Blogging for SEO is an effective way for your website to appear higher in Google’s organic search results. But you have to remember, there are a lot of websites you’re competing against, and Google looks at a lot of different criteria to help decide which of these websites is worth showing to people first.
So, you’ve written your content and you’re ready to publish, but how can you ensure your blog will be seen amongst the noise? Keep reading for our 5 easy and practical SEO tips that you can implement in your blog for ultimate success.
1. Make sure you’re incorporating keywords
One of the first steps to blog writing for SEO is to conduct some keyword research to include throughout your content. By focussing and incorporating a select group of keywords, it allows you to keep your content zoned in on an appropriate topic, which in turn helps raise the odds of your post featuring higher on Google.
But remember to keep your keywords as a guide and something to help steer your post. The quality of your blog should not be determined by the number of keywords you can shoehorn into a post. Keyword stuffing could result in a Google penalty.
When planning a blog strategy, you should focus on keywords that are relevant for your business and industry. That means over time, you become more discoverable by relevant customers. There’s no point ranking highly for a topic that brings leads that won’t convert.
2. Use CMS plug-ins
When you use CMS plug-ins such as Yoast SEO, you’re making your blogging life a bit easier. Yoast will scan your text for things like readability, keywords and meta-descriptions. It suggests how to improve your post in order to raise its chances of improving its position in search results. That means your brand can stay focussed on content creation.
Yoast SEO is completely free to use and install, but if you want to truly boost your SEO efforts, you can opt for the premium version. Yoast SEO Premium offers additional extras such as optimising your content for multiple keywords, access to ‘SEO Workouts’ and smart internal link recommendations.
There are other blogging SEO plug-ins you can use for WordPress that are also free, including All In One SEO, Squirrly SEO and Rank Math.
3. Add internal links and descriptive anchors
When you’ve created a great piece of blog content, you should reward your effort with internal links. Don’t forget to make your anchor text (the text you hyperlink) descriptive where possible, as this will enhance your credibility and authority. It also provides a better user experience, which are all signals Google looks for when determining your ranking position.
Linking to previous blog content you’ve written is also a great way to keep visitors on your website. But it’s important to remember to use this tactic to help readers find relevant information, and not to spam people with links to everything you’ve previously written. Google will reward the former, and punish the latter.
4. Bump up your word count
Wherever you can, ensure that your blog posts are of a suitable length. We would always recommend aiming for at least 700 words and this is because blogs that rank highest on Google tend to have a lot of content. In fact, some blog posts are close to 2,000 words, so it’s definitely worth aiming for as many words as possible – but be sure not to waffle just for the sake of it!
Google wants to know that your website is relevant, interesting and most importantly gives users the information they’re looking for. Regular and lengthy blog posts means Google will crawl your site more often, which will help improve your search rankings.
5. Don’t forget about the technical stuff
When we say technical stuff, we mean domains, URL structures and mobile optimisation, and these are all things you should be thinking about before you get going with blogging for SEO. Free blog services and domains don’t offer as much SEO benefit compared to a strong .com or .co.uk domain. If you’re a professional business, it’s unlikely you’d consider the free option anyway.
If your brand’s domain is already established, you’d want to consider whether your URL structure is based around a subfolder of the domain or a subdomain (e.g. fifteendesign.co.uk/blog or blog.fifteendesign.co.uk). Whichever you choose, either option is better than a completely different domain to host your blog.
Another tip is to ensure that when you’re creating URLs, the structure is based around words that people understand rather than automatically generated numbers or symbols. For example, if you look at our URLs, they’re descriptive and give users an idea of what the blog is actually about. This leads to building trust with visitors which in turn will help to increase traffic and engagement to your blog post. You’ll also want to include your target keywords in your URL structure too.
Finally, it’s extremely important your website is mobile responsive. According to Oberlo, over 50% of all global web traffic comes from mobile, so if your website is not optimised for mobile, you’re missing out on a huge audience. This is also a factor Google considers when determining your rankings, meaning a mobile responsive website also brings a huge amount of SEO value.
Need help with your blogging and SEO efforts?
We hope our SEO blog writing tips help improve your content’s ranking on organic search results and increase traffic to your website. If you find you still need help with your blogging and SEO efforts, why not see how we can help?
Our digital marketing experts can create regular and relevant blog content that is fully optimised for SEO on your behalf. Contact us today to learn more about how we can put your blog in the spotlight.