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
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 and start swimming?
A blog without SEO is like the person who can’t swim. You’re throwing your content into the deep end of Google with little chance of it staying afloat. It’s more likely to get washed away in the flood of content from your competitors.
When used right, SEO can help your blog swim to the top of search results. Blog SEO includes keyword research, metadata, image optimisation, and link building.
Not everyone is an SEO expert. We include SEO strategies in our Finer Blog Copy package so our clients don’t need to spend time learning how to do this themselves.
5. Include internal links
Attracting ideal clients to your blog from Google is an achievement in itself. Next, you want the reader to stay on your site for as long as possible.
The average reader spends 52 seconds reading a blog post. That’s not long at all. So how do you keep them engaged?
Well, obviously, write engaging content. But including internal links will help too. This lets you link the blog the person is currently reading to other blog posts and pages on your website.
Imagine a reader lands on a blog post that explores how movement can help with trauma. You could link to another post you’ve written about the symptoms of PTSD or simple exercises people can try at home.
With internal linking, your reader doesn’t only read what they came to the post for. They also discover related information on other blog posts you’ve created.
As a bonus, internal linking can also make your website content more visible to Google.
6. Post regularly and consistently
You need to blog regularly and consistently to see results. Don’t start a blog unless you know you can commit to uploading at least once a week. Fewer than this is unlikely to lead to an increase in traffic any time soon.
Blogging is a long-term marketing strategy. With a weekly blog, you’ll see steady progress and then bigger growth in around 12 months. The exact length of time depends on factors like your domain authority.
A blogging mistake to avoid is quitting because you’re not seeing immediate results. If you give up too soon, your blog definitely won’t see any growth.
Blogging is like planting seeds. Your patience will pay off in time. As long as you plan to be in business this time next year, a blog could be the most valuable marketing strategy in your arsenal.
Another blogging mistake to avoid is posting inconsistently. If you’re blogging as part of your marketing strategy, really commit. Set aside time each week or month to write, edit, and upload or schedule your posts.
Don’t be like those wellness businesses that haven’t updated their blogs in months (or years). These businesses look inactive to website visitors and aren’t taking the action to show up in Google search results.
7. Promote your blog
Once you’ve uploaded your blog post, don’t just wait for people to discover it in search engines. Promote your blog by sharing the posts on your other marketing channels.
This is a great way to increase web traffic and save time creating marketing content.
Sharing links to your blog post in your podcast show notes or enewsletter increases the chances of people clicking on them and visiting your blog.
Plus, you can repurpose your blog posts, turning them into social media posts, video scripts, and more.
Building your entire content campaign around your blog can save you so much time! All our Finer Blog Copy package clients get a bonus digital content planner to help them do just this.
More step-by-step blogging tips
We’ve covered seven steps to blogging in the wellness space that should help you get started. For a more in-depth look at launching a holistic blog, check out our step-by-step blogging guide.
If you, like our clients, would rather delegate your blogging to the pros, why not check out our blog package? We write for entrepreneurs who enhance their clients’ personal and business well-being. If you’re a business coach, dietician, massage therapist, counsellor, spiritual healer, or something in between, we’d love to help amplify your influence.
About Finer Things Editorial
Finer Things Editorial writes for businesses that help others achieve abundance, whether in the form of profit, self-love, or physical health. Our content helps these businesses attract their dream clients, so they don’t have to chase them. Having taken businesses from 0 to 1,000+ primed-to-buy website visitors per day, we take businesses from unknown to really known.
