You already know why you need a blog: to keep clients in the loop, offer helpful tips and tricks, rank well on the search engine results page (SERP), educate your audience, position yourself as an industry leader and grow your reach.

Knowing all of this, it’s important to update your content and publish it on a regular schedule. Otherwise, your customers have nothing to read. Check out our tips for publishing all the right things at the right time.

Conduct keyword research

Sure, you can technically write a blog post about anything. But if you want to leverage your posts to help you reach your goals, have a strategy for the topics you choose to cover.

That’s where keyword research comes in. The good news: You don’t have to have marketing expertise to conduct this research. You can start by simply brainstorming some of the phrases or words you think people would use when searching for a product or service like yours via a search engine.

From there, you can go to the search engines themselves, type in these words and phrases and see what other ideas surface, such as in the “People also ask” section of the results page. You can also check out what your competitors are blogging about, and see if there’s a topic worth putting your own spin on.

If you’ve got the time to get more in depth with your research, tools like Moz, Semrush and Google Ads Keyword Planner can help you pinpoint keywords that would be good to cover through your blog. Resources like Yoast and HubSpot can also help you get a firm grasp on the concept of search engine optimization (SEO), which can increase the likelihood of having your blog rank high on the SERP.

Define your brand voice

Having a defined brand voice and tone helps you maintain consistency in your messaging across your blog, website copy, social media captions, advertising and more. It also keeps everyone on your team on the same page about how you want to come across.

When it comes to your blog, you want to write how you speak. It also helps to employ storytelling whenever possible. Connecting with readers and creating content that flows easily while drawing them in is also what will keep them coming back.

It benefits both your rankings potential and brand credibility to have your content attributed to a person versus having the byline be your company name. Bonus points if you include their headshot and brief bio along with the post.

Use a content calendar to stay organized

Experienced content creators know having a content calendar is crucial to running a successful blog. This tool keeps you organized and on track and helps you see the bigger picture in terms of what topics you’ve already covered, what’s coming down the pike and what you may want to tackle next.

Your calendar can be as simple or as specific as you like—and you can create one in just a few minutes via Google Sheets. If you work with a team, it’s often a good idea to use a cloud-based document like this rather than a static Excel sheet that can only be accessed by the owner.

A calendar also adds transparency about who is responsible for what part of the blog’s creation process. Along with columns for things like the content type, topic, publish date and author, you can add deadlines to keep everyone accountable and in sync.

Leverage feedback from clients and prospects

Listening to your current and potential customers is an easy way to source new blog content. Is there something your team gets asked about frequently? Is there a problem they can help solve? These are the kinds of questions you can answer through blog content.

A business blog’s ultimate goal is to provide value to its readers. You can do this while also positioning your brand as an industry authority by creating content that directly aligns with the issues your target audience is trying to solve.

Keep an eye on your competitors

Of course, you never want to just mirror what the competition is doing. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use them for inspiration.

Are there keywords your competitors are outranking you for? If so, consider creating a similar piece of content, but doing it better, whether that means sourcing your own exclusive data, going more in depth or quoting the insights of experts on the subject at hand.

Schedule a yearly content audit

Once you’ve built up a sizable content library, audit and analyze your content at least once a year. This way, you can identify which pieces are outdated, inaccurate or no longer relevant.

From there, you can update or consolidate this content accordingly. (Semrush has a step-by-step process for conducting content audits.) Repurposing content is win-win: Your readers get fresh content, and you get new pieces to promote without having to start from scratch.

Refresh old or outdated content

Once your audit is complete, create your action plan. Updating your content could be as simple as changing a hyperlink from an older stat to a newer one, or combining two similar posts into one longer pillar page (like a one-stop-shop article on a topic).

To keep your blog content fresh and relevant, it’s particularly important to update time-based posts, such as “The Best E-Commerce Tools of 2021,” as these articles quickly grow stale as time goes on.

Running a company blog can do a lot for your business. By implementing just a few mindful strategies, you can easily maintain a blog that’s robust, timely and informative for your readers.

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