Not everyone is a writer. Not everyone has the time to maintain a blog and update it consistently with fresh, original content. And that’s okay.
You might believe otherwise, given all the buzz you’ve seen online. Content, you’ve been told, is king. To truly compete on the modern web, you need a blog.
That’s not entirely correct. While blogging certainly does help, you don’t have to be a writer in order to optimize your site for search and bring in more traffic. As long as you ensure you’re providing your audience with something valuable, the following steps should be enough to attract eyeballs to your site:
- Optimize product listings. If you maintain a digital storefront, every single product you sell should have a product listing consisting of several high-quality photos, a complete description of the item, and a unique title/name that makes it clear what that product is.
- Highlight customer reviews. Eighty-four percent of people trust online reviews as much as they do recommendations from friends and family. What that means is that positive reviews not only drive revenue but also have the potential to bring in more traffic.
- Do keyword research. Understand your keywords. What are people searching for when they visit your site? More importantly, what do they want from your site? You’ll want to do extensive keyword research here, drawing on both search data from your pages and a keyword research tool.
- Make sure your NAP is readily available. Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP) essentially refers to all address and contact information associated with your business. Make sure it’s present on every page of your website, and fill out your Google My Business listings, as well.
- Prioritize performance. Speed has long been recognized as a ranking factor. With that in mind, your website needs to be both designed and optimized for usability. It should be streamlined, easy to navigate, and viewable across a wide range of devices and form factors. Focus on the user experience above all else.
- Seek social shares and backlinks. Last but certainly not least, they may not directly influence your PageRank, but social shares can have an indirect impact. Backlinks, meanwhile, still matter a great deal for SEO as well, provided they come from high-quality sources.
At the end of the day, you can rank well without blogging, but it certainly helps. After all, no matter what industry you work in, no matter what products and services you offer, there’s always something you can write about to catch your audience’s interest.
