How to improve the performance of your blog

For startups, your blog is your biggest inbound marketing tool and traffic magnet. It needs to be optimized and provide content that your target audience wants to read, or you’re missing opportunities to convert visitors and leads into customers.

If you want to get the most out of your content and increase your startup’s qualified leads, below are our top tips for improving the performance of your blog.

Make it visual

According to visual marketing statistics from HubSpot, when we hear information, we typically only retain 10% of it. However, when that information includes a relevant image, we’re more likely to retain 65% of the information. The impact of visual storytelling is undeniable and should be a top priority when creating blog content.

One of the best ways to incorporate visuals into your blog content is to create infographics to accompany your posts. Infographics can be used to sum up the main points of your article in an easily digestible way, which makes it easier for those who prefer to skim to retain the information. Plus, if you’re operating on a lean budget, the good news is you don’t even need a graphic designer or expensive tools to make this a reality. Use a design tool like Canva to easily create branded infographics.

Not only do infographics provide a visual element to your text-heavy blog posts, but they also make your posts more shareable. And having shareable content increases the chances of it picked up by an industry publication or getting better engagement on social media.

Use data

Another way to drive your talking points home and ultimately improve the performance of your blog posts is to include relevant data points within your articles. Strong metrics not only stand out in big blocks of text, but they show that you’ve done your research, which ultimately increases your credibility.

Use a tool like Statista or PrimoStats to find relevant statistics that back up your points. Sites like these pull data from recent reports and surveys across a range of industries so you can be sure that your statistics come from trusted sources.

Include SEO best practices

We can’t talk about blog performance without mentioning SEO. If you want to improve the performance of your blog posts, SEO optimization is key to increasing visibility and ensuring that your posts are getting seen by the right audience.

While keywords shouldn’t be the focus of your article (and whatever you do, avoid keyword stuffing), they should be considered when setting out to write about a certain topic. Naturally work the keyword into the article when it makes sense and be sure to make the blog post title a phrase that’s searchable.

Another SEO best practice is to make your blog post mobile friendly. This means taking into consideration the way the blog post appears if it’s being read on a small screen. To make your blog post mobile friendly, write it in a digestible format by using bullet points, short paragraphs, and succinct headlines.

Address user intent

While keywords are important, a high-ranking keyword-backed article that doesn’t address what the reader was searching for in the first place will only leave them frustrated and on to the next article in the search results.

If you really want to improve the performance of your blog, you need to get people to stay on the page longer which means your blog post needs to address user intent.

To do this, focus on the reader and answer the questions or curiosities they have. They searched for this topic for a reason: they were either looking for an answer, inspiration, or wanting to learn more about something. Do some keyword research to determine what your reader is searching for and use that to guide the content of your blog post.

Ensure it’s quality content

One easy way to make your blog posts stand out among the rest is to make sure the content is thoughtful and high quality. Sounds simple, but the reality is that there’s a lot of bad content out there.

The first sign of a well-written blog post is that it’s written with good grammar and free of errors. Again, this may sound like a no-brainer but you’d be surprised how many pieces of content make their way to a blog even though they’re full of typos or poorly written.

You should also avoid technical jargon. In fact, your writing should be at a fifth grade level. This makes it easier for a reader to digest regardless of their industry knowledge and keeps their attention longer than an overly-technical blog post would.

If you’re a startup founder and not confident in your writing skills, send an outline of your thoughts on the topic to the marketing person on your team to fully flesh it out. Or, if you’re working with a tech PR agency, see if they can take on your startup’s content marketing efforts so you don’t have to worry about the nuances that come with blog post writing.

Have a distribution and marketing automation strategy

While your blog post should be optimized for search, showing up in organic search results can take some time. To make sure your blog posts actually get read once they’re published, you need to have a distribution strategy in place.

Have a plan for how you want to share your blog content once it goes live, whether you have a marketing automation tool like HubSpot or a strong social media strategy that goes hand in hand with the blog.

This is also where infographics can come in handy. You can use the infographic as visual, shareable social media content with a CTA to read the full post on the blog.

Looking to step up your tech startup’s blog?

As a tech PR agency with expertise in content marketing for B2B tech startups, we can help you implement a successful inbound marketing program that achieves your most ambitious growth objectives. Here’s an example of how we helped one of our clients increase blog traffic by 500% and gain over 1,000 qualified leads from their blog