Optimizing Blog Posts for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Darren: Hi there and welcome to episode 92 of the ProBlogger Podcast, where today, I want to talk about what to do after you hit publish on a blog post. I had a question this way from Susan, which reads, “Darren, thank you for the podcast so far. I have a question that I hope you might have some insight on. I’ve been working hard on my blogging workflow after hearing your podcast about blogger’s block. I feel like my ID generation is going well and that the writing completion phases are great, but I can’t help but wonder if there’s more that I should be doing after I hit publish, and I wonder if you could give me some tips into what I should be doing before moving on to writing the next blog post?”

This is a great question from Susan and I’ve got five things that I would encourage you to consider doing as you hit publish on every blog post. You can find today’s show notes where I will have a summary of the points at problogger.com/podcast/92.

I love that question that I just read from Susan. She actually mentioned there a previous series of podcasts that we produced on three stages of creating great content for your blog and beating blogger’s block. They were episodes 84, 86, and 87. We walk through idea generation, writing great content, polishing, and completing that content.

These are all really important parts of producing great content, but Susan is so right in her question. The point of completing and hitting publish on a post is really just the start. What you do next can be the difference between people reading that post or not. It could also be the difference between people reading and then just leaving or are they making a decision to connect with you and ending up being a loyal reader. The day, the two days, the three days after you hit publish is a crucial time and it’s a time you should be working. It’s not such a time that you should be passive.

If you’re anything like me, you put a whole heap of time into writing your blog post. You ponder that topic, you pour your heart and soul into the writing, you obsess over choosing the right headline, and you put a lot of effort into polishing the post so that it looks its best and it reads well. You put all that time in but what happens next is really important.

For a lot of bloggers and for me, certainly in the old days, back in 2002, when I hit publish I then started moving on to the next post, but I think it’s really important to pause. Today, I want to suggest five things that you should at least consider doing after you hit publish on a post.

Now, some of these things you probably should already be thinking about as you’re getting ready to hit publish, so it’s not just hit publish and then do the things. You should probably already have some plans of workflows in place, but these are things that have become a part of the workflow that I have and I would encourage you to build into yours.

Let’s get into the five things. Firstly (this is probably the most obvious one, this is one that I think most bloggers automatically do or have at least some system to do) is to socialize the post for maximum effect.

Now, there’s a number of factors that will need to come into play here. We actually had some podcasts on designing a social media strategy for your blog, and we’ll link to them in the show notes, but a few factors to work through some questions to ask yourself.

Firstly, which social network is best for you. This will depend upon your style, how much time you have, where your readers are gathering—that’s probably the most important one—and the network that’s relevant to your type of content as well. Also, where there’s critical mass. You don’t want to be hanging out on the network when no one else is hanging out.

I don’t have a whole heap of time to go into great depths on those questions, but I will give you a link to read through on ProBlogger on how to choose which social network to be active on. What I will emphasize here is the key to developing a rhythm of sharing, and to think about how you get your post in front of those followers.

Now, there are some great tools and I actually mentioned some of these tools in the last episode. An episode where I went through 19 tools that I use in my blogging. Tools like CoSchedule can really be helpful here, MeetEdgar can be really helpful here. I think it’s probably really important as you publish your post—that’s what this podcast is about—to be automatically thinking, “Where should I be sharing that?” and, “At what intervals should I be sharing that?”

If you’re using a tool like MeetEdgar, get it into the library of tweets and updates that you’re going to do, so that that post not only gets tweeted out automatically when you post it and then it’s never tweeted again, but develop some workflow where you can highlight that post again in a few days time or in a week’s time or in a month’s time. That’s what I found is, in terms of the power of using MeetEdgar. For us, we use the two tools, MeetEdgar and CoSchedule. 

CoSchedule is where we share that post over the next few weeks, so we will use CoSchedule to get a tweet out there for example as soon as the post goes live. We also schedule a tweet for a day later, at a different time of day, and then we schedule a post to go up on CoSchedule as a tweet a week later, and then a month later. We know that it will be tweeted multiple times over that first month.

Then, we put it into MeetEdgar. We know that it won’t tweet out every month, but it will be tweeted out every couple of months. This extends the life of that post. It means that people are continuing to have it highlighted to them through social media. You want to develop some kind of workflow. The workflow we’ve got works for us, but you may want to work on your own.

Build some sort of a system, find the tool that’s right for you, and develop that as a workflow. We’ve worked out our workflow. It works well for us. We do the same thing for our Facebook account on ProBlogger. The post will go live on that within 24 hours of a post going up, and then it gets highlighted again a week later. Then, usually a month or two later, it will get highlighted again.

Again, find the tool that’s right for you and only develop this workflow for evergreen posts as well. You probably don’t want a news-oriented post being tweeted for the next three years, because it’s not relevant.

I often see people doing that, they just tweet every tweet again every month and that doesn’t work, but Evergreen posts, you want to do that. Socialize your post. Develop a system for that.

Always use images in your posts on social media. I’ve certainly noticed over the last couple of years since I started using images in my tweets, they get so much more in terms of likes and retweets and responses, same on Facebook, obviously on Pinterest images as well. I think it was Dan Zarrella found that tweets with images are 60% more likely to be retweeted. Make sure you got images in every post.

Socialize your post is the first thing. This is something that I think most bloggers do pretty automatically, but it might be worth it right now just taking a step back from the way that you do social and just asking yourself, “Is this something that I could do differently? Could I use one of these tools or something else to extend the life of the posts that I create?”

Maybe you put so much time and effort into those posts, you want them to be seen, you want to give them a chance to be read but also shared. Every time you share it gives the opportunity for other people to share it as well. That’s number one, socialize your posts for maximum effect.

The second thing that I would encourage you to do—this is something that we’ve started to build more and more into our post on ProBlogger, Digital Photography School—is to optimize your posts for search engine optimization, for SEO.

There really is no need to forget about Google and search engine optimization, I see a lot of bloggers say, “Well, I just let SEO look after itself.” Believe me, I understand it. SEO makes my head hurt and it’s something that I don’t really enjoy, but it’s something that you should really be paying some attention to.

Now, you don’t need to spend your whole day doing SEO. I know a lot of bloggers get into the nitty-gritty of that and trying to get links to that blog and all that kind of stuff. I don’t tend to spend a whole heap of time doing that, but what I do as I hit publish and just before I hit publish, is give my posts a once over and look at the title, look at the words that you’ve got in your permalink. Look at the keywords in your article, look at what keywords that are in your image tags.

It’s really important to choose good keywords for your posts and that’s something you should be thinking about as you write your post, but it’s well worth it as your post goes live, so just give it another once over. Going back and just tweaking the keywords that are used, particularly in headlines and your titles are really important.

Now, I will say I’m no expert in SEO and I’ve got someone coming on in this podcast in the next couple of episodes who is going to answer some of the most frequently asked questions that I get asked with SEO. I’d encourage you to tune in with that. In the meantime, in today’s show notes, there are a couple of links that I’ll include.

One post which we published on ProBlogger a year ago, from Rand Fishkin from Moz, is just a great post. We’ll give you some things to work on with your posts, without investing your whole life into SEO. It’s amazing what happens if you can raise your posts ranking in Google, even by one or two spots. That can significantly increase the amount of traffic that comes into your blog over the long haul. So number two, optimize your post for SEO.

The third one I want to focus on a little bit longer now and that is to repurpose your content or at least ask yourself, “Is this post that I have just published, is there an opportunity to repurpose this piece of content?” Now, repurposing content is a catchphrase that has been used, probably for the last two or three years and it gets talked about a whole heap.

I like Erin Everhart’s definition of repurposing content. She defines it as repacking one piece of content across many different media. Each time, you’re adding to it or taking away from it and making it unique from the source. The medium and the user who’ll be reading it.

The idea here is that you’re investing a whole heap of time into creating a post. What about if you could use some of that content in a different way, in a different medium? There are some definite benefits of repurposing your content but there are also some risks. I want to just really quickly look at the benefits and the risks of repurposing your content.

I want to say right up front, not every piece of content you publish should be repurposed and I’ll talk about why I say that in a moment, so just quickly the benefits. Firstly, it does enable you, hopefully, to reach more people on other mediums. If you take a blog post, produce a video, and put that on YouTube, that opens up not only the opportunity for people to find your blog from Google but also when people are searching on YouTube.

It does work. It significantly increases the potential reach for your ideas. It does, in some cases, help you rank higher in search engines. If you have different pieces of content all linking back to your blog post, it can help your blog posts to rank higher. It can increase the shareability of your ideas. It can deepen the impact upon your readers.

I love this quote from Seth Godin, “Delivering your message in different ways over time, not only increases the retention and impact, but it gives you the chance to describe what you’re doing from several different angles.” Being able to talk about that same idea in three different ways, as long as that content is presented in three different ways and it’s slightly different from each other, could actually be the difference between your reader understanding and acting on what you’re talking about or not.

If they hear in a blog post and they hear you talking about in a podcast, that might be the difference between them taking action or not. It can deepen the impact upon your readers and also can take a little bit of the pressure off. You can’t come up with a world-changing idea every single day of your life. I don’t think that’s possible. I certainly can’t and so to be able to take a world-changing idea and then to use that multiple times in different ways in different platforms over time, can take a little bit of the pressure off. You don’t have to keep coming up with fresh ideas every day.

On the flip side, there are some risks with repurposing content. I don’t really see many people talking about the risks. I think we really do need to because I think repurposing your content can be done very badly and it can be overdone.

If you have a blog post, it’s good, and then you repurpose in five different ways, but because you’re repurposing it for so many platforms, you don’t do any of those five ways well, it can actually hurt your brand. Polyproduce content—because you feel this pressure to reproduce it in lots of different ways—can hurt your brand. It can also become a bit formulaic.

This is one of the things that I’ve seen in a number of blogs that I’ve followed over the years says that you begin to see what’s coming. You see the blog post coming out. You know you’re going to be hit with a podcast about that exact same topic tomorrow. You know that there will be a SlideShare produced. You know there will be a YouTube video. You end up anticipating that.

Some of that whack of surprise is predictable, and that can hurt the brand as well. I much prefer a little bit of surprise, a little bit of randomness as well. It can actually become a bit of a quantity over quality thing, and it can also become a bit fluffy just hearing the same thing in the same way over time.

I think it’s really important when you do repurpose content, is to think about how you can bring some variety to that. You don’t want to just raid your blog post as a podcast, and then you don’t want to just use that podcast and put some slides over it for YouTube if you’re going to promote that content to the same people, because that’s going to get boring for people. That’s going to burn your readers out, by hitting them too many times with exactly the same stuff just presented in slightly different ways.

I want to read Erin’s definition again. I want you to hear what she’s saying. “Repackaging one piece of content across different media each time, you’re either adding to it, or you’re taking away from it. You’re making it unique for the source, the medium, and the user who’ll be reading it.” Here, what she’s saying there, there’s variety. Once we are repackaging maybe a central idea, it really has a much better impact if you are able to bring some variety to that in different ways. If you’re repeating the same idea 10 times to the same people in different ways, it can get tiring, so really be careful about that.

A few really quick tips on repurposing your content. Firstly, choose the content that you repurpose really carefully. I’ve already alluded to this above, but the selection of which content to repurpose is critical. You don’t want to repurpose every single piece of content that you produce. It has to be something that is evergreen, it should be something that’s a core idea, something that’s central to what you stand for, and it might be something that has already got some runs on the board.

Maybe watch for a day or two to see how your blog posts are being received. If one takes off, if one ‘s getting a lot of comments, if one ‘s getting a lot of shares, that’s an idea that people are resonating with. That might be a hint to you, that that’s a piece of content that you might want to repurpose. For me, I’m repurposing content that (1) is evergreen, (2) is a core idea, a core need for my readers, and something that has had some success already.

The second thing I’d encourage you to think about with repurposing content is to think really carefully about the medium. Not every idea lends itself to every different medium. Not every idea that starts as a blog post is going to be relevant for SlideShare. It’s not all going to be relevant for Periscope, it’s not going to be all relevant for a video. Think about the medium and don’t just produce every piece of content in 10 ways the same every time. Think about how you can bring some variety to that. That adds an element of surprise and delight even to some of your readers.

Some of the types of mediums that you might want to think about repurposing to SlideShare or OfficeStream are great for producing content as a slide deck. If you’ve got a 10-point blog post, you might turn that into 10 slides. Using a tool like SlideShare or OfficeStream to communicate those 10 points might work. At least a post does work quite well in a slide deck.

The good thing about having a slide deck is that then you could use that slide deck as the basis for other types of content as well. That could be then used in a video for YouTube or that could be used even in a Periscope. Some of my best periscopes have had slides that I’ve used as well. 

Other types of mediums that you might want to explore. Infographics are really great for presenting stats. They can actually be useful for presenting histories, or any kind of visual content as well, and you can use tools like Piktochart or  Visual.ly to create those infographics.

Instructographics are similar to infographics, but they’re more focused on presenting a how-to or a step-by-step process. It’s a visualization of a step-by-step or some blueprint.

Podcasts, obviously, take the core ideas of your post and then record yourself exploring them expanding upon them. A podcast is really great for having more of a conversation about the post that you’ve published. It might be actually useful to bring someone else in and to get their perspective on what you have written. I think that’s a really easy way to repurpose a blog post in many cases.

Interviews. Get someone in your niche to interview about the topic of your blog post. Seek a second opinion, seek a second point of view on the post that you’ve written.

Using screen capture videos. If your blog post talks people through a process that can be captured as a screen capture video. Then, you could record that and upload that to Youtube. You can use tools like Camtasia, Jing, Screener, ScreenFlow. I use ScreenFlow on my Mac to do that.

You might want to repurpose your ideas as a talking head video in a similar way to a podcast. It’s particularly useful if you’ve got some kind of visual that you might want to bring to that idea.

You might turn your blog post into a PDF download. A lot of bloggers now are doing that and this is something that we’re exploring for both of my blogs at the moment. Some of the readers on some of their posts want to take that post away, print it out, and use it in a different context. Offering that as a PDF, there’s a variety of tools Anthologize, Zinepal (I think) is one that we’ve used in the past, BlogBooker. These turn blog posts into PDFs.

You might repurpose that content to an ebook, or a report, or a white paper. You might repurpose it into some visual, some graphic that you could use for social sharing. Using a tool like Canva or PicMonkey, or even outsource that using a tool like Swiftly. There’s a whole heap of different ways that you can take those core ideas or take quotes from your posts and make an eye-catching graphic that can then be used to share that post on social media.

You could even take a post that’s doing really well and break it down into an autoresponder series, an email autoresponder series. A series of emails that walk people through a process. I think that’s a keyway. If you’ve got a post in your archives that’s performing really well, that’s a long meaty post, why don’t you rewrite that post as an autoresponder series and use that as an opt-in? It could become almost a mini-course.

What about repurposing your content for a blog post and take some of those ideas and use them in guest posts for other blogs? If an idea has resonated with your audience, take those ideas and explore them, perhaps in a different way. Just submit your post to another blog, but get those ideas out there into other circles. If they’ve resonated with your readers, they might just resonate with other readers of other blogs.

In a similar way, you could do the same thing and submit your content or repurpose content to articles from mainstream media or industry publications. You could take the ideas and put them into a webinar, Hangouts, Periscope, or Blab. You could even take an idea from a blog post and then run a Twitter chat about it or a Facebook chat. What about if you said, “That post resonates so well, we’re going to discuss it on Twitter this time using this hashtag,” and get your readers together to give their feedback on it.

You could take your main points and repurpose it into a workshop that you do at a real-life event or online. If you’ve done a podcast, you could transcribe that content and use it in some other form as well, a webinar.

Lastly, maybe take some of the ideas from your blog post and create a printable. Create a checklist or a template that relates to the blog post. I just went through 15 or so different ways that you can repurpose content there, but hopefully, you’re seeing that not all of them are going to be relevant for every post that you write. You really need to look at the post that you’ve got.

Ask yourself, how can I extend this idea? How can I present it in a different way so that it will have a different impact on my readers? That if my readers do see it in two or three different forms, they’re not just seeing the same thing in the same way, but they actually have the chance of really being impacted in a deeper way by that idea.

A few last tips about repurposing. I do have a lot to say on this particular topic because I do see a lot of people even missing opportunity here, they’re not doing it and they could do so much more, or people are overdoing it. The last tips I’ll give you, firstly, spread it out. There’s no need to bombard your readership with the same idea over and over again quickly, you can spread it out over time. You might publish your blog post today and then share a slide deck based upon it next week, and then follow up with a video or an infographic next month. It doesn’t all have to come out in one week.

Now, it can have an impact if you do produce exploring ideas in different ways or very quickly. If they’re all very different and they do build and have variety, but if it is the same kind of idea, you might want to spread it out further. Just so that there’s a bit more variety and your audience has a little bit more of a chance to breathe and explore other ideas before they revisit that idea.

Another quick tip, repurpose as you write. As you’re writing your blog post, pay attention to the ideas that you get and about how you could repurpose them. Often when I’m in the middle of writing a blog post, I’m also making notes about how I could get a graphic or a slide made, or use it in some other context.

The third last tip is to pay attention to your archives. Don’t just think about repurposing your recent post. Actually go back and look at what you did last year. Maybe there’s something this time last year that you could be repurposing today in some different way. This is something that I try and do pretty much every day. I look at what we published this day last year, (1) so I can share that on social media, but (2) maybe there’s an opportunity there to repurpose it in some way. I think it’s a really good discipline to be reading your own archives.

The second last tip, make it visual. It’s really important to take advantage of the fact that we are operating in such a visual space with social media at the moment. The more visual we get, the better. Either invest in some skills and tools in creating great visual content or outsourcing, get some help in that.

The last thing I’ll say about repurposing content is to cross-link between your repurposed content. If you write a blog post and then you produce a slide share, in your slide share you should be linking to your blog post. If you’re producing a Youtube video, link back to that blog post. If you’re producing a podcast, link back to that blog post. This helps your SEO but it also gets people back to your site and hopefully on your site you’re well-optimized to getting them to subscribe as well. Get people back to your home base and try and get people on your email list, or whatever it is that is your primary way of connecting with your audience.

I’ve got some further reading for you in today’s show notes on repurposing content. I know that was a lot of information to digest. You might want to go back and listen to some of that. I’ve got two more things for you to do before you move on to writing your next blog post. These are two more things you need to do after you hit publish.

The fourth thing that I really want to just quickly touch on is to deepen your relationships, to interact and engage with those who read your blog posts. It’s so important rather than just moving on to write your next post to actually watch and see how people respond to your content. Reply to comments is probably the number one thing that you should be doing. You might want to email readers to leave a comment, as I talked about in one of my earliest episodes of this podcast—it might have been episode two or three—a really great technique of making a big impression upon people.

Work hard at deepening and extending comments. When you reply to a comment, don’t just say, “Thanks for commenting.” Actually ask the person a question, ask them what they […], ask them for an example. Work hard at getting a second comment. This is really important because people then feel like, “Oh they’re paying attention to me. They want to know my opinion, they think I’m important enough to engage with.” This is the beginning of getting a loyal reader in many cases.

You might want to provide more information in the comments. If you think of another idea that you could’ve incorporated into a post, add a comment. Engage with your readers in that way. Ask people questions and maybe add a poll to your post. This is something you can do on all posts using poll plug-ins and that gives you an excuse to reshare it on social media. You might say, “I’ve updated the post that I’ve previously published and I’ve added a poll, I’d love your opinion.” That’s another legitimate way to share that post on social media but to get a little bit more engagement.

You might want to highlight the conversation that’s happening on a post. If you publish a blog post and the conversation takes off, take that conversation and share that on social media. Rather than saying, “Here’s another link to my blog post,” actually link to that blog post and say, “There’s an amazing conversation going on,” or, “I love the comment that Peter left on this blog post.” Use that as a way of sharing it because it highlights the community, it highlights the interaction. It shows your readers that you value conversation.

You might want to add a homework or an activity to the end of your post that readers could do. Again, I’d be sharing that on social media. Anything you can add to a blog post really gives you another legitimate way of sharing that blog post. Of course, people are watching on social media. These days people aren’t just commenting in your comments.

This is frustrating for us as bloggers because we want that conversation all in one spot, but you also need to be watching on Twitter. You need to be watching on Facebook. You need to be watching on the different platforms that you have chosen to engage in because that’s often the place where people will be interacting with your ideas. Again, I’ve got some more reading on developing the relationships with your readers in today’s show notes.

The fifth thing I would encourage you to always do just after you hit publish on a post or even just before it, is to ask yourself a simple question. Is there anything in what I’ve just written that I could extend or follow up with another blog post? This is a great habit to get into. Get into the habit of asking that question because you’ll naturally start to create content that goes deeper and builds momentum with your posts.

One of the things I’ve noticed about great blogs is that they take their readers on a journey. Great blogs don’t just hit them with random blog posts one after the other. Great blogs actually take the readers on a journey and one of the best ways to build momentum between your blog posts is to ask yourself that question at the end of every blog. Is there something in what I’ve just written that I could extend or follow up with another blog post?

A few things that you could do with posts once you’ve written, pay attention to the tangent you can see taking mid-post. This is something I do all the time. I’ll be halfway through writing a blog post or halfway through creating a podcast, and I find myself taking a tangent and I realize that to take that tangent actually gets off-topic. It’s a legitimate post idea that I could then repurpose into another post. Pay attention to those things that kind of distract you as you’re writing that are still somewhat on topic for your audience.

Pay attention to the questions your blog posts readers have but also the questions you get at the end of your posts. Sometimes, writing a post gives you a question that you don’t know the answer to. Maybe that’s something that you should go away and research. Examine all the posts in your archives that could be developed in some way or that could be updated.

If you’ve written an opinion on a blog post—opinions are really great to write in posts because they make them unique—maybe you could follow up that by exploring the opposing view by interviewing someone who has a different point of view on that. That’s a great way to do a follow up because it shows your readers that there is more than one way to go about things. It can also create a bit of a conversation or debate, which is another great way of getting engagement from your readers.

Maybe you could follow-up your blog post with a case study, an example, what you’ve learned since writing that post, or another tool that does the same thing as the tool that you’ve mentioned.

One thing I’d encourage you to do on blog posts, particularly, that are doing well with your readers, if you do get a post that’s been shared a lot, if you get a post that gets lots of comments that resonates with your audience, is to just do a mind map. Get a whiteboard or a piece of paper, or use a mind mapping tool, and brainstorm how you could extend that post because something in that post has resonated with people. There’s an opportunity in those posts, in particular, to extend and deepen. Maybe even replicate the style of that post. I think it’s really important to pay attention to the posts that resonate and to see what you could do to extend that.

The example that I’ve given many times is a guest post that we published over on Digital Photography School quite a few years ago. It was a post which had posing tips and it had a whole heap of hand-drawn poses that you could use when photographing women. It was just a random guest post that we got, we published it, it took off, it went crazy. We had a lot of shares on it, lots of comments, and lots of questions about how to pose men, how to pose children.

We went back to the author of that post and said, “Hey, how about doing a series on this?” I think he ended up producing eight or nine different posts for us. We then took that idea and turned it into an ebook, we turned it into a printable, and really paid attention to what was working with our audience and extended that idea. Pay attention to that when sparks fly in a blog post like that. Again I’ve got some further reading for you on how to extend your blog posts as well.

This has been a bit of a meaty podcast. I’ve now covered a lot of ground here. I just want to really quickly recap the five points that I made. Firstly, when you hit publish on a blog post you should be thinking about how to socialize that post for maximum impact. Number two, you should be thinking about how to optimize that post for SEO. Number three, ask yourself a question, at least consider, should you be repurposing that content in some way, even now or in the future? Number four, deepen the relationships, the interaction and the engagement with your readers. And number five, extend your ideas with future content in some way.

These are five things that I would encourage you to build into your workflow. It needs to become automatic. As you’re writing content, as you’re publishing content, just automatically have systems in place but also questions that you ask yourself that help you to do these five things.

I hope this has been helpful. I would love to hear your feedback on it. Which ones do you do, what tools do you use to do them, what workflow have you built after you hit publish on a blog post? Share your ideas. This is where we learn from one another. I’ve got so much to learn about these things, too, and I’m looking forward to learning what you do. 

Maybe some of the stuff that you share with us might turn into a future podcast. Who knows? I’d love to interview some of you about the things that you do and extend this blog post with a future one based upon some of the things that you do. If you’ve got something that I haven’t mentioned or you do something in a different way, share that story in a comment, and we might just end up talking to each other in a future podcast.

Look forward to chatting with you. If you think this is helpful for any of your readers, any of your followers on social media, please do share it. You can share and find the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/92. I’ll chat with you in a couple of days’ time in episode 93.