Any company can have a blog, however not every organisation can capitalise on their blog content to hold an advantage in the SERPs. Here are 8 easy steps to take your blog from the rest of the crowd and increase your sites visibility, traffic and results.
- The Name of Your Blog
It’s important to be creative when deciding what to name your blog section if your website. It’s an optimization opportunity so don’t just stick with the standard “Blog”! There’s a variety of questions you should ask yourself when deciding the title:
- How can I compellingly describe my industry?
- Who is my target audience?
- What’s the overall theme of the blog?
- Am I able to bring SEO keywords into my blog title or name?
By optimizing around a theme and a descriptive name it can lead to a significant amount more organic traffic. If you struggle to incorporate keywords into your blog name then at least make sure you include them in the page title as this is what’s visible in the SERPs.
- Audience Specific Posts
Each blog post should be written for a specific segment of your target audience. This is the most efficient way to not only create but also optimise your content for specific customers. This also allows you to include keywords that relate to certain customers, needs and solutions.
- Effective URL Structures
There’s a variety of benefits a strong URL structure can have for both website visitors and marketers. Firstly, it makes reporting a lot more straightforward and clear. I would recommend always including /blog/ in your URL syntax as this will help when it comes to tracking overall progress in Google Analytics.
Next, ensure for each blog post the URL is user-friendly. Often people include every single word from the title in the URL when in fact the trick is to keep it short, relevant and still descriptive. ALWAYS leave out conjunctions such as “and”, “or” and “but”.
- Never Stop Optimising Content
SEO improvements don’t always mean new website content. Recycling and looking for additional optimization opportunities in existing content can be just as effective. By using existing blog content you can save resources and time. Here are a few ways to further optimize a blog:
- Ensure title tags, meta descriptions are targeting and include keywords
- Discover more internal link opportunities
- Optimise existing images and add new optimised images
- Link together related posts
- Content Gaps!
Blogs are a great way to fill SEO gaps within your website. Are there industry-related keyword opportunities that you currently don’t rank for? Are you missing content on your site that’s related to these keywords? This then generates a variety of topics to surround your blogs on.
- Add Optimized Images & videos
Images not only create a positive user experience but also can increase user engagement which adds to the SEO value. Always fully optimise your images from the sizing to the keyword-rich alt tags descriptions.
- Mark it Up
Structured data markup is added to your HTML to provide Google with information about your page. Schema markup ensures your post is fully optimised and can improve the way it’s represented in SERPs.
- Take Advantage of Social media Sharing
Sharing your blog posts on social media can have an array of benefits from keeping your audience engaged and your socials relevant. Additionally, it can increase referral traffic and also improve SEO results. This is because social signals are included in the ranking algorithm.
A blog is one of the quickest and simplest ways to improve a website’s content and also overall SEO results. Therefore it’s crucial to implement the above steps into every blog that’s produced to hold a competitive advantage in the SERPs.