For as long as online marketers have been around, blogging and SEO have been considered to be the pillars of any comprehensive strategy for growing an audience.
Even today, when there are more opportunities for promoting your website or business online than ever before, writing high-quality content and getting it ranked on Google remains a surefire way for maximizing your ROI and getting thousands of targeted prospects clicking through to your site. That’s why it’s not surprising that according to various statistics, there are more than 600 million blogs on the internet in 2020, with an estimated 32 million bloggers in the United States alone.
When a page gets ranked on Google, it can not only receive clicks but also pre-qualify the reader to be interested in your offers, which can be very useful when building funnels and capturing leads. But the problem is, blogging on its own isn’t enough to real the rewards that SEO can offer; you also need to have an effective SEO strategy for getting your posts ranked.
So, to help you get started, let’s explore the topic of SEO optimization for blogs with the most effective strategies that have proven to be effective in 2020.
Determine Your Goal
Before you can get to any specific SEO strategies, you need to figure out why you’re writing your blog post in the first place. Sure, your ultimate goal might be to improve your SEO rankings and grow your audience, but as you can imagine, content that doesn’t serve any other purpose isn’t likely to be entertaining and useful to your audience. And while ten or fifteen years ago you could get away with stuffing keywords in some generic content and getting it ranked, Google and other search engines have become too good at recognizing poor-quality content, and have started penalizing sites that use shady strategies.
Therefore, when developing content ideas, you should always approach the process from a reader-centric perspective, and look at in what ways your post might provide the most value to the people that you’re trying to reach while simultaneously moving your efforts forward as well.
Perhaps there’s a new development that everyone’s talking about, and you have a hot take you want to share with your readers? Maybe you want to address a pressing question your audience is facing? Or is it simply that you want to start broadening your reach and write about a topic you feel isn’t covered well enough in your blog right now?
Whatever the reason might be, take the time to think about the core focus that your blog post is going to have. That will not only make your post more engaging but will also help you zero in on what you should include, providing a significant boost to your SEO optimization for blogs and making your blog pages much easier to rank.
Optimize Your Site
Finally, any comprehensive on-site SEO strategy must use the most recent on-site optimization tools to make sure that all the effort put into researching and creating your blog posts pays off. For one thing, you should make the post itself easy to crawl and analyze – use subheads to break down your content into sections, illustrate them with images, and use plenty of relevant external and internal links that expand on key points or provide more context.
Furthermore, content piece optimization is a must in SEO. Optimizing content is made possible with the use of optimization software. This tool lets you generate an accurate report for the keywords you’re targeting and paste content for the report guide to initiate the editing process.
Content optimization software programs show suggested outlines and headings. This tool also generates relevant keywords writers can include in content, SERP themes, FAQs, and more. The intuitive dashboard displays real-time content scores while editing to monitor progress. Additionally, a good content optimization tool has a dedicated checklist the writer can follow when editing to tailor the piece to the user intent and meet all metrics for excellent search engine performance.
You should also take care of technical details that show Google whether your site is safe and convenient for users. For one thing, make sure that your design is user-friendly and easy to navigate on any device, no matter if your site’s visitor is on their mobile phone or a desktop computer. You should also use an SSL certificate, which not only helps people feel safer when browsing on your site but also shows Google that your website is encrypted and would prevent access to sensitive visitor data.
URL structure is another vital part of SEO optimization for blogs, as you should use a logical tier-based system that’s based on topics, categories, and main sections in the navigation so that people can easily find everything that they’re looking for on your site. Using a WordPress search plugin can make navigation of your site convenient for the users, helping them find whatever they’re looking for and, as a result, prolonging their stay on your site. Google uses hundreds of ranking factors when determining your site’s position, and having a convenient search bar will ensure that people spend more time browsing your site before clicking away.
The bottom line is, aim to provide a convenient experience for your visitors while also making your posts clear, informative, engaging, and to the point, and that should be more than enough to qualify your site to get ranked for even some of the most competitive keywords in your niche.
Be Strategic About Your Keywords
If you’ve ever done any SEO for your website, you’re probably familiar with the unavoidable task of performing thorough keyword research. But while it may not be the most glamorous or fascinating part of blogging or even SEO, it’s still an integral step that can either set you up for success or doom your blog post to mediocre rankings from the get-go. Luckily, performing keyword research doesn’t necessarily require expensive paid solutions. It can be done using free tools that you can find online. To start, look at some of the broader and more prominent keywords that are closely related to what you want to write about, identifying the biggest traffic sources and opportunities.
Then, start digging down and identifying more specific long-tail keywords that have less competition and are easier to rank with, even if they have lower monthly traffic numbers. Remember, it’s better to rank at the top of the results page for a few low-traffic keywords than to spend your time chasing highly-competitive keywords that are all but impossible to rank for. When doing keyword research, you should also analyze what types of phrases are the most common in your competitors’ content, as this will help fill the gaps and identify keywords that you might have missed before.
Don’t forget voice keyword research. Voice keyword research is the process of identifying common keywords and phrases that people use when searching for information using voice search. This differs from traditional keyword research, which focuses on keywords and phrases people type into a search engine.
When you write your blog content, use the natural language people use when speaking. Avoid using jargon or technical terms. Many people voice search using their mobile devices, and when your website is SEO-mobile-friendly, you can improve your search engine ranking.
Take the time to explore different keyword groups, thinking about what your target audience is the most likely to search for, and what phrases they are the most likely to use when looking for answers. Over time, as you start gaining traction with the keywords that are easier to rank for, you are likely to see that your page will start ranking for some of the broader keywords as well.
Map Out Your Posts
If you want a chance to stand out among the competition on Google, you need to be able to bring something unique to the table, or Google won’t have any reason to include your post among the top rankings. After all, when you’re merely repeating what others have already said multiple times, that doesn’t add any real value and won’t be interesting to your readers.
Therefore, before you get to writing your blog posts, you must look at what others have written around the topic you want to cover and how you can make your content stand out. Start by looking at the top results for the keywords that you ended up choosing. Go through the top competitors, analyzing not only their keywords, but also content structure, emphasis, and what ideas are argued for.
Then, think of ways how you can either expand, oppose, or twist the information that is common to make it fresh and unique both to your readers and to prominent figures in your niche who would want to share and broadcast your opinion. By having a roadmap for making your content more relevant, you’ll increase your chances of ranking and make generating organic backlinks much easier, as people are naturally more likely to share content that they find interesting and this will work greatly to improve SEO optimization for blogs.