To plan blog articles for your business, you need to identify your customer base, understand what their pain points are and create topics around them to help them navigate these problems. When writing, it’s crucial to mention how your business can help ease those pain points.

Let’s make this very practical.

Right now, you’re reading an article about ‘How to Plan Blog Articles for Your Business.’ by our team at Caffeinated Marketing. Coincidence? Not at all.

We know our customer base mainly comprises Adelaide businesses who need web design and online marketing services to help them grow their business. As an Adelaide business owner, you wanted to learn about planning blog articles for your website. And when you ran a quick Google search, you found us. Right? It’s all part of our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.

 

If it isn’t already clear, planning blog articles for your business is important because you will

• Attract customers to your business with helpful content,
• Build their trust in you by showing expertise, and
• Convert them into customers in no time!

So, how to plan the blog articles? Let’s find out.

Know Your Audience (Choose Topics That Solve Their Problems)

To do this, you need to answer a few questions. What services do you offer? Who do you offer those services to? What are their problems? If you can answer these questions correctly, then you can start to identify content topics that will help your customers. The first goal of a blog article is to solve your customer’s problems, even before marketing your services. When you solve problems, you can earn their trust and show how your service helps them.

 

To identify content topics, think about what questions your customers have asked you before via DM, calls or emails. Do you have a sales team? Ask them about the common objections during sales conversations. Google’s Autocomplete feature (suggestions as you type in Google), PAA (People Also Ask) section is a great way to identify your customers’ pain points, too. You can even run a survey to identify their needs. Don’t forget to think about what problems your business solves; that’s what you should be writing about!

Have a Content Strategy

We did say your content should solve problems before anything else. On a larger scale, it must also align with your business goals. So, you must first determine those goals- attracting customers, improving Google search rankings, etc. It’s important to set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound goals). Hence, it isn’t enough to say you want to increase traffic to your website. You should say that you want to increase traffic to your website by 25% over 60 days. Then, your content strategy should work towards these goals.

Think of content strategy as the master plan, while blog articles are the building blocks.

Organise Your Ideas Into Pillars and Content Clusters

An important aspect of content strategy to know is that when you have your topics, you don’t just start writing and keep writing about them. Instead, you use pillars and content clusters. Pillar content is 3-5 core topics (such as web design, web hosting, SEO for Caffeinated marketing) that show your main services. After you’ve written these pages, you can now write supporting blog articles that link back to those pillars. For example, the blog article you’re reading right now was just linked again to SEO as pillar content for Caffeinated Marketing (check the preceding bracket). This is a great SEO strategy, and it helps your readers navigate your site more easily.

Map Out a Simple Content Calendar

After you’ve got a list of topics to work on, mapping out a content calendar helps you stay on course. You can use a spreadsheet or productivity tools like Trello or Asana to schedule topics to make blog articles for weekly or monthly. This enables you to remain consistent and plan for product launches and seasonal trends.

Set a Clear Goal for Each Blog Post

What do you want your reader to do after reading the blog post? You must decide this before writing a blog article because this will shape your approach. If you want your reader to buy a product, then you have to include a CTA (call-to-action) that nudges them to take action.

Do Your Research

Research is the foundation of any good blog article. Before writing on any topic, SEO and keyword research are important because doing this right will help your blog rank higher and reach the intended audience.

It also helps to check out your top-ranking competitors and see what they’ve written or missed. You can draw inspiration from their content to know what Google likes and fill in the content gaps they’ve missed in your blog article. However, make sure to stand out with unique content, latest data, and better explanations.

Create a Post Outline

Every blog article has an outline which generally follows the introduction, body that has a few sub-headings, conclusion and CTA pattern. Outlines help you write more easily and faster; they also improve the reader’s experience.

Include Images

Images, infographics, and graphs help to break down difficult concepts for your readers and make their experience a lot better. You should always remember to add alt text to your images for SEO purposes.

Create a Call to Action

Your readers should never leave your blog without knowing what’s next to do. Do you want them to contact you, download a guide, or share the blog post? Then, tell them. This is also our opportunity to tell you that we write great blog articles as part of our SEO strategy at Caffeinated Marketing, so contact us now to get your blog running.

Hit Publish

Are you done writing the blog article? Then, it’s time to hit the publish button. But that’s not all. After you publish the article, you should also promote the blog on your socials, newsletters, LinkedIn, etc. Furthermore, track the blog article’s performance using Google Analytics and Search Console. You want to know if people are seeing the blog, reading it through and taking action. Don’t forget to update content regularly, too, so that it stays on top of the rankings.

How Do Blog Articles Improve SEO?

SEO is how you make your website rank higher on Google, and it involves writing blog articles, among other key aspects. When you write blog articles, you can target specific search queries that your customers are asking Google, e.g, ‘How to Plan Blog Articles for Your Business’ and rank for this query. You can link your blog article to core services on your website, which improves site structure and boosts rankings. Moreover, search engines are smart and tend to regard people who talk consistently about something as experts, so you should keep blogging about your business.

Another crucial aspect of blog articles is the opportunity to earn backlinks that link to your content as credible information. Google regards this as a key ranking factor.

Should I Write Blogs Myself or Hire Someone To Do It?

You can write blogs for your website if you have good writing skills and you have the time to do the research, write, edit, and publish them. If this sounds like a lot for you, then consider hiring experts. Our writing team at Caffeinated Marketing is based locally in Adelaide, so we have experts who are well immersed in the local Australian context. We take time to understand your brand’s goals, customer behaviours, industry trends, and relevant keywords so we can incorporate this into your content.

What to Avoid When Planning Your Blog Content

Poor Strategy

Poor planning covers everything from failing to identify your target audience to inconsistent publishing. Blogging for no reason and not knowing your audience, your goals and which topics relate to your services equals wasted time. Every blog should have an intention and fall under your bigger content and SEO plan.

Ignoring Basic SEO

You can write an amazing blog article, but if you aren’t optimising it for keywords, search intent or internal linking, it’s like making an amazing flyer and putting it in a drawer. People need to know that you’ve set the work out there, and SEO is a crucial way to get that done.

Inconsistent Publishing

One post here and there every few months will never gain traction. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated, but an editorial calendar will keep you focused, and even one post a month can help if it’s calculated and planned. At Caffeinated Marketing, we regularly add over 4,000 words of well-written content across multiple pages and blog articles to each of our SEO clients’ websites within any given month.

Creating Long Pieces of Text

All text with large chunks and no illustrations and no breaks equals a bad user experience. Use headings, bullets, images and short paragraphs to structure your content if you want to keep your readers’ interest.

Skipping a CTA (Call to Action)

Every blog should make clear what you want someone to do next, whether to contact you, read another relevant post or subscribe to something else. If you don’t tell them, they’ll never know!

Abandoning a Blog Article After Publishing

It’s a big mistake to forget that you wrote a blog after you hit the publish button. Use Google Search Console or Google Analytics to see what’s working. Over time, update, modify and repurpose these posts for ultimate success.

How Long Does It Take for New Posts to Rank?

It can take up to 4 months or more for a new post to rank, and that’s why blog articles are all about playing the long game. If your blog article satisfies all necessary ranking criteria, such as content quality and relevance, internal linking, and backlinking, then you have a good start. Generally, newer websites take time because Google needs some time to trust them.

Google also takes time (4 days to 4 weeks) to index the blog articles(find, categorise and sort your content into their algorithm), before you can first appear as a search result. After indexing, your blog article can start rising through the ranks.