This week I discuss what works in blogging right now for credit unions who are either planning to start a blog or who have been blogging for a while.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to another episode of the CU social strategy podcast. I’m your host and your credit union copywriter and content strategist Jennifer Roland Cadiente, and today we’re going to talk about what you should actually do with your blog in 2026
so overall, blogging is still a really powerful thing to do as a credit union. It helps build authority and show that you’re you know, you’re the right choice for people’s money. It helps potential members find you when they’ve got questions and they go to the web or to an AI tool to research what they should do. Having your information index there helps them know that you’re the right place again. And in addition, it helps show members why they should trust you. And you know, as we all know, when money is involved, trust is so important. You know, a lot of times potential members may be having trouble with money, and that’s why they’re looking for answers on the web and looking for help. So you want to not only be clear that they can trust you with the money that they deposit with you, but also that you can trust them with the information that they share with you as they work through any issues that they’re having or that come up later on.
I did mention you know that people are using AI tools to search for information. That kind of led to this whole discussion last year of whether SEO was dead, and the key it is not dead. It’s very important that we continue to use the right keywords to attract people, to make sure that they find our information, but to know that it doesn’t always lead to an immediate click like it used to. You know, it used to be that you could do some SEO refreshes on your website, and you could see your traffic go up almost immediately. And that felt, it felt great for, you know, people like me, who were your service providers giving you the tools that you needed to increase your traffic, and it felt great for you seeing that what you’re investing in this in your online presence, was having an effect. But now, even if people are not using an AI tool, Google and other search engines, they give these summaries that answer the question that the person is asking without them actually having to click on your website to find out, unless they need more of more information than what is contained in that answer. So SEO is important, continue to use your keywords, continue to research new keywords, as you know, as you develop new financial products, and people have new questions about their money, but also think about how to structure your content in such a way that it’s picked up by those AI learning, language learning models, so that when people go into chat, GPT and ask, you know, how should I do this thing with my money that your pages will will be in there, and your information and the name of your credit union will be shared? But also look at how you’re structuring things so that they can show up in those quick AI answers that you see on Google.
So what you need to do with your you know, your blog content and your web content is make sure that it’s broken up into really easy to digest pieces. Use a lot of headings. Make sure that you know you’re really following what we in journalism call the inverted pyramid structure where you give the most important information right away, not just in the entire page, but in each section of the page. So the first sentence, whenever possible, should answer the question, then you provide more details in the subsequent sections, and you want to organize those in the order of importance, so that if a person just reads the heading and the first sentence, they’ll get the information that they need, because then the AI answer will also get the information that it needs to provide on the page. Another thing is to make sure that you’re using tools, what a lot of people might call a schema, to make it really clear what type of content each of your blog posts include. You know, whether you make it very clear at the very top that it’s an FAQ. You know a how to. Do something like that. You can include that in the heading. You can include it in the URL. Things like that, that let the AI tools easily read what type of content you’re creating, so they know how to structure it in answers that they provide. Because the goal, you know, Google wants people to stay on their Google search results page and not click through to the websites, because the more time they spend there, the more likely they are to see the ads that Google is providing.
But of course, we want people to actually visit our website, not just stay on Google. So we are, you know, we in Google are working at cross purposes there.
So if you haven’t started a credit union blog. Yet, what you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to create a content plan that really focuses on the real questions that people are asking right now, whether it’s your members or your potential members. You just want it to be things that are really current, so that your blog posts are going to come up when people are searching for those questions. It’s a good idea to start with a, you know, a batch of maybe eight posts to make sure that you have some really good information out there and then continue to post regularly. As you’re moving forward, you don’t have to post. You certainly don’t need to post every day or even every week. A couple posts a month should be enough, and we know that Google really likes sites that get updated, and a blog is a great way to make sure that you’re making, you know, consistent updates. You’re probably, of course, updating your promotions every month, but this gives you some extra content, and the type of content that can really draw people in. Whenever you have stories of real members who you’ve helped with your services, try to include those as much as you can. One of the things that you know, we’ve always thought it’s so important to only share these stories when we have a name and permission, and that’s still great. It’s a story that you know that has an actual person attached to it is so powerful, but some of the new research coming out shows that the case studies and the testimonials can be anonymous and still be effective. I’m still working through that research, and I’m going to talk more about it in an upcoming podcast, so stay tuned for that, but for now, just know that whatever way you can get a story in there, is better than having no stories at all.
So if you’ve been blogging for a long time and you have this wealth of blog content worked up, where you’re going to want to focus, you’re still going to want to post, you know, two new posts a month as much as possible, and follow the guidelines for how to make sure that your SEO, your AEO and your geo are all all working for you, but where you’re really going to want to focus your energy is on revising some of your content so that it feels new and looks new to the search engines, But that you’re not having to, you know, create it completely from scratch. So depending on how much content you have, you may want to, you know, say, I want to revise five posts per quarter. I want to revise 25 posts per quarter. Just pick a number that you feel is sustainable and go find those posts, update them using the guidelines to, you know, maybe change the structure, make sure that the way that the questions are being asked are, you know, really current, and make sure that the answers are really concise, so that They can be picked up by the AI answers. I whenever you can incorporate stories again, do it as you look through your content, you know you’re going to see just how much revision each of these posts need. And you know maybe you want to pick the easier ones first, get the quick win, the key is just to keep doing the updates regularly. And you know, as you go forward, continue the process of iterating. Once you’ve gone through all of the posts in the past, continue working through the newer posts so that you keep adding. Everything updated so that it continues to be relevant.
And to help people with this, I am launching a new service of a blog audit, where I can go through your blog content and create a report with some recommendations of what to update first, how to update it and where you’re going to want to focus on your new content going forward, so that you have a really complete and useful credit union blog. So you can find out about that at in the show notes for this this episode, and you’ll see it if you go to credit union copywriter, and you sign up for my emails, you’ll get an email link with that.
So going forward, I just, you know, I want to reiterate that blogging continues to be important. SEO continues to be important. Updates continue to be important.
So thank you for joining me today. I will talk to you next time, and until then, visit me on LinkedIn at Jennifer Roland Cadiente Or at http://creditunioncopywriter.com
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