Blog SEO makes up an important component of your website’s overall ranking on search engine result pages. This SEO strategy offers an effective route to get your site ranked for specific and relatable keywords all while still focusing on serving your target audience’s needs. It’s what marketing dreams are made of!
The truth is, search engine marketers will always recommend blogging as an effective SEO marketing tactic. Why? For one, it’s an easy way to fill your website with industry related keywords. Secondly, it allows you to produce more links for audience members to easily find your website. When your content ranks well, that’s when you start seeing more traffic being driven to your website and your number of leads increase.
If you’ve read our previous blog posts, you’ve probably picked up that we’re big on search engine optimisations. While most of our content has been centred around optimising your website as a whole, let’s take a deeper look at what SEO means for your blog itself.
Our Blog SEO Tips to Rank on Google
1. Get to Know What Makes Good SERP Content
Before getting started, let’s do a little experiment. Take a look at the first 10 websites ranked on Google for any search query. What do they all have in common?The chances are that they are all well thought out with a catchy headline promising to solve your search query, correct? These are the exact reasons why they’re on the first page of Google! Content that is full of helpful information and handy tips is what gets ranked on search engines. It’s high-quality content all the way!
While all blog posts aren’t created equal, they do all follow a similar theme of bringing its readers massive value. To ensure that you’re making the most out of your blog posts, we’d recommend spending some time getting know how the top ranking posts are crafted. By taking note of how the first few websites structured their blog posts, you can get a better sense of why Google has put them on the first result page.
A few key characteristics you can keep an eye out for are:
- Heading structures - do they pose an intriguing question or do they immediately state how their content can benefit the reader?
- Videos and images - how do these website use images to enhance their blog posts?
- Readability - are these blog posts easy to read with factual information at the fore or do they go more in-depth with their explanations?
- Engagement - do they encourage a sense of communication and feedback at the end of their posts? How do they respond to their comments?
2. Focus on Your On-Page SEO
According to Search Engine Journal, between 70% and 80% of users pay better attention to organic search results than paid listings. Furthermore, a whopping 51% of search traffic is generated by organic results. By optimising your blog post for SEO, you’re helping Google understand your content and therefore assist in having it ranked on the first page.So, what can you do to get your blog SEO ready? Here are a few basic steps to get you started:
- Follow the right heading structures
- Do your keyword research
- Optimise your website for mobile searches
- Complete your metadata descriptions
- Add alt-text to your images
These are just some of the ways that you can incorporate on-page SEO into your website. For a better look at this branch of optimisation, make sure to read our blog post here.
3. Provide Value to Your Readers
The one aspect that underpins every blogging philosophy is that your content must strive to serve your target audience’s needs. Whether this is done by helping them solve a problem or by providing them with expert advice, the goal should be to create a positive user experience. This form of inbound marketing is proven to help drive loyal and trusted customer relationships.
These days, consumers aren’t interested in the sell as much as they are in businesses that are willing to help them achieve their goals. For your content, this means you have to constantly work on providing answers that are relatable to your target audience’s situation and pain points. By doing so, it poses as the perfect opportunity to present your business as an industry leader and to create long-lasting customer relationships.
To ensure that you’re always creating unique and relevant material for your target audience, we highly recommend using a highly researched content calendar. A content calendar will help you keep track of which subjects you’ve covered and which subjects are still to come. This way, you will always have a fresh understanding of your target audience’s reading material and updated blog page.
4. Encourage Social Sharing
Social media is full of blogs, videos, and images constantly being shared. For businesses, this is extremely useful in getting your content seen.Currently, there are 4.39 billion social media users, all of which could make up a part of your ideal target audience. This is why we’re constantly seeing websites go viral for their social media success! By having your articles shared on your platforms, you’re opening up another communication channel to get your business right in front of a potential customer.
Moreso, social sharing is an important pillar under SEO. Google values your number of social shares of a way to show that your content can be trusted and is worth extending to its users. So, whenever you have a fresh blog post to share, make sure to copy it over onto your social media channels too!
5. Fix Any Broken Links
If you’ve been creating blog posts for a while, you should consider doing a quick broken link check. Not only do broken links promote a poor user experience, but they could be dampening your post’s ranking position too.Luckily, broken links aren’t too tricky to sort out. If you have a WordPress site, you can make use of plugins such as Broken Link Checker and Link Checker to do the work for you.
6. Dedicate Time to Link Building
Lastly, the most effective way to get your blog post ranked on Google is to focus on your link building. Link building will get your content referenced on other pages and show Google that your post is valuable to its users.While this strategy may take some time until you start seeing results, it’s one of Google’s most valued SEO components.
The best tip you can get when trying to improve your blog SEO is to remember to put the user first. Yes, the goal is to get on that coveted first page of Google but it’s your audience that will help you the most in your efforts.