7 steps to blogging in the wellness space

7 steps to blogging in the wellness space So, you run a business that enhances your clients’ personal and/or business well-being. You know that a blog is a great way to reach a wider audience. But  where should you start? Without following blogging best practices, your blog is unlikely to get seen at all, let alone by your ideal clients. Here are seven steps to blogging in the wellness space that will help you grow your audience: 1. Identify your niche. 2. Do your keyword research. 3. Write useful, reliable content. 4. Do your search engine optimisation (SEO). 5. Include internal links. 6. Post regularly and consistently. 7. Promote your blog. 1. Identify your niche Imagine starting a business without knowing who you’re serving. You wouldn’t know what services to offer, how to market your business, or who to share your offers with. That’s why many business coaches will insist you identify your niche before you take any other action for your business. We absolutely agree with this advice. If you start a blog with no goal or target audience in mind, you won’t know who you’re writing for or what topics to cover. If you’ve already identified your niche for your wellness business, you can use the same demographic for your blog. Are you helping women in their 30s who want to optimise their fertility? Are you offering wellness retreats for busy entrepreneurs? Keep your target audience in mind when writing your blog posts. This will help you address the issues your ideal clients want advice on. Knowing your niche will also help you write in a suitable tone of voice for those people. For instance, if you coach business owners you might want to adopt a tone that’s friendly but professional. 2. Do your keyword research Keyword research is a blogging essential. We can’t stress enough how a lack of keyword research can sabotage even the best-written blog posts. That’s why it’s an integral part of the blog package we provide. Keyword research tells you exactly what your ideal clients are Googling. You can target these phrases and questions in your blog posts to show up in Google search results when your ideal clients type in their problems. You can find the best keywords for your niche with free keyword research tools like Ubersuggest. These tools tell you two things: How many people are Googling each keyword per month (the search volume). How difficult it will be to rank in Google results for this keyword (the keyword difficulty score). We recommend making a list of keywords with a low SEO difficulty score and a search volume of at least 10. These will be easier to rank for than highly competitive keywords. For example, let’s compare the keywords ‘reiki’ and ‘reiki violet flame.’ ‘Reiki’ has a monthly search volume of 33,100, and its SEO difficulty is 74. Meanwhile, ‘reiki violet flame’ has a monthly search volume of 30 and an SEO difficulty of 18. ‘Reiki violet flame’s’ much lower SEO difficulty score means it’ll be way easier to get your blog ranking for this keyword than ‘reiki’ alone. 30 searches a month may not sound like many compared to 33,100. But what if you booked 30 new clients in a month? Trust us, 30 searches a month is plenty to make this keyword worthwhile for a reiki therapist. In short, using keywords with a lower SEO difficulty is more likely to get your blog posts ranking high in Google results. Only the biggest, most established businesses will show up for generic keywords like ‘reiki.’  If you skip keyword research, you’re likely to miss out on loads of website traffic. You’re also missing out on identifying a bunch of blog topics you could cover. Topics you know people are searching for via Google. Quick tip: Create a content calendar that contains all the keywords you want to target. A content calendar will help you plan all the blog post topics you’ll cover over the upcoming weeks or months. 3. Write useful, relevant content Each of your blog posts should *brim* with useful, reliable content that enriches your readers’ lives. This way, you’ll keep them engaged and coming back for more. Draw on your content calendar full of keywords to inspire your blog post topics. You can also create useful content by asking your clients or social media followers what they want to read about. Covering trending topics is another good way to serve readers useful content. If you’re offering health or well-being advice to readers, your blog posts need to be extremely reputable. Do your due diligence to ensure you only share factually correct information. Sharing beneficial, reliable content can help you establish a reputation as the go-to expert in your field. Building a trustworthy site that others link to from their own blog posts or websites also helps you climb Google rankings. Finally, proofread your blog posts before sharing them. Looking at content with a fresh eye can help you pick up on mistakes. You can easily lose credibility with spelling errors or misplaced punctuation. If you’re not the best at spotting these things, you might prefer to delegate your editing to a professional copy editor. Choose an editor who is a member of a professional body, like the CIEP. This way, you can be sure you’re hiring a professional editor, rather than a self-nominated editor. (Trust us, there’s a big difference between the two.) 4. Do your SEO You’ve identified your niche, researched keywords, and written your blog post. But there are still a couple of vital SEO steps to take before you hit publish. There’s no successful blogging without SEO. Sure, you might upload some nice writing to your website. But content that you haven’t optimised for search engines is unlikely to get seen in Google or attract readers. Imagine two people who dive into the deep end of a pool: one can swim and the other can’t. Who do you expect to rise to the surface…