Asked Questions. 

Take ten or so of these questions and write a blog or post or article or release, in which you answer all of them. 

There is one thing I must say here. You can’t fluff it out. You need to actually answer the question. So if you can’t come up with something good for the question, pass and pick another one. 

You can “answer” all the People Also Ask questions all you like, but if your answers are hot air, Google will probably never index the page in the first place. 

Hack the Google Autofill 

Let’s try a separate content writing experiment, in which we will use the same keyword, SEO Services. 

Put that in the search bar but don’t hit enter. 

See this?

It’s called Google Autofill, and it uses a form of rudimentary AI to fill out whatever it anticipates your search will be based on the characters you enter. The more fully you enter a query, the more specific the autofill feature will be.

In this case, you can see the autofill is suggesting SEO service prices, providers, and meaning. 

This is a gold mine and it’s just waiting for you to tap it. You could write a whole blog, or just page copy, dedicated to detailing the prices associated with SEO packages your business offers, location pages, what the services entail, and so on and so forth.

But the more creative you are with it, the better will be the fruits of your labor.

For instance, you can see through the autofill feature that there are enough searches for “SEO Services Meaning” that Google considers it significant. 

That means there are people out there that don’t know what SEO services are.

Rather than defining services, you could put together a post on the benefits of SEO services, how they complement other marketing efforts, why SEO is a better long-term investment than eCommerce PPC management – you get the picture. 

Hack the Headers

I must admit, it almost feels cheap that I’m offering this as a content writing hack, but for better or worse, it is one of the easiest ways to get whatever you’re drafting to show up in the search engine results pages. 

What I mean by “hack the headlines” is to stick your keyword in your page titles and headers. But you need to go a bit further. 

See, everyone does this. It’s 2024 and you need to differentiate your copy. You can’t just stick a bare keyword in there and expect the page or post to blow up the search results. 

You need to answer something, specific, or mimic a question that is commonly asked. Google will see this and reward in kind. 

Let’s take a specific example from something I’ve done in the past. 

That is a header from a blog post I wrote recently (which is ranking position 4 on page 1 for “What are SEO impressions?” by the way) and you can see the hack right there. 

Not only is the keyword “SEO impression” in the header, but there is a question directly from the People Also Ask section embedded in it. 

Therefore, Google knows that the answer to that very question is in the text right beneath it. 

This is the oldest and grayest SEO content writing hack in the book, but it still produces, provided you follow my earlier maxim of the “zero fluff tolerance.” 

That post is lean and answers the question of what an impression is, and in it I take great pains not only to define what an impression is, but why it is important to know what it is, as well as how to increase them – and in it, I also include actionable advice. 

My gift to you. 

Skyscrape Page One 

One last hack I have for you before I cut you loose to tame the search engine results pages for yourself, is this. 

Pick another keyword. This time we won’t use “SEO Services” because the first page is just going to be littered with listings for businesses that sell them. 

We need something more substantial. Something more readable. Because you will be writing, right? 

So let’s go with…”Why invest in SEO services?” and see what comes up. 

Below you have most of the first positions on page one (albeit of my search results, and skipping, of course, the ads, as well as one listing, in the interest of making it easy to display):

As you can see, there are three posts here attempting to answer the question with (at least) 11 pointers. Skyscrape the heck out of it.

But what do I mean? Well, open both those posts and find out what those 11 benefits are. 

Now draft your own post, including all 11 reasons (some may be duplicates so scratch them) and then add in some more of your own that the writers of those pages may have missed. 

Then, if you really want to make a comprehensive post, scroll further down the page and compile additional benefits from other listings on page one till you have a “master” list of all the reasons why a business “should invest in SEO services.”

No need to thank me.

The Easy Way Out: Hire Us for SEO Content Writing Services 

While I can’t guarantee that any given piece of content, or page, for that matter, will rank effectively in the organic search results, these 4 hacks are proven to deliver, by years of experience and data. You can even see one instance of that reflected in that very post. 

The “secret” I have not yet openly divulged, however, is actually not a secret at all. This is a lot of work, and I enjoy it, so it isn’t a chore for me. For others, I can understand how this research, drafting, and editing could be seen as a somewhat civilized form of torment. 

Either way, that’s why my final hack is this: hire a professional agency for SEO content writing services, if you can’t do it yourself. We can.

The post Content Writing Hacks to Increase Visibility appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

They carry the top brands, too. You name it, they have it. Fujikura Ventus. Autoflex Golf Shafts. Nike Golf Equipment. Check. Check. Check. 

They also happen to be running an eCommerce operation (link above) so they can better serve their golfing customers far and wide across the country. Expertise and inventory like theirs aren’t easy to come by. 

But reaching that broader market? That’s a bigger question. Fortunately for their customers (and for them) they partnered with us for PPC and SEO services for online growth. Here’s the short version. 

The Background 

It all started back in early 2020. Basically they, like so many others in their industry, were looking for effective ways to increase their reach online. 

They also sell the best golf equipment brands in the industry, inclusive of the most in-demand clubs, shafts, and golf bags, at competitive prices. Plus, they offer club fitting services, sell used gear, and a whole lot more. Their service is top tier.

It then became a question of what channels to target. For this project, we chose a bifurcated strategy inclusive of PPC and SEO.

Why PPC and SEO Work Well Together 

Starting from nothing, following a two-pronged approach that includes both PPC and SEO is a smart move. This is because the two work in very different ways and help drive a strategy forward over the long-term.

Here’s why. With search engine optimization (SEO), you need to make granular optimizations at the page level which not only take time themselves, it takes time for search engines like Google to recognize them and assign authority so the website ranks higher in the organic search results. You also need to develop a long-term content strategy as well as start sowing links. 

That all takes a long time. Most SEO efforts don’t bear real fruit for a year or more. In this instance, it just happens to be the case that we can take a long look backwards.

The thing here is, if you’re aiming to have SEO pay for itself, it usually takes a while. Clients that want to see results more quickly should also invest in PPC. 

In PPC, instead of organically improving positions, you bid for top ad spots in the paid search results by buying – literally- relevant keywords. This gives PPC marketers the ability to buy positions for higher visibility, effectively overnight. 

Paired with exceptional targeting – which will be covered in more detail below, PPC can start driving traffic and generating higher conversion rates and sales right out of the gate.

But it gets better, because as data associated with customer and purchasing behavior rolls in over the course of the campaign, PPC specialists can hone their strategy and improve targeting to improve both ROI and ROAS, boosting profitability. 

Then, as SEO efforts improve and organic impressions, clicks and sales start to generate steam, domain authority increases. Higher organic rankings improve the credibility of paid ads, which in turn makes it easier to develop a sensible bid strategy, lowering cost per click. 

Keyword Strategy, Targeting and Setting the Stage 

For success in both SEO and PPC, you need a cohesive keyword strategy, which in many cases will revolve around the same keywords.

That’s the secret sauce of a campaign which we won’t divulge here, but suffice it to say our SEO experts uncovered a bunch of mostly golf shaft and bag-related keywords that were attainable, had decent volume, and which were associated with intent to purchase. 

These we set the rest of the campaign around. For the purposes of SEO, the targeting is more or less inherent in the search intent of the keyword. For PPC, it required an additional layer of targeting by area, keyword, and a select group of demographic factors.

With this joint keyword strategy and targeting unfurled and in place, the stage was set. So what sorts of results have we gathered through the years?

Success with PPC and SEO Is a Long-Term Game: Results 

Success in PPC is measured directly through user actions, and ultimately in sales. The efficacy and profitability of the campaign can be measured in ROAS, or return on ad spend. Here we will take a look at conversions and conversion value.

These metrics are straightforward and the numbers about to be presented speak more or less for themselves. The following shows data for their PPC campaigns from Q1 of 2023: 

As you can see from the image which represents performance during that quarter, there was still a respectable volume of conversions and total conversion value. 

But part of our targeting was involved in looking for ways to further improve the campaign. We determined that by adding a Customer Match list, along with calls, store visits and directions to store in mid 2023, we could improve targeting, attract new customers, and improve conversions and overall conversion value.

As evidenced by data from Q4 2023:

And again by data from Q1 2024: 

I won’t beat a dead horse; the numbers speak for themselves. 

As for SEO, that’s a slow game, too. Here are some figures associated with target keyword standings up through the present time:

As you can see, as of the latest scan through one of our proprietary tools that tracks organic keyword rankings, Dallas Golf Company is on one page for most of the target keywords displayed in the image below. You can clearly see positions and search volume – but we blanked out keywords to protect the strategy:

But what about organic traffic? Impressions? Clicks? Sales? 

We can see some of this through Google Search Console. We can only go back 16 months, but you can see there is a clear upward trajectory, notwithstanding a little dip in the middle, which is customary due to natural search engine algorithm updates and fluctuations:

Still, the trend is overwhelmingly positive. 

We can see more through Google Analytics GA4, specifically with respect to event count. There were some minor drops in views and users which can be expected with a bump in traffic – but events are up substantially: 

This of course represents the bottom line – both organic and paid traffic have brought in a substantial amount of conversions and revenue for this client, but there’s more that should be exposed. 

The Soft Details: Content Marketing Success

In SEO, you may have heard the expression, “Content Is King.” This might mean different things to different people, but in this capacity, it’s important to understand that a huge amount of organic growth – SEO, that is – hinges directly on the quality of content a website publishes. 

Content creation could result in product page copy, category page copy, blog copy, CMS page copy, FAQ page copy – whatever – but it has to be attributable to your domain and it has to be both useful and convey authority at the same time. 

Therefore, a large portion of this eCommerce SEO campaign’s value came from optimizing category and page page content, and more directly, writing blog posts that were useful to the target market. These blogs brought in visitors and conveyed authority to the target pages that we wanted to get into ranking. 

How valuable does it need to be? Well, let’s take a look at the top performers. 

The image above shows only traffic to their blog since January 2023. The blog alone, for which our content production team was almost entirely responsible, brought in nearly 200,000 views during that time frame. 

What’s more is that average session duration among those 100,000+ sessions was over a minute – ludicrously high. People are actually reading these blogs and gaining something valuable from them. 

Even better? Every single page has a little bit of conversion value attached. This means that not only are these blogs ranking and pulling in traffic that actually reads them – many of them go on to make a purchase from their website. 

And that is why you can’t completely optimize your website without creating content that actually resonates with your users. No digital marketing strategy – especially SEO –  is complete without it and it is arguably the most impactful ranking factor that will affect your online presence. 

Get Your Marketing Off the Ground Today 

Results like these are, in a word, not necessarily common, and there’s some more insight here. They don’t happen overnight. This case study has been clear on that. 

What’s worse: You can’t begin your SEO marketing efforts in 2020, unfortunately. That proposition is off the table. 

But you can begin today, and there’s no time like the present. 

To start generating more traffic, sales, and to build a massive organic footprint and respectable domain authority, get in touch with us today at 888-982-8269.

The post Uniting PPC and SEO for Long-Term Success (Plus Some Content Marketing) appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

1. Conduct Comprehensive Keyword Research:

Keyword research lays the foundation for your eCommerce SEO strategy. The first step in any SEO campaign is to identify relevant keywords and phrases that potential customers are likely to use when searching for products in your niche. 

Utilize tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush to create a list of high-volume keywords with low competition. One strategy is to focus on long-tail keywords(longer, more specific phrases) that reflect user intent and incorporate them naturally into your product descriptions, category pages, and meta tags.

2. Optimize Product Pages:

Optimizing your product pages is essential for attracting organic traffic and converting visitors into customers. Ensure each product page has a unique title tag, meta description, and URL optimized with target keywords. 

One of the best ways to optimize copy is to write compelling, informative product descriptions that highlight the features, benefits, and unique selling points of your products. You can also incorporate high-quality images and videos to enhance the user experience and encourage engagement.

3. Create SEO-Friendly URLs:

Clean and descriptive URLs not only improve user experience but also make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your eCommerce site. Opt for short, keyword-rich URLs that accurately reflect the content of the page. 

Avoid using generic identifiers or parameters in your URLs and instead include relevant keywords and product names. Additionally, utilize hyphens to separate words and make URLs more readable for both users and search engines.

4. Implement Structured Data Markup:

Structured data markup, also known as schema markup, provides search engines with additional context about the content on your eCommerce site. It basically translates an eCommerce website with a structure that is designed for search algorithms to easily process.

Implementing structured data can enhance your search engine listings with rich snippets, such as product ratings, reviews, pricing information, and availability. This not only improves visibility in search results but also increases click-through rates by providing users with valuable information upfront.

5. Optimize for Mobile Devices:

With the majority of online searches now conducted on mobile devices, optimizing your eCommerce site for mobile is a necessity. Ensure your website is mobile-responsive and provides a seamless browsing experience across all devices and screen sizes. 

Optimize page load times, simplify navigation, and prioritize mobile-friendly design elements to enhance usability and encourage conversions. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool can help you identify and address any mobile usability issues on your site.

6. Focus on User Experience (UX):

User experience plays a crucial role in both SEO and conversion rate optimization (CRO). A well-designed, user-friendly eCommerce website not only ranks higher in search engine results but also encourages visitors to explore, engage, and ultimately make a purchase. 

Streamline the checkout process, provide multiple payment options, and offer personalized product recommendations to enhance the overall shopping experience. Regularly monitor user behavior metrics, such as bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rate, to identify areas for improvement and optimize accordingly.

7. Content Marketing:

Content marketing is a powerful tool for eCommerce SEO, allowing you to attract organic traffic, build brand authority, and drive conversions. Create high-quality, informative content that addresses the needs, interests, and pain points of your target audience. 

It’s a good idea to publish blog posts, how-to guides, product tutorials, and buying guides related to your products and industry. It’s also smart to incorporate relevant keywords naturally throughout your content and promote it across various channels, including social media, email newsletters, and industry forums.

8. Optimize for Voice Search:

As the adoption of voice-enabled devices continues to rise, optimizing your eCommerce site for voice search is becoming increasingly important. Voice search queries tend to be more conversational and long-tail in nature, so focus on optimizing for natural language phrases and questions. 

Businesses should create FAQ pages, optimize for local SEO, and provide concise, informative answers to common customer queries. Additionally, similar to mobile optimization, you should ensure that your website loads quickly and is structured in a way that makes it easy for voice assistants to parse and understand.

9. Build High-Quality Backlinks:

Backlinks are a crucial ranking factor in Google’s algorithm and can significantly impact your eCommerce site’s visibility and authority. These are links from credible sources that point back to your website. 

Focus on acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable websites in your industry through guest blogging, influencer outreach, and digital PR campaigns. Create valuable, shareable content that naturally attracts backlinks from authoritative sources. Monitor your backlink profile regularly and disavow any spammy or low-quality links that could harm your site’s reputation.

10. Monitor and Analyze Performance:

Continuous monitoring and analysis are essential for optimizing your eCommerce SEO strategy and maximizing results. Use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and third-party SEO platforms to track key metrics such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, conversion rates, and revenue. 

Analyzing your data will help when it comes to Identifying trends, patterns, and areas of improvement so you can adjust your SEO tactics accordingly. Regularly audit your website for technical issues, broken links, and duplicate content. If you find any issues, implement fixes to ensure optimal performance and user experience.

Implementing effective SEO strategies is essential for the success of your eCommerce business, especially if your business is in a category restricted by Google Ads. By conducting thorough keyword research, optimizing product pages, creating SEO-friendly URLs, implementing structured data markup, and focusing on mobile optimization and user experience, you can improve your search engine rankings, drive organic traffic, and ultimately increase sales and revenue. 

By following these 10 actionable tips, you can take your eCommerce business to new heights and achieve long-term success in the digital marketplace.

The post 10 SEO Tips for Your eCommerce Business appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

Copywriting is a massive part of online marketing that cannot be overlooked. You’ll often want to utilize a team of experts that can focus on expert and meaningful copywriting. You’ll need impactful copywriting on your website, on your blog, and on your social media. Here’s why and how to do it!

Benefits of Great Copywriting For Your Blog

The first major use of copywriting for your site’s marketing is blog content. Blogs have evolved from personal diaries to powerful marketing tools that enable businesses to connect with their target audience, drive traffic to their websites, and establish themselves as authorities in their respective industries. Here’s what a great blog can do for your site.

1. Driving Traffic: One of the primary benefits of maintaining a blog is its ability to drive traffic to your website. Each new blog post presents an opportunity to attract visitors through organic search, social media shares, and referrals from other websites. When you offer useful information and genuine advice, you will boost your site’s SEO and also create an authentic space where customers can learn more about your brand, products, and services.
2. Building Brand Authority: Blogs provide a platform for businesses to showcase their expertise and establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry. By sharing valuable insights, industry trends, and expert opinions, businesses can position themselves as trusted authorities in their field. Over time, this helps to build credibility and trust with their audience, making it more likely for customers to choose their products or services over competitors.’ For example, if you’re a clothing brand, write articles on the latest fashion trends. Or if you sell refurbished tech, create blog posts about how to use certain products with ease.
3. Engaging with the Audience: Unlike traditional marketing channels, blogs offer a more interactive and personalized way to engage with the audience. When you create a blog, focus on your brand’s personality and story. You want to not only have authority in your space but share your voice. You can connect with potential customers by being real and authentic, allowing them into your world and to build a connection with your brand past your products. Share personal stories, insert jokes and opinions… You want your brand to really shine through.
4. Educating and Informing: On top of sharing your story, blogs serve as valuable educational resources for customers seeking information about products, services, or industry-related topics. By addressing common questions, providing how-to guides, and offering insights into emerging trends, businesses can help customers make informed purchasing decisions. Educational content also helps to build trust and credibility with the audience, positioning the business as a trusted advisor.
5. Measuring and Iterating: Blogging provides valuable insights into customer preferences, interests, and behavior through analytics tools. By tracking metrics such as page views, time on page, and conversion rates, businesses can gain valuable feedback on the effectiveness of their blog content and make data-driven decisions to optimize future posts. This iterative approach ensures that blog content remains relevant, engaging, and impactful over time.

Good blogs are essential components of effective marketing strategies in today’s digital landscape. By driving traffic, building brand authority, engaging with the audience, educating and informing customers, boosting SEO, fueling social media and email marketing, and measuring and iterating based on analytics, blogs offer a versatile and powerful platform for businesses to connect with their target audience and achieve their marketing objectives.

If you want to share your story but don’t have the time to consistently write education and informational blogs, you may need our experts! Our team of SEO writers will work with you to find out what your brand’s voice is as well as the type of content that your customerbase is searching for to get more eyes on your site.

Benefits of Great Copywriting For Your Site and Socials

On top of blog writing, copywriting should be powerful and quality across your entire site and socials. This includes your product descriptions, all across your homepage and about me, as well as any social platforms you’re using. Your copywriting should be consistent and represent your brand’s voice and story across every space.

1. First Impressions Matter: Your website is often the first point of contact between your business and potential customers. Powerful copy ensures that visitors are greeted with captivating language that immediately captures their attention and communicates your brand’s value proposition. Whether it’s a compelling headline, an enticing product description, or a persuasive call-to-action, impactful copy sets the tone for a positive user experience and encourages further exploration.
2. Building Trust and Credibility: In an era of skepticism and information overload, building trust with your audience is paramount. Powerful copy fosters trust and credibility by communicating your brand’s story, values, and unique selling points in a clear and authentic manner. By addressing customer pain points, showcasing testimonials, and providing transparent information, compelling copy instills confidence in your brand and establishes a foundation for lasting relationships with your audience.
3. Driving Conversions: Ultimately, the goal of your online presence is to convert visitors into customers or clients. Powerful copy plays a crucial role in this process by persuading visitors to take the desired action, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a contact form. By leveraging persuasive language, compelling benefits, and a sense of urgency on product pages, effective copywriting nudges visitors along the path to conversion and maximizes the return on your marketing efforts.
4. Optimizing for Search Engines: In the vast expanse of the internet, visibility is key to success. Powerful copy not only resonates with human readers but also caters to search engine algorithms, improving your website’s ranking in search results. By incorporating relevant keywords and phrases naturally into your content, compelling copy enhances your website’s discoverability and attracts organic traffic from users actively searching for products or services like yours.
5. Engaging Your Audience on Social Media: Social media platforms provide an invaluable opportunity to connect with your audience on a more personal level. Powerful copy on your social media profiles and posts captivates your followers’ attention amidst the sea of content vying for their attention. Whether it’s crafting engaging captions, sharing compelling stories, or sparking conversations, impactful copywriting drives engagement, cultivates brand loyalty, and expands your reach within your target demographic.
6. Differentiating Your Brand: Standing out from the competition is essential and powerful copy gives your brand a distinct voice and personality that sets you apart from competitors. Whether it’s injecting humor, demonstrating empathy, or showcasing expertise, compelling copywriting creates a memorable brand identity that resonates with your audience and fosters emotional connections.

Powerful copy is so important when it comes to a successful online presence, shaping perceptions, driving engagement, and ultimately, driving results. Whether it’s your website, social media profiles, or digital advertisements, compelling copywriting is essential for capturing attention, building trust, driving conversions, optimizing for search engines, engaging your audience, differentiating your brand, and adapting to evolving trends and platforms.

When you build a website, you’re often focused on the images, the UX, even the product listings. Copywriting can sometimes be forgotten in the grand scheme of things. But good copywriting can make all the difference for your marketing. Whether it’s an informational blog post, a fun social media status, or an inspiring product description, you need copywriting to find and maintain a large customerbase that trusts you and your products.

The post Why Copywriting is the Key to Good Marketing appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.