What we learned from blogging this year: our top tips from 2022
Helpful tips to improve your content marketing via your blog
As a branding and website design studio in Devon, for creatively-inclined businesses across the UK, we love living reflectively, whether that's in business, family life or our gardening successes or failures!
Over Christmas, we wanted to share some things we learned from blogging this year that you might find helpful in your work too.
This kind of content is quite popular around this time of year (it's quick and easy to put together, plus scheduled ahead of time), but we're looking back as we've been intentionally investing in our blog.
The reason for this is because website content is incredibly valuable. It feeds your performance in search engine results (SEO); boost your customer's journey on your site; plus can be continually be improved.
So here are five of our tops blogs; why they did well; and what we learned from the process.
Wildings is a website designer for small businesses. Our studio is based in Torquay, Devon, and we provide small business website design for creative, hospitality & lifestyle businesses across the UK (like garden designers, interior designers, architects, floral designers and more!). If you’d like to find out more, explore our website design for small businesses or contact this small business website designer →
5 powerful visual elements for amazing website design (& what to avoid)
This top-performing blog demonstrates why a great title or subject line is crucial to blogs (or newsletters, for that matter). The switch in brackets provides a tantalising hook to click through to the blog. We also included lots of practical tips and visual examples, plus made further improvements to it as the year went on.
Best size for your website images, how to do it & why it’s important
Although only published recently, this SEO-related blog shows how you can take user-generated content and create valuable written blogs. We developed it from at Q&A at our free Website Club, and it specifically targets the image-related questions people put into Google search queries. The title also points to the results the visitor can achieve and an inkling of the roadmap to get there.
10 fundamentals of SEO: our comprehensive list for a tremendous Google-friendly website
We threw the kitchen sink at this one after honing several blogs: a listicle title (10 fundamentals...) that is an ever-popular format; long-form blog for extra Google brownie points; plus title, meta description, URL all lean, mean and optimised! Again, this content was pulled from a Website Club session, reducing the effort of writing totally fresh content.
How to pinpoint your brand strengths & uniqueness like a boss for success
Originally published in 2020, we optimised this blog further in May this year, which goes to show how blogs keep pulling in traffic long after they've gone live. This is a great example, as we used the free monthly Google Search Console performance report to guide our ongoing website maintenance work. Want to know how? Join our next Website Club session at the end of January (it's free!).
WHAT ARE MY BRAND STRENGTHS? →
Six top ways to level up your Instagram & website game
We teamed up with Instagram coach, Kirsty Raper, on how to attract homes and gardens brands in and around big show (like the Chelsea Flower Show) or your industry-specific event . It shows how the key principles of your Instagram bio mirror how to approach your website: being clear about who you're helping; how you solve problems; and making it easy to take action. The fab thing about this blog is that we can rerun the campaign next year with minimal effort by updating and tweaking the existing content.
Have you enjoyed one of our blogs this year? Let us know - we'd love to hear from you! Next time we'll share some of our top performing Instagram posts and what we learned from doing our social media marketing this year. If you’d like to learn more from us on website design or get visual inspiration, follow @wildings.studio on Instagram.