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2024/02/27 2024/02/27

How to write a good quality blog post

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Content marketing

In the realm of digital marketing, the axiom “content is king” has never wavered in its truth.
However, it’s not just any content marketing that reigns supreme—it’s the meticulously crafted, engaging, and informative kind that does.

With the evolution of SEO practices, the emphasis has shifted towards creating content marketing that doesn’t just appeal to search engines, such as Google but also provides a superior user experience (UX).

John Mueller of Google once highlighted “awesomeness” as a critical factor for ranking success, underlining the importance of content quality.

 

What should we be writing about?

Before penning down your next masterpiece, it’s crucial to engage in thorough research to pinpoint topics that resonate with your audience.
The goal is to find subjects that not only spark interest but are questions thousands of shoppers are likely to be asking.
A pro tip is to use quality SEO tools, such as Moz Pro to help you with this.

 

Keywords

Before you let your creativity flow, take a moment to step into the shoes of your potential readers.
Understanding user intent is paramount.

Ask yourself: What information are they seeking before they buy a product?

What solutions do they need?

Keyword research, including the use of Google Suggest, will further refine your focus, allowing you to select primary and secondary keywords that enhance your organic SEO without compromising the natural flow of your article.

 

Structure

The structure of your blog post plays a pivotal role in keeping your audience engaged and reducing bounce rates—a signal to Google of your content’s quality. So do add page titles.

Also do incorporate various elements like images, videos, and infographics can significantly enhance readability and engagement.
Ensuring your headings are properly tagged and your content marketing is well-organised will make your post more accessible and appealing to both readers and search engines.

 

Page titles

The title of your blog post is your first opportunity to captivate potential readers.
It should be directly aligned with the search queries your audience is using, incorporating your primary keyword in a way that also that answers the shoppers question. Emotive and powerful words, along with clear indicators of the content’s value (such as “ultimate guide” or “5 simple steps”), can significantly increase click-through rates.

 

How many words should we be writing for each blog post?

In the realm of SEO, longer content (evergreen content marketing) often translates to higher rankings.
Aim for posts that are at least 1000 words, as they tend to provide more value, covering topics in-depth.
This not only benefits your SEO efforts but also establishes your blog as an authoritative source of information.

 

Social media

Promote your work on X, Facebook and Instagram.

In conclusion, crafting an SEO-optimised blog post that ranks well on Google and captivates readers requires a blend of well-written pages, user intent understanding, keyword optimisation, and innovative structuring.

By focusing on creating quality content marketing that is not only informative but also engaging and white hat you can achieve a prominent position on Google’s first page.
Remember, in the dynamic world of SEO, the combination of quality content and strategic optimisation is your key to success.

Facts and statistics are integral to reinforcing the credibility of your content marketing. For instance, according to HubSpot’s “State of Marketing Report 2021,” content marketing is used by 82% of marketers, reflecting its critical role in digital marketing strategies. Furthermore, a study by Backlinko found that the average Google first page result contains 1,447 words, highlighting the importance of comprehensive content in SEO efforts.

For further reading and statistics, consider exploring resources such as the HubSpot State of Marketing Report (https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing) and the Backlinko SEO Statistics (https://backlinko.com/seo-stats). These sources provide valuable insights into the current trends and data supporting effective content marketing and SEO strategies.

 

 

 

 

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2024/02/15 2024/02/15

Has your websites rankings decreased since the Google Helpful Content Update?

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Many businesses have seen their SERPs decrease after the Google helpful content update.

Therefore, copywriters are scrabbling across the globe for ways to fix their content marketing so that the Google helpful content update approves it and their SEO improves.

Therefore, this article has been written to help you improve your business’s content marketing.

 

Written by: Ryan Walsh

Date: 15/02/ 2024

It can happen to many businesses that work hard and diligently to get their companies right to the top of Google.co.uk. They might not make any further changes to their organic SEO, yet after the Google helpful content update, their rankings have sometimes substantially decreased.

 

So, how exactly does Google’s helpful content update work?

What is essential to note is that this could be a sitewide penalty. meaning that all the pages / blog posts are ranking notably lower on Google. Often this is because of the following:

– A lot of content thin content
– Content marketing that has a low Google E-EAT score

All of your pages and blog posts could get dragged down if you have a lot of low-quality pages, such as content or thin pages on your website.

So this means that if you have a lot of low-quality content marketing, such as content-thin articles, or just pages that are not that useful, as they don’t offer much useful advice to a shopper, your businesses rankings could get dragged down the ranking after this update.

Today in 2024 your content marketing has to be very good.

 

When you consider that there have been numerous updates rolled out by Google

Google has gone through an enormous effort, rolling out the Google Panda update, the Google Rank brain artificial intelligence update, and the Google hummingbird update. These have been significant updates, which have changed enormously where some businesses rank on the Google and therefore alterted these businesses organic rankings.

Therefore, this latest update, the Google helpful content update is just another step in weeding out low-quality content marketing. For example, if over 50% say of the blog posts are content thin, then the whole website, including main product pages may start to rank lower on Google’s organic results.

So basically, the long and short of it is this: if you hire the wrong agency which creates lacklustre, not very well written content marketing, what this can hold your website back. You might have been doing well, ranking at the top of Google.co.uk, but after that Google update, your business may move down the ranks, because of all the blog posts that haven’t been well written.
It can take a long time to recover from a Google penalty

As with all sorts of Google algorithmic or manual penalties, it does take time to recover, so let’s say that you believe the Google helpful content update has impacted your website. Let’s say that you have noticed that your rankings have plummeted after the Google helpful content update was rolled out. Then you will want to set about improving your content marketing.

However, it’s worth noting that with all algorithmic and manual updates, it can take a considerable amount of time, sometimes even years, from our experience, to recover from such an update. Therefore, it’s not simply a matter of updating the content marketing, and then watching the rankings improve, it does take time.

To recover from Google algorithm penalties therefore, you have to be extremely patient. And be continuously working on trying to improve your business content marketing

 

Could there be a possible over-optimisation issue?

There could be a possible over-optimisation issue that the SEO consultant or business has implemented. This could be over optimising the content marketing for a particular keyword.

Let’s say that that keyword is a particular brand of “ladies’ handbags”.

The marketing agency may have over-optimised the page or number of pages for that particular handbag brand.
Therefore, the marketing agency needs to go back and ensure that they don’t over-optimise; for example, if keyword stuffing has been used on that page.

Keyword stuffing is simply over-optimising the page, which can severely damage the business’s SEO moving forward.

 

Write for real humans.

Now, this might have you somewhat confused, scratching your head thinking, well, obviously, when writing content marketing it will be for humans, we’re not writing; therefore, for extraterrestrials, are we?

However, a problem that many SEO agencies and businesses have fallen into, is that they try to write content marketing just purely to try and improve their SEO.

However, you have to turn this marketing strategy entirely on its head.

If you write super helpful content marketing that is very useful, well written and has a high Google E-EAT then this type of work will rank high on Google.

So, by offering helpful advice, you are actually improving your seo.

 

Write detailed articles

Try to make your content marketing as detailed and in-depth as possible.

What you most definitely don’t want is for the content marketing to be deemed as “content-thin”.

So do work hard to make the content marketing detailed as possible. Perhaps you don’t want to publish a piece of content marketing every single week; instead, focus on writing superb and high-quality piece say perhaps just once a month. Use your time wisely; therefore, create quality content marketing, that’s instead of churning out low-quality content marketing.

 

Keep on point

This is a critical point that should be carefully considered.

Sometimes, some businesses start to talk about things within their company blog posts that are not directly related to the products or services they sell.

For example, a firm of solicitors might be talking about a rugby team they sponsor, so we recommend removing non-relevant content marketing if you have a lot of it. This can confuse search engines, such as Google as to what your business is offering.
For example Google’s algorithm may ask are you offering legal services, or are running a rugby team?

 

Fully understand Google E-EAT.

Google now wants content marketing to be written by an expert; it wants the writer to demonstrate expertise, on what they are writing about.

Google also wants the writer to to demonstrate real-life experience of what the person is writing about.

If any work on your website that doesn’t fully answer Google EEAT, then this work should be revisited and improved.
This might take a lot of time, but it needs to be done because this is a critical consideration in assessing whether the content marketing is deemed as high quality.

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2024/02/07 2024/02/07

Content freshness and why this is important when improving your business SEO (organic & local)

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Introduction

If you want your business to climb to the top of Google’s SERPs, you must regularly add content marketing, such as new blog posts to your company website.

This article will explain why it’s essential to periodically add new pages and blog posts and evergreen content marketing to your website.

Written by: Ryan Walsh
Date: 07/02/2024

What Is Fresh Content?

What does an SEO company mean when they are talking about adding fresh content marketing?

Fresh content refers to content marketing, which is content marketing has recently added to your company website. It could be a brand-new blog post that you just took over 10 hours to write.

It could be a more in-depth article, such as a piece of evergreen content marketing, or an embedded video such as YouTube video. You could even be a SoundCloud recording or lets say a podcast that you recently did. It can even be social media updates which are embedded into your website.

 

Helping to reduce bounce rates

When a shopper comes to your website for advice, and they want to read one of your blog posts, that shopper will undoubtedly want to obtain up-to-date advice. For example if they are searching on Google for “the best mobile phone handsets to buy in 2024”.

Well they wont want to read an article that was published in 2018.

So what the SEO company can do is keep updating that same page every year; this improves the freshness of the page offering the most up to date advice to the customer. This can help to reduce the bounce rate.

Why is fresh content important for SEO?

 

Is Content Freshness a Google Ranking Factor?

Yes, we would say it is; websites which stay stagnant in terms of not adding new content marketing they can start dropping down the ranks quickly. That’s to say, if your direct rivals are adding top-quality blog posts, which have good Google E-EAT score, well a business not adding new work might start to get left behind by the competition.

The Google Freshness Update back in 2011

This important Google update aims to provide users with much more up-to-date information as possible. So if someones looking for advice, they receive up to date advice.

So, whats the best selling running trainer, obviously implies to the current year. The shopper therefore wont want to read a blog post written in 2017- as the companies making the products, such as Nike may have stopped making that item. This is why the

Google Freshness Update aims to serve answers, that is businesses, which offer up to date advice.

The Google Caffeine update 2010

There was also the Google caffeine update back in 2010, which again improved the speed and accuracy of the Google bots’ crawling and indexing process. This basically means pages got indexed much faster. So, if you wrote say a new blog post, its likely to appear in the Serp’s a lot faster.

 

New hasn’t got to mean new

So what we mean by this is you haven’t got to constantly churn out new content marketing at a rapid pace.
The copywriters could return to older pieces of content marketing to update them, improve, and make them more helpful to your customers.

Be consistent

It’s essential to be consistent when publishing your content marketing. What you don’t want to do us write is a large amount of say long blog posts, then to publish them all at once and then not publish any for months after.

You should instead publish regularly, set aside time to do this, say once a week or once a month and be consistent in the spacing. So if you write an article once a week, try to stick to that.

Create an editorial calendar to plan which content marketing you are going to write about

What can sometimes happen is if you write content marketing off-the-cuff—the problem with this is you may end up writing about the same topics again and again. What you need is to write about a wide range of issues relating to your business.

So we would recommend creating an Excel spreadsheet, plan what your going to write about. This way you can tick it off, and your not writing about the same stuff all of the time.

So for example, our business writes about:

-Technical SEO
-On-page SEO
-Off-page SEO
-Link building
-Local SEO
-Organic SEO
-Google algorithm changes

Digital marketing agency

We have over ten years of experience working with many different companies here in Wales. We can offer you quality search engine optimisation (SEO), and we can improve your local or organic SEO. If your business needs help writing content marketing, then why not call our SEO agency today?

 

 

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2024/01/30 2024/01/30

How do writing blog posts help improve a company’s SEO?

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How important is content for SEO?

Content marketing, whether the writer is writing a blog post, a number of product descriptions or perhaps an evergreen piece of content marketing, if done right, can help to improve the business search engine optimisation.

However, the written work must be high-quality. For the work to be deemed as high quality it must meet the following quality standards:

– Google’s E-EAT
– Must be white hat
– Can’t be duplicated
– Can’t be “content thin”
– Must be helpful to the reader because of the Google Helpful Content update

So, in a nutshell, businesses can be improved by adding quality content marketing, but it can also go the other way, and it can be damaged if the business is adding low-quality or what might be deemed as spam content marketing.

Google is becoming much better, all of the time at spotting low-quality content marketing.

It used to be from businesses which were using what is called “spun content”, or using keyword stuffing methods, but now in 2024, and for a long time prior to that, these methods do not work now. They will result in the business incurring an algorithmic penalty, which will massively set your SEO back.

 

Improving organic traffic

So let’s say that you have a website and you might have been paying to have our website live for say the last seven years.
During that time, you receive no phone calls, no emails, it’s a bit like having a business card just languishing in your desk. Obviously, you will want that business card instead distributed to people who are interested in your business. And that’s a bit

like having a website, but not paying for SEO.

This is where the really good and talented SEO consultants come in.

Talented SEO consultants will make your website more visible; we do that by helping to drive more customers to your website and by helping your business obtain more organic traffic. One of the ways to do this is to write high-quality, unique, well-written content marketing.

 

Remove duplicated content marketing

You might have hired a particularly lazy SEO consultant in the past, and they might have been in-house or they might have been external.

You might have been busy copying and pasting other companies’ work onto your website; when it comes to search engine optimisation, this is a massive no-no.

If you use duplicated content marketing, this will trigger a Google penalty, which could massive

Offer helpful advice to shoppers (Google Helpful Content Update)

Here’s our best advice, most definitely write for humans first, that is your customers.

Then if the work is really good quality, then the bounce rate should be low, and the engagement should be high. This basically means shoppers are spending a long time reading the work, and this will help to improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation.

 

External and internal links

If the work is super high quality, then well-known brands and companies may choose to link to your website.

Let’s say for example that you manufacture quality paint here in Wales. An interior design magazine might decide to link to you, and mention your high-quality paint on their website. For example, in a magazine such as Period Living.

Therefore, this is our example of a good quality link because the magazine that’s linking to you is a well-known and respected company.

You also want to add many internal links, for example, an article talking about paint, you might want to take the reader to a page about wallpaper page on your website, this can help to improve your business’s seo as well.

 

Come to the experts

There are few search engine optimisation agencies here in Wales which have the level of experience we have.
Whether it’s writing content marketing, improving your business’s technical SEO, or perhaps link building we are the business call.

We work with well-known brands, that are well-known companies within Wales. We can offer you SEO advice, and offer to consult with your company as regularly as you would like. All we can offer monthly fixed-price packages, which can help start improving your business’s organic SEO.

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2024/01/24 2024/01/24

A step-by-step guide on how to improve your business’s Local SEO

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Date: 24th of January 2024

Written by: Ryan Walsh

There are many businesses that hire digital marketing agencies to help the company to sell even more products on a national or even an international basis.

 

For example, the agency may complete the following work:

– Building backlinks
– Adding schema mark-up
– Adding NAP
– Building business citations
– Building backlinks

 

What is local SEO?

There are now more businesses than ever that want to promote their company locally within the immediate area in which their company is based.

For example, you might just want to get more customers in one single town or city. This is where “Local SEO” can help promote your business to better advertise the products or services you sell.

 

Formulate a detailed marketing strategy

As you walk around the local supermarket, grabbing things that are on offer- you might find that when you return home, you have spent, let’s say, over £100. Yet after all that expense and time, you might not have anything to make a meal out of!
If you have a shopping list, it’s much easier to make a meal plan; therefore, less food goes to waste.

Now you might think that we’re going off topic here are a bit! But trust us we are not, when it comes to search engine optimisation, its important to always have a plan.

It’s too easy to spend, let’s say, 1000 hours in total trying to improve your business’s search engine optimisation, yet you might not get anywhere unless theres a plan of what you need to do.

For example, you should ask yourself?

-How many quality backlinks do we need to get on page one of Google
– Is the website well designed?
-Do we need to add more pages
– How many quality blog posts do we need to write?
-These are just some of the questions you need to consider before you embark on improving your businesses SEO.
You, therefore, need to have a plan of which keywords, and you want to enhance how you can go about it.

 

 

Moz and Ahrefs

We would highly recommend using Moz or Ahrefs for keyword research.

And do make a really detailed marketing plan, as otherwise, you could spend a considerable amount of time trying to improve your company’s SEO and not get anywhere! That’s because you may not create a rounded marketing strategy. This simply means you may overly concentrate on say building links, when really you should spent more time improving the onsite SEO.

 

Carry out a local SEO audit

Hire a top Cardiff SEO consultant

First things first, even if you’re planning on doing the work yourself, talk to a SEO expert first to gain some initial advice to help come up with a marketing plan. This might sometimes be created for less than one thousand pounds. However, its well worth the expense, because, you will have a roadmap for how you can get your company on page one of Google.

The SEO consultant should therefore consider the following when writing your maketing plan:

-How many backlinks do your competitors have
-How many blog posts have they written

– How good is there onsite SEO?

 

Keywords

It’s essential to know which keywords you will optimise your website for. We would highly recommend using Ahrefs, this is the tool we would recommend using.

Some keywords might have an huge search volume and you can check this using “Google Search Console”.

If the keywords have a huge search volume, then this means you will want to get your company on the first page of Google for those keywords. That’s because if they describe a product / service you sell, then by getting your business on page one of Google, for that keyword, your likely to gain more business.

 

Technical SEO

Don’t purchase really cheap website hosting for your company, it’s a total waste of time- instead, you should choose a quality hosting company, which offers fast hosting, such as “Siteground”.

Do make sure the loading times on each and every page and blog post are good. We recommend either A2 hosting or Siteground website hosting.

 

Mobile optimisation

Use mobile optimisation methods, to make sure that your smartphone version of your website works well. Make sure your company website works well on i-phones and android phones.

 

A/B testing

You should use split testing to continuously improve the user experience (U.X) of your website.

 

Keep your Google Business Profile up-to-date

Obtain a Google My Business account and keep it up-to-date your

Ensure that your business obtains a Google Business Profile, it’s free so do obtain one. It only takes around less than an hour to

complete. It is straightforward to verify your business as well, then make sure you add as much detail as possible.

 

You should add the following information to your companies Google My Business account:

– Your businesses opening hours
– Ensure you choose the right business category
– Gain reviews from your customers
– Add your company logo
– Add your companies NAP (Name of business, address and phone number)
– Add a link to the home page
– Add phone number

 

Respond to customer reviews

Customer reviews can be left in many places, such as on Google My Business, Yelp, and other websites like Trustpilot. Therefore, if you do get a bad review, make sure that you respond to it, or if you believe it’s a fake, therefore a malicious view against your business, make sure you flag it as a fake business review.

Obtain a Google Analytics account (its completely free)
Obtaining a Google Analytics or Google Search Console account is completely free and really easy to set up so we would recommend obtaining one if you haven’t already?

A Google Analytics account gives you insight into how many organic visitors are coming to your website, which pages have a high bounce rate, and which pages have better engagement.

 

Keep an eye on your direct competitors SEO

Just like when you’re running your business, and look at the products and services your competitors are offering, you need to do this with your competitor’s SEO. This is so they don’t get a competitive advantage, for example, they may start building do-follow backlinks, from well known company, this could soar them to the top of Google. So you do need to monitor your competitors SEO.

 

We are a very well-known SEO agency that’s located in the heart of Cardiff. If you want to improve your business’s local or national or international search engine optimisation, then why not give our business a ring today? We have SEO consultants which now have well over 10 years experience helping many brands to get to the top of Google.co.uk.

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