As a communicator and content creator, one of your goals should always be to maximize the readership of the blog articles published on your website. Because what’s the point in spending time researching and writing a well-thought-out blog article if no one is going to read it?
Like social media, the way readers consume blog articles is continuously changing. So we have to be open to continuous pivoting and optimization to maximize reach and readership.
How Do You Do That?
Well, there are several ways this can be accomplished — embedding high-quality images and videos to optimize the navigation ability, maintaining brand identity, and adding tags to improve search engine optimization are great places to start. Here are our top four recommendations for a solid website blog in 2022.
High-Quality Visuals
Did you know human brains were built for visual information? It’s been said that blogs implementing high-quality photos or videos can grow traffic something like 12 times faster when compared to those who don’t.
Think about it; put yourself in the reader’s place. Do blogs with high-quality visuals retain your attention longer than blogs with text only?
People tend to associate high-quality photos and videos with being “a lot of money.” Invest in a solid digital camera and utilize the professional features of your cell phone camera to make some stand-out visual content to embed into your blogs in the future. It doesn’t have to cost much.
Optimize Navigation Ability
No matter your organization type, ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly is key. Imagine having to read a blog with the text cut off, having to scroll not just up and down, but left and right to read a complete sentence. Yea, no, we’re likely clicking out of there…no one has time for that.
Ensuring that your website is optimized for desktop, mobile and tablets will ensure that the readers of your blogs have a smooth experience navigating through the website.
Here’s a data point we’d like to leave you with, mobile devices drove 61 percent of visits to U.S. websites in 2020.
Maintain Brand Identity
When a community member, client, potential applicant, etc., click on your blog article, they should be able to immediately identify that it’s coming from your organization.
Maintaining branded fonts in the headline and body, keeping with branded colors, ensuring consistency with the layout, and maintaining the organization’s voice will enhance your brand identity via blogs published on the website.
Add Tags
While this step seems simple, many content creators and organizations do not utilize the tag feature, which is a FREE way to improve your blog’s search engine optimization (SEO).
When it comes to your website and blogs, SEO is everything as it improves the positioning of web pages in organic search results. So when one of your blog’s tags is searched on the internet, your blog will be positioned higher in search engines compared to the blogs with the same topic but no tags.
When adding tags to your blogs in the future, it’s imperative to tailor them specifically to the content in the post. It’s helpful to conduct a quick Google search to identify what people are Googling about your blog topic and use that information to help you strategically choose the best tags to elevate your content.