Your charity’s blog can be a powerful tool for helping the people who need your work to discover your website. As the internet becomes less of an information map and more of a misinformation maze, your blog can be a beacon of truth.

The first blog was published in 1994, but the term ‘blog’ wasn’t coined until around 1997. It’s an abbreviation of ‘weblog’ which means logging the internet. The early days of the internet buzzed with the many topics and opinions that eager bloggers offered their new readers.

Blogging is different to journalism in a number of ways, but essentially: journalism is based on the presentation of facts and sources, such as reports and experts, which are mentioned or quoted within the piece. Blogging is led by the interests and opinions of the writer and includes links to sources and other relevant information online.

In digital marketing, blogging is an important tool for search engine optimisation (SEO). Search engines scour the web for keywords and phrases to serve users with the most relevant content to their search terms or question.

Blogging about the topics that are relevant to the people you support will help bring them to you via Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, or wherever they search for information. Blogging also massively increases the likelihood of other sites linking to your site. Organisations who blog receive a massive 97% more links to their sites.

Here are five ways you can use your blog to help your audience find you online and keep them coming back.

Answer the questions your audience are asking

When we hover over our favourite search engine it’s usually because we have a question in mind. Search providers trade on being able to list the most relevant answers to the questions their users are asking. If you work out what questions your audiences have, you can blog the answers and search engines will bring your audience to you.

There are some useful tools to help you find out what your audience want to know. Answer The Public can provide you with a detailed report on your keywords, including questions and phrases that the public has searched for using those keywords. You can also use Google to check how keywords are being used. When you google your keywords, look at the list of related searches for research. 

Educate: use your experts

The people you support with your work look to you for expert advice and information. Bringing your experts and knowledge to the fore on your blog will give it authority. Using multiple experts as authors can be really valuable for credibility too. 63% of people think blogs with multiple authors are more credible.

‘Experts’ could include those with professional experience of the issue you work on or people with personal lived-experience. They might be staff, advisors, service users or supporters.

Images will help to tell your story

You can educate with facts and you can educate with stories. Often the best blogs include a combination of the two. Create or capture images to illustrate the key statistics and stories from your blog to support storytelling. Images and graphics are also useful for promoting your blog across your social media channels.

Search engines are scanning your content for relevant images as well as text. Alt text boxes for images are used to describe what is in the image for people using screen readers. Try to include keywords in your alt-text descriptions without compromising the readability. This will help search engines to pick up your blog images for the ‘image’ results tab and increase the likelihood of your blog being found. 

Strcture your blog well

There are some basic structural rules that you can follow to make your blogs readable and compelling.

Start your blog with a ‘hook’; It could be a statistic, a one-line summary of the story or a compelling image. Move on to tell the story of blog: set the scene, provide your expert’s views and stories, come to a conclusion and include a call to action, if relevant.

Structure your blog to make it ‘skimmable.’ Online audiences like to read quickly, so using sub-headings, pull quotes and lists will help them to absorb the information easily. Your titles, headings and subheadings are used more heavily by search engines scanning your website for info.

Try to use the keywords, questions, and phrases that came up in your research as headings and sub-headings for better SEO results.

Track your blog with google analytics

It’s worth taking a monthly snapshot of the pageviews, average time on the page and returning visitors to help you understand your audience’s response to the blogs you have created.