Nearly every online industry webpage is full of blog posts today. All with different purposes and topics, but all with the same opportunity of not only sharing useful content but gaining a better SEO score. Search engine optimization is very important for digital marketing in the 21st century. Depending on your business goals, strategizing the best ways to boost SEO will help the growth of your business. Many industries are moving online and strategizing new ways each day to stay on top. With more and more businesses hopping on the SEO train, the competition is only growing, so maximizing your relevance and prominence will help your business in the long run. Fortunately, Google is always changing too, which means we are all trying to better understand the mysterious way Google works. One aspect of boosting your SEO is within the content of your website, or more specifically, in your blogs. No matter if you are constantly writing new blogs or just looking to revamp some older ones, there are many ways you can use blogs to elevate your business’s SEO and ultimately your ranking on Google. So, how do you squeeze more SEO juice out of your blogs?
Four ways to squeeze more SEO juice out of your blogs
User experience
Half the battle of getting your blog post to rank well on Google is user experience. Jakob Nielsen, author of the Nielsen Norman Group states: “users often leave web pages in 10-20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people’s attention for much longer.” When a user is looking for a quick recipe for apple pie and lands on a blog with the title “easy apple pie recipe” only to read 4 pages worth of your favorite memory eating fruit pies, a user will likely close your tab and keep on searching. Depending on your personal goals for your blogs, this aspect of user experience is crucial. Google measures these metrics of how long users stay on a web page and decide how valuable your content is to readers. The longer a user stays, the better.
In addition to relative and easy-to-read content, page speed and mobile responsiveness are a big portion of the user experience as well. You want your readers to be able to read your content wherever they go, right? If your answer is yes, then ensure your content can be formatted for mobile use. Also, keep an eye on how fast your page loads on all devices. Google Analytics is a great resource to see how well your mobile site and page speed are performing.
Your name is your gain
Taking our second stop of the SEO blog tour goes back to the very beginning. The title, or in SEO terms, the H1. The easiest way to think about creating a title for your blog (to strives towards a higher in Google ranking) is creating one consumers will likely search. A good tool to see how people are searching is Google Trends. This tool allows you to compare certain search terms and see exactly what people are typing into Google. For example, let’s say you want to write a blog about vegan pastries in Portland, Oregon. Start by brainstorming ways people will search about your topic. Maybe “best vegan pastries near me” or “Portland vegan bakery” and see how they compare. People are probably not searching “Vegan SZN” or “sweet treats without the dairy.” Although these titles can be comical on their own, they don’t add any substance to your SEO score because it is not how people search. On the other hand, if you are passionate about your title and don’t want to change it, ensure you add those killer keywords to your content.
When curating a title for your blog, ask yourself a few questions before you choose a juicy name:
- What keywords can I incorporate into my title?
- Who is my target audience?
- What is the main theme of my blog?
If you can’t seem to find a keyword to work well in your blog title, don’t try to force the word in. Take advantage of your title tag instead. Moz.com describes a title tag as “an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page… displayed as part of the search snippet in a search engine results page. It appears as the clickable headline for the search result and is important for user experience, SEO, and social sharing.” This is where you can find a home for your keywords instead. Make your title or title tag relevant to your target audience and the content within your blog as well because there is nothing worse than falling into the clickbait trap.
Look through your old blogs
When you think about blog posts in general, what tends to happen over time? Naturally, the traffic to your blog begins to decay. Users may find your blog about Air Pods useful in 2016 but not so much in 2021. As less and less traffic comes to your post, Google’s algorithm collects this traffic data and decides “This blog doesn’t deserve to rank anymore! Let’s get rid of it!” Slowly but surely your ranking falls into the abyss of Google one spot at a time. Fortunately, it is never too late to redeem the ranking of your blog. So, take some time to look at your old blogs. Check out your top blogs and the ones with little traffic, too. Decide which ones are slowly decaying in traffic and before you begin rewriting the content, go to Google and see which keywords are ranking well. Look at competitors’ blogs and see what keywords they are using to drive impressions for them. Collect and integrate the new keywords into your content. If you can revamp these blogs to be relevant so Googles algorithm deems you worthy of reclaiming your ranking, you can drive leads, sales, and business.
Hyperlinking
Hyperlinking is one of the most crucial aspects of blog writing. Utilize high domain authority websites such as Wikipedia or HubSpot to essentially tell Google you are providing trustworthy content. Add internal links to different pages of your website to get more traffic and time spent on your website. The longer a user is on your website, the more Google trusts your content to be worthy of the number one money spot on an organic search. Keep in mind user experience when adding hyperlinks. You don’t want to flood your content with hundreds of blue and underlined words and keyword after keyword. You want your readers to gain something from your writing and enjoy the time spent on your site.
No matter what industry you are in, take advantage of content writing and blogs so you can boost your SEO. Consider what is important to you and your business goals and take a trip down blogging lane to see where you could improve your SEO. If you are a believer in tracking your marketing, a best practice would be to change older blogs one at a time so you can see which keywords or topics are boosting traffic and impressions. Remember, real people are reading your blogs so keep them relevant, easy to read, and easy to access.
So, the next time you are writing a blog, think like Google!
