56% of surveyed consumers have made a purchase from a company after reading their blog and 10% of marketers who use blogging say it generates the biggest return on investment. If you’re writing a blog for a business, those stats make blog SEO a pretty big deal.
Even if you’re blogging just for fun, SEO can help you boost your message and connect with more engaged readers.
But what is blog SEO? And how can you optimize your blog for search engines? Get ready for an in-depth exploration into the world of keywords, backlinks, and content optimization.
Blog SEO
Blog SEO is the practice of creating and updating a blog to improve search engine rankings. This approach usually includes keyword research, link building, image optimization, and content writing.
Blogging helps boost SEO quality by positioning your website as a relevant answer to your customers’ questions. Blog posts that use a variety of on-page SEO tactics can give you more opportunities to rank in search engines and make your site more appealing to visitors.
When you optimize your web pages — including your blog posts — you’re making your website more visible to people who are using search engines (like Google) to find your product or service.
Why does blogging improve search engine optimization
Google and other search engines use ranking factors to figure out what results come up for each search query. It also decides how to rank those results. Blogging can help you optimize your site for important Google ranking factors like:
Organic Click-Through Rate
Blogging helps you create relevant content for more keywords than other kinds of pages do, which can improve your organic clicks.
For example, a person who clicks on a landing page usually has transactional intent. This means that person is clicking because they’re ready to convert.
But people search online for many different reasons. And a blog has the potential to answer navigational, informational, and transactional search queries. Creating content for more types of search can increase clicks to your pages, which can improve your SEO.
Index Coverage
Google can’t rank a page that it hasn’t indexed. Indexing means a search engine finds content and adds it to its index. Later, the page can be retrieved and displayed in the SERP when a user searches for keywords related to the indexed page.
So, it’s important to create relevant and link-worthy content to encourage Google to crawl your site pages. One way to do this is to constantly add fresh content to your site. A blog gives you a reason to post new content to your site on a regular basis, which encourages more frequent indexing.
Backlinks
When other websites link to pages on your website it shows search engines that your content is useful and authoritative. Backlinks are a sort of peer review system online. If your blog gets backlinks from respected sites, it’s more likely that your website will rank in search results.
Because blog posts are likely to educate or inform users, they tend to attract more quality backlinks.
Internal Links
When you link from one page on your site to another, you’re creating a clear path for users to follow. Internal links can also make it easier for people to find the content on your site they’re looking for. These links also help search engine crawlers figure out the organization of your site.
A blog creates more site pages that you can link to internally. It also gives you a chance to direct site traffic to other pages that can help your users.
For example, say you run a lawn maintenance company and offer lawn mowing services. Someone searching for a lawn mower wouldn’t find your services online because that’s not what they’re looking for (yet).
But say you write blogs about the best lawnmowers, lawn mowing challenges, or pest control for lawns. Those posts make your website easier to find.
And if someone looking for lawn mowers decides they want an easier option, they could be a good candidate for your services. You can help them visit other pages on your site through internal links.
These are just a few of the many reasons that blogging is good for SEO. Blogging lets you share useful information with your audience.
It can draw new customers and engage current customers. Creating a blog can help you build trust, boost sales and leads, and improve your search engine optimization.
Blog SEO strategy
Blog SEO strategy is a comprehensive plan to improve organic search results. This plan might include competitive research, keyword lists, or an optimization proposal.
Search engines make frequent updates. Business goals can change quickly too. But it can take an average of three to six months for a post to rank on Google. Without a strategy, you might find yourself investing in your blog but not seeing a boost in SEO.
A strategy can help you measure whether your ideas and efforts are effective. It can also help you make the most of your team’s time and resources. This post can help you develop your SEO strategy if you’re not sure where to start.
Blog SEO Best Practices
1. Start with a search-friendly blogging platform
One of the most important decisions you’ll make as a blogger is your choice of CMS, or content management system. A CMS is the publishing platform you’ll use to create your blog, add new content and structure your content into a complete website.
Not all CMs are made equal – some are easier to use than others, while some are far better optimized for search engines than others.
For most bloggers, WordPress offers the best combination of user friendliness, search engine optimized design and ubiquity. WordPress is so popular as a blogging platform that it powers an estimated 26% of all websites.
Other options include Blogger and Typepad, both of which allow self-hosted blogs. 99% of the time, you’ll get the best results – both in terms of ease of use and search engine optimization – from WordPress.
2. Optimize your permalink structure
Before you start creating content, it’s important to structure your website with search engines in mind. By default, WordPress uses an “ugly” permalink format, with a specific Post ID for each page or blog post you publish.
Not only is this URL structure hard for users to remember – it’s also difficult for search engines to understand. Search engines like Google use the URL of a page to determine its subject. The more closely a page’s URL lines up with its target keywords, the better it’s likely to rank.
After you’ve installed WordPress, and even after you’ve published content, you can modify your blog’s permalink structure to use the title of each post as it’s URL instead of its publishing code.
To do this, click “Settings” in your WordPress dashboard, and select “Permalinks”:
This way, the keywords in each post title will be used in its URL, instead of a numerical code. A post called “The Best Hotels in Rome” will have a URL structure of “/the-best-hotels-in-rome” in place of its numerical post ID.
This helps Google’s algorithm to better understand the key theme and target keyword of each post you publish, improving search visibility and helping you rank in organic search.
If you’ve just started a WordPress blog, changing your website’s permalink structure should be one of the first steps you take as a blogger. It’s a quick task that has major benefits for organic search traffic over the long term.
3. Understand the role of titles and meta tags
Using WordPress, you can give each post you publish its own title and meta description. These fields determine the content Google and other search engines display in their results pages for each search keyword.
There are lots of WordPress plugins you can use to control your titles and meta descriptions. As of 2016, the most popular are Yoast SEO and SEO Ultimate.
For example, a search for “healthy protein shake recipes” brings up the following result. We’ve marked the title and meta description to show how these fields, which you can modify, affect the appearance of the page in organic search:
Page titles are ranking factors, which means Google uses the keywords you include in your title in order to sort and rank your content. Try to use your primary keyword as close the beginning of your title as possible to make it clear that it’s the key focus of your content.
The meta description is the description of your content that appears below the title. Google does not use the meta description as a ranking factor, but it’s still important to write a detailed, useful meta description to encourage users to click on your search result.
Keep your meta description under 160 characters so it’s displayed in full, and focus on summing up the main topic of your post.
4. Identify the target audience for your blog
No matter what industry your blog targets, you’ll want to find and speak to the primary audience that will be reading your content. Understanding who your audience is and what you want them to do when they click on your article will help guide your blog strategy.
Buyer personas are an effective way to target readers using their buying behaviors, demographics, and psychographics.
Without this insight, you could be producing grammatically correct and accurate content that few people will click on because it doesn’t speak to them on a personal level.
5. Conduct keyword research
Now that you’ve selected your target audience and prepared a buyer persona, it’s time to find out what content your readers want to consume. Keyword research can be a heavy task to take on if you don’t begin with a strategy.
Therefore, it is recommended that you start with the topics your blog will cover, then expand or contract your scope from there. For an in-depth tutorial, check out our how-to guide on keyword research.
6. Add visuals
Search engines like Google value visuals for certain keywords. Images and videos are among the most common visual elements that appear on the search engine results page.
In order to achieve a coveted spot in an image pack or a video snippet, you’ll want to design creative graphics, use original photos and videos, and add descriptive alt text to every visual element within your blog post.
Alt text is a major factor that determines whether or not your image or video appears in the SERP and how highly it appears. Alt text is also important for screen readers so that visually impaired individuals have a positive experience consuming content on your blog site.
7. Install an XML sitemap
Here’s another quick, simple SEO win. An XML sitemap is a roadmap of your blog that shows Google’s spider exactly where to find each page. Install a plugin like Google XML Sitemaps to increase your post indexing rate and make it easier for Google to quickly find your content.
8. Competitive industry? Say it in more words, not fewer
There’s an interesting relationship between content length and rankings – longer blog posts and articles, all else equal, seem to outrank shorter blog posts and articles for most search terms.
There are several potential reasons for this:
- Google’s search algorithm gives more weight to a page after its reaches a certain length, improving its chances of ranking.
- Longer content is more likely to be shared and linked to, improving its PageRank and giving it a stronger presence in search.
- Long articles include a greater number and larger variety of keywords, helping them achieve better organic search visibility.
Whatever the cause, longer content tends to rank better in organic search than short content. If you’re writing a post aimed at a competitive keyword, review any competing pages before you’re ready to publish to make sure your post sits above the average in terms of scale.
9. Write first, then optimize later
When you write with SEO in mind, it’s easy to let keywords slip into your content without notice, resulting in a piece that’s packed with useful information but reads a little too unnaturally.
Instead of writing with keywords in mind, it’s far better to write around a topic and optimize after you finish. Once you’ve completed a post, look for common keyword themes and optimize using the content you already have, instead of simply writing for SEO purposes.
It’s easy to fall into an SEO mindset as a blogger. Focus on creating the best possible content, then optimizing, and you’ll write with readers and natural social activity in mind first and search engines in mind after.
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