Does writing a blog post for your business seem like an extra task on your plate – one you’re afraid of?
Relax! Once you learn the SEO benefits that blogging brings home, it wouldn’t be. In particular, creating valuable blog posts that answer your readers’ questions can improve your ranking chances.
The best time to optimize your site’s blog content for SEO is when you’re creating it. And after reading this piece, you can also go back and improve your old blogs as well.
Blog SEO is essential because it helps you bring more traffic to your website continuously. There’re many things you can do to optimize your blog post for SEO.
This article will share our best blog SEO tips to help you optimize your blog post for SEO like a pro.
1. Keyword Research is the “Key”
Effective keyword research is the key to creating blog posts that are best positioned to rank high on Google.
Start with keyword research and decide which keyword you are targeting and whether it is a ‘low-hanging fruit target or an overabundance. Build your content accordingly on similar blogs. Do your research accordingly, researching similar blogs that have ranked highly for that keyword.
The goal of your keyword research should be to answer the following questions:
- Which keywords are searched more often?
- What are the questions that are often asked?
- How challenging is it to rank on these keywords?
When you do research, keep in mind that some search phrases are more commonly used than others.
2. Answer Niche Questions
An area that Google is focusing too much on these days is measuring the ability of content to answer popular specific questions. Every time you type a question in the search box, you must have noticed Google’s Quick Answer Box. Hence, every time you write a blog post, it is essential to make question research a part of your keyword research.
3. Find Semantic Keywords for Your Focus Keyword
After you’ve done your keyword research and filtered the keyword ideas, it’s time to use the ones with the highest search volume and the least competition.
It will be your focus keyword. It is the search phrase your users are most likely to find. You can easily set the focus keyword in the SEO settings of your article. Next, you need to find the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. These are searches related to your focus keywords.
The simplest trick to find them is to enter your focus keyword in Google search and scroll to the bottom of the results. There you will find them listed as ‘related searches.’
You need to include as many of these keywords in your content as possible to have complete content for users.
You mustn’t try to stuff them in your content. This will seem odd to your users, and you know very well that search engines are very good at detecting keyword stuffing.
4. Improve Your Content Format
Quality is about being detailed and comprehensive. It is about answering all related questions and providing examples. As we said, it is about creating the best pages on the Internet for the subject.
But there is another quality factor. Is the material easy to consume? To make it easier for visitors and more likely for their stay, we need to make inviting blog posts. It means adding formatting and visualization. Here’s how it affects our SEO.
The page ranks on Google, the visitor clicks, and lands on a page with a dense block of small types of text without a view.
… Two seconds later, he hit the back button.
The visitor clicks to another website in the same search result page, arriving at a beautiful page that is easy to scan with meaningful subtitles and views.
… Five minutes later, he hit the back button.
It is the difference between “short click” and “long click.” If the visitor stays longer, you have sent a positive user engagement signal to Google. And the key for visitors to remain is to make the page scannable. Do not hit them with a wall of text.
Here is a list of ways to make your content more consumable.
- Keep short paragraph
- Avoid writing paragraphs longer than three lines.
- Brief writing
- Make it concise, direct, and actionable. Remove soft language such as “It would seem to me,” “In my opinion,” “Sometimes,” and “Maybe.”
- Use sub-headline
- Divide the content into sections with meaningful headings for each. Bolding and italics can also help draw attention to the most valuable points.
- Leverage Bullet lists and numbered lists
- If the entire post is a list, be sure to include a number in the title. It indicates to potential readers that it is easy to scan.
- Insert Quotes from experts
- Add names and faces to make your article more human and accessible.
- Multiple images
- Do not use only the image pictured at the top. Try adding an image at each scroll depth.
5. Share Triggers
Do you wonder why some blogs are shared more over another one? You can ask why you would read blog posts and find lots of shares on various social media platforms. The truth is that there are sharing triggers that can inspire someone to share your blog post online. When your content gets shared, your chances of ranking that blog post increases to be ranked on search engines.
Also, trying to get people to share a post takes you on a path that produces search engine-friendly content. Now, what are these share triggers, and how can you get them in your blog post?
There are many things to consider as a share trigger, but here are some of the most important ones.
Utility: The importance of creating value in your content cannot be overemphasized. You need to create content that provides value to readers. The benefit becomes a two-way blessing as the algorithm will rank it for its value while readers share it with friends and colleagues.
Length: There is a myth regarding the length of words really affects the ranking of blog posts on search engines. There is some truth in this, and there are also a lot of myths surrounding it. If you write long blog posts, which means complete nonsense for your readers, then you are starting wrong. But a long blog post answering many questions from your readers is likely to be shared and ranked higher on search engines.
Memory Glue: Can you remember the last material you read online? Well, not me either. People are so used to blog content formats that it’s almost a cliche for them. But there is nothing wrong with being creative, authoritative, opinion-forming, and original (of course, innovative thinkers rule many places globally).
Positivity: In a society where people are careful about what brings them happiness, you should really stay away from sending messages with negative feelings. Just add some humor here and there and convert “serious” concepts into simpler smiles. People want to be identified with a positive attitude, and it will help your online presence if you can help them with this.
6. Focus On Low Difficulty Keywords
Keyword difficulty is an important metric that you need to keep in mind when choosing keywords for your blog articles. The higher the keyword difficulty is, the more intense the competition and the harder it will be to rank.
The general rule of thumb while choosing keywords is to find keywords that have a good traffic volume with little competition.
To find the keyword difficulty, you can use either free tools like Google KP, freemium tools like UberSuggest or premium tools like Ahrefs and Semrush.
7. Get Links to Your Blog Posts
The final step to get the ranking of your blog post in Google is to create a link to that post. While most business owners spend time obtaining links to their home pages and other high-value pages, many forget to link to specific posts.
Unless your blog posts are extremely useful, practical, and/or unique, these highly-targeted links can be challenging to obtain. However, as noted above, if you create “linkable” content, you naturally have the best chance of submitting links from other bloggers and journalists.
There are some other ways you can get these links:
- Internally linking to your blog post on your site.
- Linking to your blog post when you guest post on other sites.
- Tell bloggers and journalists about specific posts relevant to them.
Keyword research has evolved nowadays and is undoubtedly more complex. At the same time, it’s also more diverse. It encourages you to create deeper content and does fantastic work for inspiration. If you want to outsource your SEO part, we will handle it. You can contact us to get a free quote from our SEO industry experts. Call now!