Even though each month 70 million new blog posts are published on WordPress alone, blogging is still one of the best ways to reach your target audience, bring more traffic to your website, and get you more conversion.
With the right kind of digital exposure, you can use blogging to establish yourself as an authority and a thought-leader in your niche and build a brand out of your business.
However,the audience is becoming pickier when it comes to the content they want to consume. As we now have more resources and tools to identify their needs, we can use this data to address these needs better with the content we create.
Read on to find out which blogging trends you should watch out for in 2020.
High-quality, well-targeted content
In order to make your blog more visible in 2020, first, make sure that your target audience actually wants to consume what you’re posting. You can achieve this only if your content is high-quality and well-targeted, relevant and useful for your followers.
However, this means that you have to make your consumers informational needs a priority and publish content that focuses on their pain points or solves some of their challenges, instead of just fulfilling your sales goals.
So, instead of creating random acts of content, fitting your promotional needs, consider the following things and develop a content strategy:
- Who is my potential audience? What problems and challenges do they face, what are their needs and desires?
- How can I help my potential audience with my content? Can I help them solve some of their problems?
- Are my content pieces evergreen? Will they still be relevant in a few months, or in a year?
- What current trends can I cover with my content, that my audience will find useful and relevant?
- What type of content my audience loves the most? Can I add some variety?
- How can I get the feedback and be sure that my content is useful for them?
Answering these questions will help you focus on your audience’s needs instead of your own, thus making your content more appealing.
In order to best tailor your content to fit the needs of your audience, it needs to be data-driven, relying on the data obtained from your customer profile. This also means keeping track of the metrics and making necessary changes to your content according to your customers’ behavior.
Improve your E-A-T
Elevate Digital, a Hong Kong SEO company, points out that besides publishing exceptional content, you should also improve the expertise, authority and trustworthiness of your blog.
The trend that goes by the acronym “E-A-T” will dominate the world of content marketing in 2020. Achieving this goal is possible by:
- Earning mentions and backlinks from reputable, authority sites.
- Thorough research of the topics, using statistics, data and facts to back up your posts and make your content truly relevant.
- Linking sources for the information you use.
- Updating your content regularly and providing fresh and accurate data.
- Providing authors details on relevant pages.
Focus on visuals
In order to grab the attention of your target audience, and reach the younger generations that grew up on YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, you need to make your post as easily digestible as possible.
To achieve this goal you need to make your content highly visual. This gives you endless opportunities when it comes to your content:
- Enhance your textual content with screenshots, images, photos to get your points across.
- Use infographics to make complicated information understandable and easy for your customers to grasp.
- Use videos to tell stories your audience will find useful.
- Use live video to connect to your audience directly.
- Create gifs from your favorite TV shows, movies or gif yourself.
By using more visual content, you will increase the dwell time on your pages and send positive signals to Google. Your content will also be more sharable, and bring you more traffic and hopefully, conversions.
Optimize for voice search
Optimizing your blog for voice search is no longer optional, since the trend of using voice commands to browse the web is on the rise.
Forbes found that 40% of adults use voice search on a daily basis, and it is predicted that by 2020 half of all searches will be managed by voice.
The key to making your blog accessible by voice search is SEO, and understanding differences in how users conduct written and voice queries.
You can optimize your blog for voice search by adding key details for local queries, as well as product details.
Leverage interactive media
Besides including more visual content on your blog, aim for increasing the number of your interactive posts. You may include trivia and quizzes, polls and surveys, interactive calculators, product catalog etc.
These forms of content engage your audience so that they stay on your blog longer. Interactive content can give your audience something to play with, like in the case of Buzzfeed quizzes. Statistics show that no matter how trivial or silly these quizzes are, they grab the users’ attention, as 96% of users who start a Buzzfeed quiz, actually finish it.
You can also offer something more useful, and add some real value to your followers’ lives. Still, make sure your interactive media is related to your core content and is within your expertise.
Keep a close eye on these trends and try to adjust to stay competitive in the world of blogging and content marketing.