There are plenty of things to love about Toronto. The iconic CN Tower, a nearly unlimited range of multicultural food options offering anything you could possibly want, a wide variety of entertainment for both the day and the night, and a go-getter vibe to boot.
In fact, it’s not just local Torontonians that will tell you how great this city is, even The Economist’s Intelligence Unit agrees.
With so much diversity and a wide variety of lifestyles, there’s no doubt locals and visitors alike are looking to share their adventures and experiences in this city. For those looking to hit the web, a lifestyle blog is the perfect option for getting your story online and maybe even making money from it.
But the problem with creating a personal blog of any kind in a vast city like Toronto is the competition. Just a quick Google search will confirm the popularity and competitiveness with trying to get a lifestyle blog rank well enough to get visitors. So here are three steps that every blogger in Toronto should be following before they make their site go live.
1) Define Your Blog’s Purpose
Source: coschedule.com
Being one of the most popular and broadest blogging topics, creating a lifestyle blog in Toronto is more than just talking about your daily exploits. Too often, ambitious bloggers start their project without giving their blog a reason or purpose. This can confuse search engines and make your site lose focus easily.
Before diving into creating content for your blog, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- What do I want to write about?
- How much time can I commit to my blog?
- Who do I want to read my blog?
Whether you’re a mom looking to share childcare tips, food recipes, stories, and adventures with other local parents or a dog owner wanting to share pictures of your pup’s outing to High Park, your blog should have a specific niche. This is not only a marketable asset of your blog, but it also makes it clearer to search engines what your blog is about, increasing the potential to rank well.
Although it can be tempting to go very broad and cover a whole range of unrelated topics, keep your blog limited to 2-3 different topics at the most. Who knows – if your blog performs very well, you might just be able to create a new one!
2) Have a Strategy
Once you’ve got the concept of your blog firmly set in your mind, you now need to decide on how you want to deliver your blog.
Blogging isn’t always easy. Challenges such as family or work commitments, writer’s block, and a general lack of time can really slow down your progress. That’s where content calendars and schedules come in to make blogging a little bit easier for you.
By having your blogs listed on a calendar, you can write blog posts up in patches and save them for uploading at a later date. For example, if you are a Toronto local business and want to blog about your products and services, plan ahead of time and write several blogs once a week. That way, during busier periods like the holiday season, your blogs can be quickly uploaded without you having to take the time to research and write about it while being busy.
Search engines reward sites that upload fresh content on a regular basis, and having a content strategy in place can really boost your blog’s performance over time.
3) Ensure Your Site is SEO Optimized
Source: Statuslabs
While having a focused site with a steady flow of quality content is a crucial key to a well-performing blog, there are also some technical hoops to get through in order to rank highly on search engines that might be out your reach.
To make sure your site is meeting Google’s latest ranking factors(Google Core Web Vitals, pick up the right Keywords, focus on low difficulty keywords, focus on long tail keywords, primary Keywords in the Title and Subheadings, write compelling titles and meta descriptions with primary keyword, regular engaging blogging, Internal linking, Relevant backlinks from niche sites, speed, mobile friendly, and secured website, etc.) and is able to rank, you can consult a local SEO agency. Finding a great SEO company or consultant in any city can be a challenge as there are many options out there, including here in Toronto. However, one tip for finding a great SEO service is to search for an SEO-related keyword and see their performance. If the agency or individual can rank themselves in a competitive city like Toronto, it is a strong indicator they are capable of giving your blog the boost it needs. For example, a quick search ‘Local SEO Toronto’ now just found www.letsgetoptimized.com to be the number one result – your search might be the same or vary.
Whichever SEO consultant or agency you work with, never be afraid to ask questions about their processes, tools, and recommendations. The best SEOs are more than happy to provide evidence-based recommendations that will help your blog rank locally on Google.
4) Stay Dedicated to Your Blog
No matter the purpose of your blog or where you want to take it, it’s important to remember that making it appear in search results for relevant keywords is a marathon, not a sprint. So, don’t lose heart if you find after a week or two your blogs aren’t appearing on search engines, this is totally normal and expected. The most important thing is to keep your pace and regularly publish interesting content when you can.
It can take several months for your blog to pick up some pace. But once you start to gain visitors, your website traffic can increase exponentially and you’ll be in the running for one of Toronto’s top lifestyle blogs.
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