You’ve likely heard some mixed things about creating long-form content as a marketing strategy for your business. Some say it’s worth the time, others disagree.

Some people say it’s worth it for SEO purposes-- stuffing a bunch of keywords into some fluff so you can rank higher on Google, and others believe it’s a great tactic of actually engaging with and building a reputation and relationship with your audience.

Of course, we believe the latter… Maybe even a little of both? While it’s a must to make sure your SEO is optimized to help your website traffic and search engine rankings, it’s equally or more important that the content is actually providing value and that your audience will take something away from it.

So, why should you create long-form content in 2021? And what does that word “long-form” really mean?

We know that you're probably hearing every single day how important it is to have a blog. The numbers don't lie, the interaction with your audience is incredible, and the value of what you can give can be a game changer. Blog posts are a way to create evergreen content: posts that are always relevant and that your audience can find useful no matter what.

We also know that sometimes you put off something simply because you don't know the best way to go about getting it done. We want to make sure that you're using each and every post to its full advantage– it takes way too much time to prep those posts for them to not be working for you!

Today, we're breaking down a blog post piece by piece. We'll tell you exactly how your post should be laid out, what to include in it, and how to wrap it all up!

Conversion rates. Analytics. Measuring growth. Lifetime value. There are so many business buzzwords that get thrown around that can feel really intimidating to the average creative business owner.

However, knowing this information is super crucial to your profits, your growth and the decisions you make every single day in your business.

Keeping track of your business’ numbers allows you to make strategic decisions instead of just saying, “Well, I feel like this is going well, so I’m going to keep doing it” or “I feel like this new thing could really help, so I’m going to try it.”

Honestly? We’d rather make business decisions rooted in facts and data instead of basing everything soley of feelings. We love us a good “gut instinct” and we like to back it up with cold hard facts.

Knowing how much weight a product or service is pulling for you or if it’s time to let it go, the rate of growth across all of your channels, and your overall progress is so important in order to plan and set goals realistically in your business, both short and long term.

So how do you find this information (or sexy math as we like to call it)? Where do you begin?

It all starts with your analytics.

Google processes over 40,000 searches every second, which is 3.5 billion searches a day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.

My guess is that you can’t go very long without asking Google for an answer. Well guess what, neither can your clients. They are searching for your business right now, but the real question is, can they find you?  

If you have ever tried to search for your business by what you do, e.g. wedding photographer or what you want to be known for, e.g. natural light wedding photographer Boston, Massachusetts, and have been disappointed as to where your business ranks on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP), then you are probably in the market to hire an SEO consultant.

SEO consultants research and analyze the trends and best practices online to develop a strategy to improve search engine rankings.

Hiring new consultants, contractors, and team members is a big step in your business, but once you’re ready to take it your workload decreases and your business is able to improve in multiple ways, leaving you to work on your strengths and be the bad-ass lady boss you are (instead of the boss, chief bottle-washer and Jill-of-all-trades).

A blog editor may not have made the top of the list when you dreamed about bringing someone on to help you. But…

You only have twenty-six small letters and a handful of dots and dashes to wow, inspire, share, create, and convince. Surely you want to combine these in the best way possible?

How I got ranked on the first page of Google within 2 hours of publishing my post! Learn to use Yoast to maximize your SEO; with just a few tweaks you too can rank highly!