Design
Blog posts can be powerful tools for sharing thought leadership, earning trust, and engaging your customers and clients—but of course, they don’t mean anything unless people can actually read them.
That’s why we recommend promoting company blog posts on social media and in your email newsletter. And, it’s why we recommend robust attention to blog SEO.
Indeed, when optimized correctly, each blog post can be a powerful online asset—a way to gain greater visibility for your business and increased traffic for your website.
In this post, we’ll walk you through some of the best ways to make your blog posts more algorithm-friendly.
How to Boost Your Blog’s SEO Value
Do Some Keyword Research
First things first: You can’t optimize your blog posts without knowing which keywords you’re optimizing it for. This is where tools like Google Keyword Planner can be essential; input some keyword related to your topic and you can see a long list of keywords and phrases that search engine users might use. Pick two or three to employ in your blog post.
Use Keywords Effectively
The important thing to remember about keywords is that the days of stuffing as many of them as possible into your content are long gone. You don’t have to overdo it. Just make sure to organically weave a few keywords into strategic places—including:
- Your blog title
- H1, H2, and H3 headings
- Your meta description
- The opening paragraph
- A few organic placements throughout the body content, if possible
Format for Readability
Here’s a secret about SEO: Google wants to give its customers (search engine users) a great product (relevant results), so the best way to improve your rankings is to make your content more user-friendly. One way you can do that is to format each post for easy reading. Some suggestions:
- Use short sentences and brief paragraphs
- Use bullet points and numbered lists whenever you can
- Break up your content with section headings and sub-headings
- Include images so that you don’t just have a big wall of text
Include Links
Linking is another area where it’s best to just be natural. You don’t have to force 100 links into each blog post, but whenever you have a natural opportunity to link to a previous post or to a relevant section of your website, do so. You can also include links to authoritative outside resources, which can provide some SEO juice, but of course, you don’t want to link to competitor sites!
Ensure Speed
Hopefully it goes without saying by now that all content should be optimized for mobile devices—and part of that is being sure your blog posts load quickly. Do a quick speed test, and if it takes more than three seconds for the post to load, that could hurt your SEO rankings.
Get Set Up in Google
Finally, just a friendly reminder: After you publish a blog post, make sure you add it to Google Search Console. And, be sure Google Analytics is set up so that you can monitor your blog’s performance.
Get the SEO Guidance You Need
These steps will help you achieve better Google rankings for your blog posts—but of course, this is just one element of an effective digital marketing strategy.
To take more of a big-picture approach, we invite you to contact us today. Driven2020 is a seasoned marketing agency, known for helping our clients see real results as efficiently as possible. We encourage you to connect with us today so that we can start discussing your SEO and marketing needs!