What’s one thing your company struggles with most? For many B2B companies and marketing managers, the struggle lies in writing blogs and creating blog content that appeals to their audience, answers a question or solves a problem, and is engaging and easy to read.
That might sound like a lot, but thankfully, it’s not that difficult to make your B2B blog content more readable. With a few easy tweaks, you can increase your blog readability, and potentially increase your website traffic, leads, and conversions too.
Here are 10 tweaks you can use to make your blog posts more readable:
1. Define Your Audience
Writing a blog post isn’t automatically going to bring in more traffic, leads, and conversions. To write a successful blog, you need to know who you’re writing for. Before you get started on researching topics, be sure that you’re able to define your audience and that you understand exactly what type of information they expect to receive in a blog post. This is where buyer personas can be helpful.
2. Choose the Right Topic
A good blog post answers a question or solves a problem for the reader. To deliver real value with your blog posts, it’s critical to do research and choose topics that are relevant to your audience’s questions, needs, and pain points. If you’re not sure where to get started, sites like Quora and Reddit can help you determine what questions your customers and other people in your industry are asking.
3. Write a Killer Headline
Your headline is essentially your first impression on the reader. It’s what readers use to determine if they’re interested in reading more, or if they’re not interested and will simply continue searching for the blog post that will answer their question. Because you only have one chance, you need to make it count. The better your headline is, the more traffic (and traction) your blog post will receive. So, take your time crafting it!
4. Avoid Using Jargon
You want your blog post to appeal to as many people as possible in your audience, right? To do so, you want to avoid using jargon and industry terms as much as possible, because you’re likely writing for at least a few people who aren’t familiar with your industry.
5. Keep Your Paragraphs Short
This tweak is pretty straightforward. 5-6 sentence paragraphs should be reserved for English classes, not your company blog. Today, people skim more than they read, so keeping your paragraphs short will allow your readers to read in the way that most appeals to them, and that’s what will keep them coming back.
6. Use Short Sentences
As much as possible, try to keep your sentences short. Short sentences are easy to read. Long sentences can be complex and difficult for readers to understand. Short sentences also make it easier to avoid grammatical errors. If you do need to include longer sentences, try to limit them to one per paragraph.
7. Optimize Your Blog Posts for Search Engines
Your B2B content marketing strategy will be far less effective if you’re not optimizing your blog posts for search engines like Google.
You don’t have to go crazy with optimizations and stuff a ton of keywords into your writing or write clickbait headlines, though. Including keywords in your content is important for SEO, but you still want to write your blogs using natural language and avoid using too many keywords (or forcing them into your copy), as that will be distracting to your reader.
Believe it or not, Google actually places a lot of importance on user experience, so that’s something to keep in mind when you’re writing too. Will your readers find it easy and enjoyable to read through your blog post? If the answer is yes, you’re probably on the right track.
8. Break Your Blog Posts Up with Headings and Bullet Points
One of the most important components of a good blog post, in addition to it being well-written, is that it’s visually appealing to the reader. No one wants to open a page and see a wall of text with no breaks. When you use headings, subheadings, and bullet points in your blog posts, they not only break up the post and make it more appealing to look at, but they also make it easier for people to read, which will entice more people to read it.
9. Know When to Add Emphasis
And how. You can add emphasis by bolding important information, italicizing words, or underlining words to emphasize them. If there’s one specific sentence you want to call out in your blog, try bolding the whole sentence. If there’s an entire section, you can call it out by using a larger, more distinctive font, or adding a callout plugin on your hosting platform like WordPress.
10. Close with a Strong CTA
Your call-to-action (CTA) is your last chance to make a good impression on your reader. As such, it’s important to close out your blog post with a strong CTA so readers are aware of the other ways you can add value.
Now, Get to Writing!
Writing a successful blog post that appeals to your audience and is easy to read doesn’t have to be a struggle. If you have a clear picture of who you want to write for, what their questions or problems are, and can write in a way that’s easy to understand and looks clear on the page, creating valuable blog content will be easy.
If you get stuck, refer to these helpful tweaks, and you’ll be on your way to increased traffic, conversions, and leads in no time!
Still need help getting started on your blog? Sagefrog can help. Get in touch with us and we’ll help you create an effective B2B content marketing strategy. In the meantime, download our free Checklist: Marketing Campaign Planning & Execution to help get a jump start on your strategy.
