How to Create Shocking SEO Plans for Electricians
The best SEO plans are the ones that work.
Learn tips and tricks here to expand your reach and attract more paying customers to your electrician website. SEOBANK offers Web Design, SEM, SEO Plans and Full seo marketing packages for electricians that are looking to generate sales leads. Contact us for an SEO strategy example that is proven to work.
Are you creating new SEO plans?
In today’s digital age, the key to any successful SEO strategy is the same: satisfy Google. It’s been the uncontested search engine leader since its inception on September 4th, 1998.
Google now boasts over 90% of search engine market shares worldwide. Why is that important and what does it mean?
Instead of trying to please dozens of search engines, you need only please one, making your SEO strategy simple and straightforward. Follow a few uncomplicated steps, and voila… your page ranking skyrockets overnight!
Whether you’re an electrician trying to drum up business on your website or a Fortune 500 company redesigning your digital presence, the SEO principles are the same.
Read on if you’re ready to learn those principles!
What is SEO?
Let’s make sure we’re speaking the same language before we jump into the meat of this article. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of adjusting your website to make it easily accessible to search engines.
Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other popular search engines send out web crawlers to scour the web. These crawlers search through each page of your website and take snapshots of what they find. This information is sent back to their company servers where it’s dissected and stored.
When you type a query into a search engine, it quickly flips through the billions of website snapshots they’ve stored. The search engine returns these results, ranking each web page according to how well it matched the query.
SEO is all about adjusting your website so web crawlers can easily read the information. That’s the heart of SEO. Internet gurus sometimes throw a few additional elements into the mix. We’ll discuss those as well in the sections below.
SEO Essentials
How does Google determine whether your webpage matches a query? Only a handful of people actually know because Google’s constantly evolving algorithm is a closely-held, trade secret.
Fortunately, Google has taken pity on web developers. It may not publish the algorithm, but it drops hints. In 2018, we know the following components significantly impacted algorithms:
- Structured data
- Keywords
- Headers
- Content
- Dwell time
- Meta Description
- Alt Tags
- Links
The following sections will expand on these.
Structured Data
A way for search engines to make sense of the content on your website is through structured data, most notably, through the use of two tools: sitemaps and schema.
HTML sitemaps, are primarily for users so we won’t expand on them here but XML sitemaps used to organize your information so those pesky web crawlers can better understand the relationship between pages on your website.
Schema is a tool to use after you’ve built your XML sitemap. Imagine each piece in your sitemap is a wall which defines your structure. Your schema is the paint job and decoration that goes on those walls, giving your building personality.
Keywords
When a user types a query into a search engine, the engine tries to match each word to suitable web pages. One of the methods they use is to match-up the word in the query with the words on the page.
Good marketers take the time to research the most popular key terms people search for in his industry and use keywords to their advantage.
For example, an electrical contractor in Vail, Colorado may find the following are the most searched for terms in his industry:
- Vail electric repair
- Best electrician qualifications
- Where to find an electrician near me
- Common electrical issues
He should then build four web pages, one for each group of terms above.
Where, and how often, he uses those keywords on the page is a constantly evolving strategy. In the ’90s and early ’00s, keyword stuffing was the primary method, where web designers would shove as many of those words as they could onto the page.
Today, strategies have changed due primarily to the advent of Artificial intelligence (AI), which becomes more intelligent each year. AI is now quite good at determining how well the content on your webpage matches a user’s query, relying less on keywords.
Does that mean the use of keywords has disappeared altogether? Hardly. They are just used with more finesse. We recommend you use one in your introduction, one in your H1 header, one in your H2 header, and one in your conclusion.
Headers
Your headlines used as section titles for your content are described as headers. When coding in HTML, a headline is abbreviated as H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, or H6. Each headline grows progressively smaller, H1 being the largest and only used once on any page.
Drop one of your keywords in your H1 header and drop it again in one of your H2 headers.
Content
As we mentioned, AIs are much better at discerning whether users will find your content useful. The best way to address this is (you guessed it) to build helpful content, including:
- Blog Articles
- Videos
- Product Pages
- Podcasts
- Infographics
Develop professional, relevant content to your audience to rank high! You’ve hit the mark if your video could land a spot on CBS! If it looks like it wouldn’t pass muster in a 5th-grade art project, it’s time to head back to the drawing board!
To learn more, take a look at how to write great quality content.
Dwell Time
This is just a fancy way of saying how long visitors hang out on your web pages during their visit. The longer they stay on a page, the longer the dwell time. and the longer the dwell time, the higher you score in Google’s algorithm. These are determined by Google analytics.
How do you increase dwell time? You build content relevant to the keywords for the page.
Meta Description
Spend time writing an accurate, enticing meta description. Search engines may not use these descriptions in their algorithms, but they do look at visitor’s dwell times. These nifty little snippets are what users read to determine whether your website is worth visiting and are found on search engine results pages below your website’s name.
Alt Tags
Search engines are getting better at understanding images, but are still inaccurate. You can help web crawlers understand your graphics by describing each with words and placing these descriptions in the alt tag of the corresponding image.
The alt tags are part of the HTML code used to build your website and can be accessed through the backend of your website portal.
Links
Web pages link to other web pages through 3 types of links.
Internal links – links direct visitors to another webpage on the same site
Outbound links – link direct visitors to pages on someone else’s website
Inbound links (also called backlinks) – link visitors from other websites to your site
The complexities of link-building are beyond the scope of this article. Read How to Build Backlinks to walk through the most essential type of links.
Turning SEO Plans into Strategy
Components like keywords and alt tags are the short-term, mechanical portion of SEO plans, but some SEO components, such as backlinks, require a long-term strategy.
Think through your entire process for each component to build an SEO strategy template. Then create an SEO project plan from this template. If you stick to it, you’ll finish most of your SEO in 1 day. The rest will take a couple of months to finish. Remember, whether it’s SEO Plans for Electricians or any other industry, the method is the same!
If you found this article helpful, take five minutes to check out our library of other great SEO articles.
Increasing Your Brand’s Exposure on Facebook
Visual Branding On Facebook
Creating Consistent Brand Standards for Better Facebook Marketing.
Usually, we think about a top brand before purchasing a product or signing up for their service. As consumers, we develop trust towards a specific brand name due to their quality or association with what the company stands for.
Today, when a new company is going to compete in the global market, visual branding must be done in order to capture some of the mindshare of the public. People are much more convinced with visual representation rather than written text or simple audios in advertisement technique.
Not all audience get ample time to go through the texts. When anything is in the form of a picture or moving object, that makes them much more convincing.
Along with making a good-looking presentation, the visual branding directly communicates the message. Here are some visual branding tips to get you started.
Social Media Visual Branding Tips
- Understand The Psychology of Colour in Marketing & Branding
- Create a professional business logo for all your social accounts
- Adhere to Brand Standards (Colours & Fonts) consistently
- Create social media templates or add your logo to social media visuals
- Create clear messaging that is congruent with your companies core values
- How does the public view your Brand, Warm & Fuzzy, Corporate & Serious?
Find out what resonates best with your ideal client and start a list of where your flock is hanging out online. You will be able to start branding your business in the right location, remember birds of a feather flock together ; ) If you are a B2B business you may want to select a completely different set of social media accounts compared to B2C.
Need a little direction? What about a done for you social strategy? Have a look at our social media marketing services page and book a free conversation with one of our Social (SMM) Certified Team.
Examples of Great Visual Branding
Facebook is a social media platform where almost all business leaders are posting their brand, products, and seo services Windsor.
This is producing a much higher ROI than the other web marketing London ON. The World has gone DIGITAL. It’s quick, engaging, and allows you to target a specific demographic while still hitting a large marketing goal.
Let’s see a few of the companies that excels at visual branding on Facebook.
1. Crate & Barrel
Who doesn’t love looking at the photos by Crate & Barrel? Look at all the homey and eye-catching pictures they share.
All these photos have four things in common. They all have the color white, a touch of color of green, soft color schemes, and all are related to home and lifestyle.
2. Shake Shack
This is one of the pages I hate to follow because it makes me So Hungry!
If you’ve ever eaten at Shake Shack, what you see is definitely what you get: delicious, unforgettable burgers. yum!
Not only are they consistent with sharing burger craving pics and fries photos, they’re also tempting their audience to grab a bite.
If you’re a food business and you 100% believe that the meals and dishes you offer are the best, you can try this visual strategy. Share photos of your food more often and make them so good that you make your audience drool.
3. Fila
Being sporty looks so stylish and cool … if you looked at Fila’s photos above you almost feel like you got more game, instantly!
Fila’s photos are like a cross of TSN and fashion blogger’s page. The more you look at it, the more you want to copy their style. From the way, they take their photos and the consistent colour branding, which are primarily blue and white – which are of course just reinforcing the colors of Fila’s logo.
See where I am going with this?
They might not all be the same shades of blue and white, they also break away from their standard branding for female shoes and clothing.
4. Dairy Milk
Chocolate doesn’t ask silly questions, chocolate Understands.
I know it and you know it, you are salivating right now. Cadbury Dairy Milk’s page is full of picture after picture of luxurious chocolate. Anyone can see that they stay true to their Brand and have purple hue’s on everything.
You know this is a company with serious brand standards and it shows. Even the Dairy Milk Logo itself is two glasses of milk pouring into the design, more ways to tell your brain Cadbury has dark, rich chocolate and you want some.
The brand stands out because they care how they look, serious amounts of data go into Brand Analysis and it pays.
How To Establish Your Visual Brand
If you’re thinking of taking your own photos and you want to incorporate your brand into them without putting a logo, do what Fila does: incorporate the colors of your logo into your photos.
Don’t take random photos of your product, make sure they’re attractive and the colors in the photos represent your Brand’s colors.
If you have more than three colors in your logo, think Google, you can use one or two at a time, if you feel like using all of them at the same time it may be overwhelming.
Just in case you don’t have a logo yet and you want to do visual branding on Facebook just like Fila, there are tools that really helped my company like LogoAi that helps you design a logo in minutes and even generates your brand guidelines for you.
Canva is another great tool that we use to stay consistent on social media and their design tool allows you to save a set of brand standards so you look perfectly aligned with your company’s look and feel every time you post. You can also check out their guide to branding your visual style. Get in touch for Best Sarnia seo specialist.
What do you think? What’s your favorite brand on Facebook that takes their visual branding to another level? Let us know in the comment section below!
A Beginner’s Guide to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
If you want to attract a lot of organic traffic to your business website, you need SEO marketing.
But you already know that. You don’t know what SEO is or how you’re supposed to use it. That’s okay. We’ve created this detailed guide to break it down for you.
Keep reading to learn more about SEO and why your business needs it.
What Is Search Engine Optimization or SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a way to increase the quality and the quantity of your website traffic with organic search results. At the same time, this will also provide more exposure to your brand.
Most people will tell you SEO is about search engine optimization Kingsville, but it actually has a lot to do with people. Not only do you have to understand the kind of things your audience is searching for, you also have to know what words they’re using, and what content format they want. Once you know these things, you can create optimized content designed for and cater to your target audience.
And it all starts with asking these kinds of questions: what, who, when, how, why, where.
For example, let’s say you have a business that sells electronic blankets. These are some of the questions you might ask to help you get familiar with your target audience.
- What types of electronic blankets are people searching for?
- Who is looking for these blankets?
- When do people search for these blankets (are the searches seasonal)?
- How are people searching for these blankets (what words are they using, what devices do they prefer, and what questions do they ask)?
- Why are people looking for electronic blankets?
- Where are these people located (are they local visitors, national visitors, or international visitors)?
Once you know the answers to these questions, you can focus on providing high-quality content about electronic blankets and fulfilling the needs of your target audience.
Why Is SEO Important?
You can pay for advertising or set up social media accounts for your business, but most of the traffic online comes through search engines. If your website isn’t search engine optimized, you’re cutting yourself off from a platform of potential traffic.
Organic search results make your website more credible, and they get a lot more clicks than advertisements. The number of people who click on ads is minuscule compared to the number of online searchers out there.
On top of that, in order to keep your ads up, you have to keep paying for them. That’s not the case with SEO.
If you’re SEO is set up properly, it can continue giving your website traffic over long periods of time. This means your traffic will keep growing the longer you have content on your website.
Optimizing your website gives search engines better information about your content so they can properly display your content in the search results.
Getting Familiar With the Search Engine Basics
Organic Search results
Organic search results are results you don’t pay for.
For example, if someone finds your website by clicking on a paid advertisement, they did not find your website through organic search results. These are the types of results you can impact with SEO.
SERP Features
SERP stands for search engine results pages, and they now have many different SERP features, also known as dynamic organic results formats.
Some of these features include Also Ask boxes, image carousels, and featured snippets.
For example, when you look up what day Christmas lands on this year, you would see the date as part of the SERP. If you wanted to look for good restaurants in your area, you might find what’s called a “local pack” of restaurant suggestions in the SERP as well.
The Three Different Types of SEO
There are a few different SEO methods you should be aware of when you enter the world of optimization. SEO gives you a long-term strategy to build traffic for your website.
But not every SEO strategy does that.
Here are the three different types of SEO and what you need to know about them.
White Hat SEO
White hat SEO is the type of SEO you want. It involves the best SEO techniques and practices that work with the search engine rules. This SEO focuses on delivering helpful and quality content to the people who’re looking for it.
Black Hat SEO
People who use black hat SEO techniques are trying to spam search engines. This type of SEO optimizes content for the search engines without considering the people searching for it at all.
Black hat SEO can work, but if you use this strategy, you’re at a high risk of being penalized or removed from the search results altogether.
Most people don’t consider black hat SEO ethical, so you’ll want to stay away from it.
Grey Hat SEO
As you might guess, this is a mix of white hat SEO and black hat SEO. But just because you’re using white hat SEO doesn’t make up for your use of black hat SEO.
You should either stick to white hat SEO strategies or not use any SEO at all. Anything else can have a negative impact on your business.
What You Need to Know to Start a SEO Plan
The first step of optimizing your website is making sure you’re familiar with your business goals. Having a clear understanding of your website allows you to better choose the areas of SEO to focus on, shows you where to track conversions, and tells you how to set benchmarks.
Set up some key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can measure the return on your SEO investment.
These vary from website to websites, but they might include:
- Phone calls / Leads
- Email Signups
- Contact Form Submissions
- Downloads
- E-commerce Sales
- Etc.
You should also consider hiring an SEO professional.
You can learn basic SEO yourself, but you have to have plenty of time set aside and be willing to learn it. And SEO can be more complicated than it sounds.
Undertaking all of this on a busy business schedule can be overwhelming. If you want the best results, hiring an SEO professional is the way you should go.
Are you looking for trustworthy SEO services? Make sure you head over to our services page and take a look at how we can help you with best Sarnia seo expert.
6 Steps to Creating Long-form Content for Social Media Sites for Lead Generation
6 Steps to Creating Long-form Content for Social Media Sites
If you’re a marketer, it’s obvious that one of your biggest worries is lead generation. You’re always looking for new ways to capture more leads for your business. And you’re not alone.
According to State of Inbound report, generating traffic and leads is by far companies’ top marketing challenge.
But often times, it’s difficult to get leads that will ultimately become your customers. But what if you can tap into the power of social media content marketing to acquire more targeted traffic and leads to your website?
That’s exactly what long-form content on social media will do for your business. There is a big audience on social media. There are about 2.46 billion monthly active users on social media with that expected to reach 2.62 billion by the end of 2018.
However, it’s difficult to stand out amidst the noise on social media. One way you can stand out is through long-form content. Now there is lots of debate in the SEO world on how long should a blog post be but for this article we are going to focus on getting more external content on social media, to point back to your blog pages.
Benefits of long-form content on social media.
There are many advantages of publishing long-form content on social media. Let’s consider a few of them:
- You can analyze a complex concept easily.
- Users don’t need to go to your website before they access this content.
- Your content can be found on search engines. According to several studies, search results on Google’s first page are usually 2,000 words or more.
- You build your reputation as an expert in your industry.
- It is an opportunity to capture more leads.
There are simple steps you can follow on dedicated social media portals to give you the best chance of capturing leads for your business. We’ll consider these 6 steps:
i). Define your social media goals: What do you want to achieve with your content on social media? In this case, you’re trying to capture more leads. But you have to engage your readers and provide value to achieve it.
ii). Decide whether it’ll be gated or non-gated: This is where you decide how you want to capture leads. Do you want more reach for your content or are you willing to sacrifice reach for leads?
Gated content is content that requires readers to submit their information like name, company, email address, etc. before they can access your content. The objective is to capture leads before you get the value in the post. Here is an example of what I mean…
Another way is that you can leave the access open for every reader. This gives your post more reach. You can have a link to subscribe later in the post to capture leads. Most people bounce off a page if they have to submit their information which means gated content may have a lower reach.
iii). Define value for your audience: People see value differently. Some people require little to derive value from your content while others require a lot before they’re satisfied.
What is value to your audience? You can check the long-form content that has performed well in your industry in the past to get a clue of what is expected of you to provide value.
iv). Perform keyword research: What do you want to write about? What are the words your readers use when they talk about this topic or when they go on search engines?
Let your keyword research guide you in writing a new topic or writing an old topic with a new insight.
v). Write your post: Now you have to write which is probably the most important step as you have no content without this. If you want to capture leads, you need quality content for this.
You can either write the post yourself or get a great writer to write for you to connect with your readers.
One other thing you also have to add to your content is visuals. After all, articles with images get 94% more views than those without.
vi). Optimize for conversions and promote your content: In your content, you should always insinuate to your readers that they can get more benefits when they submit their information to you.
You have to promote your content to give it as much exposure as possible.
Let’s consider how you can implement these steps in the following social media channels.
The Rise of Social Media Content Marketing – Navigation Links
Long-form Content for LinkedIn
Long-form Content for Facebook
Posts for Google My Business
Long-form Content for Medium
Business Q & A for Alignable
How to create long-form content for LinkedIn (Posts, Formually Pulse.)
You can create long-form content on LinkedIn majorly through the new LinkedIn Posts feature (Pulse has gone away). The shift from “pulse to posts” happened sometime in the last two years after Microsoft purchased Linkedin in 2016.
If you do posts on LinkedIn consistently and implement the right strategies, you can easily drive traffic and leads to your business by publishing on LinkedIn with Posts.
Here’s how you can go about this.
- Keyword Research for LinkedIn
What are the terms people use when describing the topic? Content on LinkedIn usually has a professional tone and those are the words you must look for when looking for keywords.
For your post on LinkedIn, the headline is very important. According to research by Noah Kagan and Search Wilderness, they found that How-to articles and listicles perform best on LinkedIn as they got average views of 22,368 and 16,364 respectively.
This is a How-to post by Richard Branson that has over 1 million views and over 15,000 likes
This is a listicle by LinkedIn CEO, Jeff Weiner, that has over 180,000 likes, we can’t all be the CEO of LinkedIn but what we are saying here is always swing for the fences.
Include a number in your headline as they tend to perform better. Tests conducted by Marketing Experiments for an online dental company found that headlines with number increased conversion.
They compared headlines and their result is shown below.
To post on LinkedIn, check the popular posts to know what works for this type of audience. You can also use amazing tools to perfect your headline like co-schedules headline analyzer or BuzzSumo for content question topics.
1). Write your post for LinkedIn
To write your post, simply sign in and click ‘Write an Article’ in your usual message posting section of your LinkedIn profile.
After this, you’re transferred to the LinkedIn Post editor where you can see a new blank post ready for your input.
You can craft your post now. Add pictures to your post. According to Kagan, posts with images have a greater number of LinkedIn shares, likes, comments, and views. After this, you can publish your post.
2). Optimize for conversions on LinkedIn Pulse
To optimize your post for conversion, you can offer an ebook or any freebie that will attract your readers to give you an opportunity to capture leads.
Jeff Bullas in a LinkedIn post offered a resource at the end of the post to capture leads.
The link leads you to this page.
LinkedIn promotes your post when you publish it. Your connections get a notification of the title and this is why you should use a catchy title.
It is also important to publish at the right time. Research shows that posts get most views on Thursdays and Sundays and least on Fridays.
If you need more tips on when to post on social media HubSpot put together an Infographic on the Best Times to Post on Social Media.
How to create long-form content for Facebook Notes
You can create long-form content for Facebook through Facebook Notes. You can create Facebook Notes both on your personal profile and your pages. I’ll be considering pages here.
1). Write your post on Facebook Notes
To create notes on your Facebook page, navigate to the page settings. Go to Apps and add Notes app.
Go to the Notes app. Here, you can see your published notes and drafts. At the top right corner, you’ll see the + Write Note button. Click to start your note.
To add links to your notes, you use the URL or HTML code. You can also upload your picture below the text. This will turn to code in the text.
After writing your post, you can publish it.
2). Optimize for conversions on Facebook Notes
You’ll have a link to share your notes with others. You can also leave a link to your website within the note.
Pages have RSS feeds for their notes which can help to improve visibility.
This is an example of a Facebook Note by Kristi Hines.
Below is an example of a Facebook Note by Bill Gates.
How to create long-form content for Google My Business Posts
If your business is listed on Google My Business, then you should expand your online reach by having posts in your business listing. It’s free and it can lead to more business for you. Back in 2017, I created a whole video around Google Posts, that you can watch right now.
1). Write your post on Google My Business
Google Post is usually not indexed and it can stay live for up to 7 days. This requires you to write content regularly. Under your business listing, up to 10 posts can be displayed on a list with only 2 visible to you. You can share more information about your business here.
To write your post, go to the Google My Business page and select post.
When you get to post, you can upload your picture and write your post. Note that you can add a link to your website in your post.
When your post is live, you can get the statistics of how many times your post has been viewed and your link clicked.
2). Optimize for conversions on Google My Business Posts
Google Posts is an opportunity to share important information like special discounts, new products and services, upcoming events, the satisfactory experience of your customers, etc.
You must optimize this page to get as many people to click the link to your website or take any other actions you want.
How to create long-form content for Medium
Medium founder, Ev Williams, was also Blogger’s founder and Twitter’s co-founder. As he said in 2012 when he created the platform:
Medium is not about who you are or whom you know, but about what you have to say.
On Medium, you can post on your publication or post to other publications. This platform is both a social media and blogging platform. And it’s damn powerful!
1). Create and publish a story content on Medium
When you get to the Medium homepage, you can click on the “get started” button and register for a new account.
After that, click on your profile icon and click “new story” second selection on the list to create a post.
This takes you to the editor which has a simple interface and is easy to use.
You can click the + icon to give you more options. You can either add a picture, a video, an embedded code, or a separator.
You can click on any of those if you want to insert it. With pictures, you can also position it how you like. You can either save draft or publish the story when you’re through. If you’re publishing it, you can add tags to your post depending on what type of content it is.
To check the performance of your post click on your profile and select “stats”.
It brings you a graph that shows the traffic.
Below the graph, you can see the views, reads, read ratio, and fans. Anyone who visits your post register as a view.
“Reads” are those people who read it entirely and “read ratio” measures the ratio of reading and views. Fans are the number of readers who endorse the post for your post.
1). Optimize for conversions on Medium
You can include a link to your website at the end of a post. You can also share a post on your website to Medium and link back to your website.
On Medium, every comment you make is seen as a form of a post. Adding comments to other posts can increase your visibility, which means more people view your profile and consequently your post.
Below is an example of a post by Nicolas Cole on Medium.
How to create Business Questions & Answers on Alignable
Alignable is a social site for local businesses. If you’re looking for leads that are in your locality, this is the website for you. Users refer business to other users, that’s basically how the website works.
1). Create compelling posts and Publish on Alignable
To share an update on Alignable, you can click on start a discussion to start.
If you want to view a community forum, click on discussions from the Alignable page
Under your groups, you can click on different communities to see discussions going on.
When a question is posted, the original poster can get answers from different people on the website.
If you see these questions, and it relates to your area of expertise, answer the question in detail.
2). Optimize for conversions on Alignable
On this website, apart from posting long-form content that hones your expertise, you must be willing to refer business to other people. This way, there are more people willing to refer people to you.
You get more leads which is what you want.
This is an example of a forum post on Alignable. To contribute to the discussion, click on ‘post answer’.
Conclusion
Long-form content is one of the best forms of content to gain leads because it positions you as an expert on a subject. More importantly, Google has shown preference in their search rankings for comprehensive and valuable long-form posts.
Traditionally, this type of content is popular in the blogging environment, but the audience is not as large as that of social media. Our thinking here is why not bring your best valued content to where the numbers are and use long-form content on social platforms to grow your audience.
Now, imagine how much impact, reach, and leads you could drive to your website and business if you consistently publish this valuable content on social media.
The results will only blow your mind. Though this is still a new trend on social media — but you can take advantage of it today to grow your leads and revenue through social media online marketing London ON Yes, that’s what I call it!
How to Write Great Quality Content (Which gets read and shared!)
What’s the point of writing if people aren’t going to read it? Or share it? Here are 15 top tips that will get people to read through your content and want to share it, today…
1. Have a strong opening
This is the number one thing you can do to get people to read your content. If you don’t get their attention early on, why would they bother learning what else it is you have to say?
Use the tricks of the trade to get their attention. Make a bold statement, ask an active question. You can make promises, for example – this could be the most valuable 10 minutes you spend today!
This also works for your Title tags too! You can ensure you have a strong emotional title tag by using the #1 Headline Analyzer from Co-schedule. Its helps get more posts read and gets traffic to your blog.
You can even use repetition: transform your writing, transform your content – transform your business!
You can use exaggerated language – but don’t try to sell people snake oil. There’s no point building something up if there is no value. If you read the rest of this blog, you will see that the claims above are justified.
Oh, you can also challenge people to read on – that works too!
2. Have a lot of white space
Make sure there’s a lot of white space in your article. Some blogs actually have a policy of putting each sentence on a new line. That’s not necessary, but each bit of information should have its own space to be digested by the reader.
The benefit of making sure that you write in short paragraphs is that it breaks your ideas down into short, digestible chunks. People can often skim past large chunks of text – but will read pages and pages if they only have to tackle a little bit at a time.
People are also consuming more media on mobile devices. What might seem like a short paragraph compared to a book can take up the entire real estate of a smartphone.
By having white space, you are also making it more likely that people will read what you have written, no matter which device they are using it on. Here is a complete write up on how to create white space with CSS in your wordpress site.
3. Make use of lists
If you break your article down into a list, it’s another way of making it more approachable. It also gives the people reading it a clear indication of the purpose of each section.
Even if you are writing longer paragraphs, you still need to have a topic sentence and concluding sentence in each paragraph. Lists put that topic sentence in a very clear and readable way.
People also like lists. A top 10 list can contain just as much content as a long form article. Lists allow people to skim through the points and then look at the pieces that interest them.
4. Use bullet points
In the body of your writing, there are times when you will want to write a list. That can be in a post, in a blog, in an article and sometimes even in an advert. They tend to be long, run on sentences. Converting that list into bullet points makes the individual points easier to digest, and refer to. It also avoid confusing comma, colon and semicolon use (and misuse).
This means people will pay more attention to your content and you can use it in all forms of writing for:
- Posts
- Blogs
- Articles
- Adverts
| You can use box-outs, pictures and GIFs to break up the flow of the page and maintain interest. |
Like This One….
5. Should you ask questions?
Using active questions is a great way of engaging people. If people see a question, they will want to read on to find the answer. It’s also a good way of rephrasing the focus of that section, and making people take a step back to think.
So how do you write a good question?
It has to be something that people actually want an answer to. Making the heading of every section a question isn’t likely to get people’s attention and make them read on.
6. Talk directly to your audience
First person when you write as yourself, third person is when you write about someone else: he, she or they. For blogs, you should use direct address – second person, if you will. Direct address means that you use the word ‘you’ a lot. You are directly focusing on the audience, and your attention is on them – rather than yourself.
7. Be present
You should be using the present tense, right now! You shouldn’t have used the past tense. The past tense describes things that have happened, while the present tense describes things that are happening in the moment. The present tense is more engaging, more exciting and more direct.
8. Be active
Use the active rather than the passive voice. The active voice means that you are doing things – the passive voice means that things are being done to you:
- When you write, you will excite the reader by being active.
- The reader will not be as excited by your writing using the passive voice.
The first is active, the second is passive. There are places for each – but the pace is quicker using the active voice, and will make people read on more than the passive voice does.
9. Be informal
When you are writing, try and be friendly and approachable. You may know a lot more about the subject that people who are reading it (you may not). It doesn’t mean that you have to rub it in their faces.
The correct way to write in order to get the attention of your audience is something
that many people attempt but most get wrong. One needs to be professional while
still imparting the requisite knowledge that forms the intrinsic purpose of the writing.
OK, so the example above isn’t wrong – but it’s not the easiest thing to read. A more conversational tone with more accessible vocabulary means that more people will be able to access and understand your ideas.
You’re not dumbing down, you’re ‘accessing up’!
10. Have a clear purpose
In everything you write, you need to make it clear what it is you are trying to accomplish. In this blog, it has hopefully been clear from the title, and the list subheadings what the purpose of the entire article and each of the different sections is.
If people can see what your writing is for, then there’s a greater chance that they will read it.
11. Outline a clear benefit
It should be clear what the benefit of your writing is to the people reading it. If you’re writing an advert, then you make it clear what the audience will get out of buying your product or service.
Create Clear Call to Actions
If you’re writing a blog, then you need to make it clear from the start what the benefit will be to people who invest their time in reading the whole article. At the top of this article, it said ‘Read these tips and you will instantly be able to make your content more readable.’ That was a great call to action – but it also happens to be true.
Even if people know all these points already – taking time out to make sure they are still covering all the bases will help their writing. If some people have never really considered tense, person or voice before – then their online writing will improve.
State a benefit that’s a bold claim, but also one that can be backed up. People don’t like being tricked by clickbait, so make sure you have something of value to back up that click.
12. Front load your message
If you are writing an advert on Facebook – you should pay attention to the first 90 characters or so.
Why?
On a mobile feed, that represents the top two lines of writing. Two lines is short enough that people will read it without thinking – go onto a third line and they may skip past. Also, if you use something like Facebook’s audience network, the first 90 characters are all that people will see in an in-app add or interstitial.
Even if you’re not writing on Facebook, or Twitter – you should hook your audience in with an interesting first sentence that will make them read on. You should also rear load your message – and finish with a strong ‘hook’ that people will remember if they keep reading.
If you hook your audience, your business will be stuck in their head long after they’ve read your content.
13. Be quotable
Another way for people to share your content is to make it easy for them to share and post to social sites and other web 2.0 sites. Making quotes that are easy to share is a great way to get your content seen.
Here is an example…
[tweetshare tweet=”Learn 15 Pro Tips to Be a Better #ContentMarketer!” username=”SEOBANKca”]If you’re writing well, then there should be lots of opportunities for quotable content with the topic sentence at the beginning of every section, and also the concluding sentence. Look at the beginning and end of each of the sections and you’ll see what I mean.
Except for this one – this isn’t a good sentence to quote on Twitter 😉
14. Make it easy to share
If you want people to share your writing, then you should make is so they can do it without much effort. You should have links to social media when you are writing a blog – ideally in a bar that’s present wherever they are in an article.
If you want what you write to be shared,
make it easy for people to share it.
That can mean doing things like:
- Making it bigger
- Change the formatting
- Put it in bold or italics
- Add a plugin that means you can post the quote directly to a social media platform
We use a LOT of social media tools to help us gain victory over search and social, but one of my all time favorites is Social Warfare, which is providing the share buttons on the left hand side of this blog (Feel Free to Share this article Now, Thanks!) and the “Click to Tweet” button above.
Also, you can share things about yourself to make the points that you are making even more relevant. I have written millions of words that have been published on blogs and on social media, and it’s all about making a genuine connection.
I am not a robot, I am a person…
I find that people sometimes forget that there’s someone sitting at the computer, typing these words with a rapidly cooling cup of coffee in front of them – that they can contact and talk to if they have questions. I’m happy to help. Remember, when you write for shares you need to share something of yourself too. Give of yourself.
15. Check your work
There’s nothing that can stop people reading quicker than bad writing.
This sentence look its not reallty bad but i think people find hard it to read
then they stop and if its ever going to end they wonder.
See What we Mean?
Thank you for making it through that deliberately badly written sentence. It wasn’t that much fun, was it? Use something like Grammarly or Hemingway to check your writing. Read through what you’ve written before you post it – and get a fresh set of eyes to look over it if you can. You don’t want people to miss out on things that could really help them because of bad spelling or grammar.
Using these tips will help you to get more people to read what you have to say – and make it easier for them to share it. When it’s easier for people to read what you have to say, it’s easier for them to make a genuine connection with you.
[vc_empty_space height=”12px”][stm_partner style=”style_2″ title=”Zachary Jarvis” logo=”2047″ position=”Founder at Magnate.co” img_size=”medium” description=”Zachary is the founder at Magnate who’s vision is to partner with clients to drive business results via their social-first digital marketing services.” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fmagnate.co|title:Website|”]
