One of the best ways to improve your ranking in search engines is to start a blog. Regularly updated websites signal to search engines that they offer fresh content. Certain pages on your website are unlikely to be updated very often, but a blog offers a practical way to keep adding fresh content. Your blog is good for search engines if it consists of high-quality content and topics that are relevant to your specific audience.
1. Understand your audience
No matter what industry your blog is targeting, it needs to speak to the key audience who will read your content. If you don't understand what your audience wants and what they like, your blog posts will go to waste.
When your audience reads an engaging, informative, or entertaining blog post, they are more likely to comment and share, driving more traffic to your website. The more traffic your blog gets, the more authority it gains because Google sees that you provide relevant answers to the questions users want.
There are no shortcuts to getting to know your audience, but here are some ways to get to know them better.
- Create buyer personas
- Take a look at the performance of the blog
- Conduct surveys and polls
- Analyze insights from social media
Buyer Persona
You can create buyer personas, which are descriptions of your ideal readers and the basic characteristics they possess. You can create them with characteristics like age, location, search patterns, and topics of interest. This way, you can narrow down what your readers want to read and why they should visit your blog.
Readers will be happy if you provide answers to the questions they answer. For example, if you're developing software for macOS, you can provide quick guides on how to speed up your Mac to make better use of the software, free up disk space , or remove malware. Sharing these with your clients will not only help solve their problems, but will improve your website's ranking.
Blog Performance
When you check metrics, you start to learn more about what customers like to read, bounce rate, dwell time, where readers are coming from, and more. You can work hard to optimize those blog posts that get the most read and are considered evergreen content . Google Analytics gives you some important performance metrics, which means you don't have to guess.
Surveys and Polls
You can conduct surveys and polls and ask questions like that.
- What topics do customers like to read about?
- What pain points do they want you to solve?
- What will get them to read your blog?
Insights from social media
If you're constantly sharing your blog posts on social media platforms, you can take advantage of the insights they provide about reader demographics and the kinds of topics they care about most.
2. Use Long Tail Keywords
Keywords play a very important role in how your content appears in Google's search results. They not only help search engines understand the purpose of your content, but guide consumers to your content as they type in their searches.
Start by listing all the keywords related to your blog topic. You can find some suggestions by using google autocomplete. Using keyword research tools allows you to categorize keywords by competitiveness and search volume.
Examples of long tail keywords
If you sell camping gear, you will want to use keywords that are relevant to your industry. However, there are many companies that sell camping gear. If you use the keyword "camping equipment," it will be very difficult to rank on the first page of search results due to the high competition. If you use a keyword finder , you can search for longer, more specific keywords related to camping gear, and you have a better chance of ranking.
Long tail keywords can be difficult to introduce on product pages, but you can easily use them in blog posts. For example, you could use the phrase "women's waterproof hiking boots" in a blog post about the best camping shoes for women. Long-tail keywords have less competition, and consumers who use them are likely to be further down the sales funnel and more likely to make a purchase.
3. Add enough internal links
Much of SEO is about links, and internal links are the ones you can create yourself. A very simple SEO mistake many companies make is not including internal links, which lead users from one page to another. A blog post gives you many opportunities to link naturally to other pages or blog posts on your website. For example, if you wrote a blog post and mentioned "best practices for email marketing," you could link to a previous article that detailed the best practices.
Some other reasons to create internal links are.
- They help search engine spiders crawl and index your blog.
- They increase the time users spend on your site and reduce bounce rates.
- They can indicate which keywords you want to rank for.
- They can improve your page rank and pageviews.
You can add five to ten links in a blog post. The anchor text you use should be short, relevant, and optimized. Make sure these links are relevant to the blog topic.
4. Improve user experience
You want users to have a good experience when visiting your website. How much time readers spend on your site indirectly tells search engines how valuable your site is to them. To improve user experience, you need to.
- Make sure your blog is mobile friendly
- Improve your page load speed
- Use subheadings and bullet points in your blog
- Add images and graphics relevant to your blog content.
Mobile Friendliness
In the US, more than half of search engine traffic comes from mobile devices. If your blog is not optimized for mobile, this will affect its ranking. Many pre-made website themes today are already mobile friendly. However, it’s still important to check performance and run regular mobile site speed tests.
Page load Speed
Various factors can affect your page load speed , such as overuse of plugins and use of unnecessary code. Make sure you delete any plugins you use temporarily, and decide which ones you really need to keep. There are various tools that you can use to remove unnecessary code.
Use titles and Subtitles
Headings and subheadings provide an outline of the page's content. This helps users quickly browse content and see if it's relevant. When they understand the structure of a page, they can navigate between sections more easily. They should always be able to find what they need easily and effectively within a single blog post.
Add pictures and videos
Images and videos are some of the most common visual elements you see on search engine results pages. Images and videos help explain and support your blog content. If you want to achieve an enviable ranking, you will have to use original photos and videos and design creative graphics. It is very important to add descriptive alt text to all visual elements in your blog posts so that Google can rank them.
A web audit is an important inspection that shows where you are falling short in terms of SEO, design, content, and usability. You'll quickly discover what you need to do to improve all of these areas.
5. Link to credible sites and earn quality backlinks
Using up-to-date data in blog posts is an indirect SEO ranking factor. When you include links to credible sites in your blog posts with original, up-to-date data, it's helpful and relevant to readers. It also tells Google that this data is related to the content of your blog post.
One of the hardest parts of SEO is getting backlinks. This is when other respectable sites see your blog as valuable and link to it. HubSpot found that businesses with a blog on their site get 97% of all inbound links.
There are many strategies you can use to get quality backlinks - too many to cover here. Some of the most influential ones come from relevant authority sites that want to link to your content.
Digital PR
Digital PR involves creating linkable assets and then promoting them to relevant publications or journalists. By creating compelling, accurate, and in-depth blog posts, others will naturally want to cite them as sources. A blog post that is updated frequently, is relevant to many industries, and is visually easy to understand will help you gain backlinks.
Supplier Link
This can present you with the perfect opportunity to earn backlinks if you sell other people's products. Vendors are happy to link to your site because your post can draw attention to their products.
Business Association Links
If you belong to a business association, this is another opportunity to build backlinks. A membership page on a website will usually have a membership directory. If you are not listed, you can reach out to join.
Link Gap Analysis
If you can find websites that link to your competitors but not yours, there is a good chance they will link to you if you approach them.
Summarize
Your blog posts can help you reach more people, get quality leads, create brand authority, and more. They provide a cost-effective way to increase user engagement and get more traffic to your website. However, not all blogs will give you the desired results, it depends on the strategies you use. If you want to get the most out of your blog, you need to consistently create great articles and incorporate SEO into your overall content strategy. It may take some time to see results, but when using the best practices above, results will follow.
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