Why are blogs important?

Blogs, sometimes called news or insights, are a crucial part of your website content. They show your expertise, keep your website fresh, and improve SEO.

They provide a platform for thought leadership – a phrase that strikes fear in the hearts of all reluctant writers! A well-tended blog can help to:

• Showcase your expertise and authority
• Differentiate you from the competition
• Celebrate your organisation culture
• Keep your website refreshed & relevant
• Improve search rankings & AI citations

Planning content for your blog

As a marketer, my ears always prick up if my colleagues are discussing something over Slack or round the water cooler. I normally pipe up with ‘that will make a good blog post’.

If you can get your colleagues on board with writing your blog, it will be so much better. It not only shares the responsibility, but it also shows different perspectives across the organisation, and it makes for more interesting reading for your customers to hear a range of voices.

Consistency is key, and so planning the blog content is helpful for everyone. This is my process:

• Brainstorm ideas for posts with the team
• Write a synopsis for each post and get people to agree on what the post will cover
• Write a draft of the post and ask for peer review
• Polish the post based on feedback
• Publish, and enjoy a well-earned cup of tea

Keep your blog post pipeline topped up. This can be with new writing or, once you have a few posts under your belt, you can repurpose content to make new posts.

If published posts perform well, then keep them fresh and edit with updates e.g. has there been an update to the law, has there been a topical news story you can review, is there new data you can refer to etc.

Social sharing

When you invest in your blog, you’ll have infinite snippets of content for social media. Think about shareability. Don’t promote the fact you’ve written a blog post; promote the idea in the post. Use a strong title, offer a key fact or a bite-sized piece of text, so people will want to share it with their own audiences.

Share the post with your team on Slack and ask them to share it with their networks as well.

Starting points for reluctant writers

Not everyone on the team will be thrilled by the idea of writing a blog post, but different voices and perspectives across your organisation are more interesting for your customers. Confident writers can support reluctant writers by:

• Brainstorming ideas together
• Giving prompts and asking questions to use a writing framework
• Interviewing a colleague and writing the post for them

If you don’t have an enthusiastic blogger in your organisation, then AI can help. However, it’s important to use it in the same way as outlined above – for ideas, prompts, and a bit of padding – but not to give you a completed piece for you to post to your website. Remember you want your blog to be authentic and show your authority in your sector.

What should you write about?

Some ideas to get started:

• Think about what you specialise in and create content to share your expertise.
• What are people searching for related to your industry? Write content to answer those questions.
• Work you’ve done and what you learned from it, or what the impact is for your clients.
• The broader aspects of your job and what happens behind the scenes.
• Responding to something in the news that’s being talked about by your industry.
• An event you’ve attended and what you learned.
• Your organisation’s culture and what’s important to you – supporting charities, award wins, investing in training, prioritising sustainability etc

Find your voice and people will find you

A blog post written in your own voice, with whatever idiosyncrasies, is infinitely more interesting than AI-generated content. Being authentic and original will make people want to read on, and it will be rewarded by Google search.

There are various tools, like Answer the Public, where you can see what questions people are asking about various topics. If you can answer these questions in a blog post by drawing on your own unique experience, you are more likely to be cited by AI as a source of authority. You can track your AI visibility with tools like Semrush.

How do you make your content authentic?

• Write about topics that support your business ethos or organisation purpose and which could start a meaningful conversation with your users.
• Don’t jump on a trend if it has low value to your customers
• Understand why people are visiting your website and give them the content to help them achieve their goals.

Make your blog posts accessible

Prioritising accessibility will mean more people can enjoy your content. For blog posts, there are three key areas to think about:

• Use headings
• Write descriptive links
• Write alt text for images

Use headings

Use clear, concise headings to organise your content. It’s easier to scan content when it’s broken into chunks with headings.

Check your heading hierarchy to make sure you don’t skip heading levels. This helps:

• Sighted readers to scan content
• Screen reader users to navigate to the content they want
• Search and SEO crawlers to understand your content and improve your chances of being cited in search queries.

Make sure headings are properly formatted by using the heading tools provided by your Content Management System (CMS).

Write descriptive links

Sighted people can glance at any links to quickly get a feel for the content on a web page. People using screen readers can access a list of all the links on a page, but links aren’t helpful if they all say things like ‘Click here’ or ‘Read more’. Explain where the links go.

Write alt text for images

We can describe the content/purpose of images for people with low vision, to provide them with an equivalent experience to sighted people. Try the following framework:

• Object (the main focus of the image)
• Action (what’s happening)
• Context (both the surrounding environment in the image and how the image is being used)

If you are sharing an infographic with important data, alt text is essential as AI crawlers can’t read images and all the citable data that’s unique to your organisation will be missed.

You can read more about headings, links, alt text and much more in our guide to accessible content.

Remember the call to action

Finally, all blog posts should have a call to action, so here’s mine.

Our work at Studio 24 is to support your storytelling through your website information architecture, content strategy, technical SEO and accessibility. We can help with the framing and presentation of all your new brilliant writing – from support & maintenance to a redesign. Get in touch for a chat about options.