Simple SEO Tips to Boost Your Blog Post Rankings
As a business owner, you’ve probably been told that content marketing is the name of the game when it comes to driving your business and brand profile online. But you don’t want to put all that effort into writing and posting a great blog on your site only for it to be next to invisible online.
Here are some SEO basics to optimise your blog posts:
Be smart about your keyword choices
If you’re engaged in SEO and content marketing, you’ll likely already have built your foundation of choosing the right target keywords with keyword research – if not then check out a free keyword search site like this one as it’s extremely important.
When choosing keywords, many people think the higher the search volume the better, but this approach can end up wasting your SEO dollars. As well as search volume you need to take into account competition and intent. Most of the time the keywords with high search volume are too broad to really bring you any sales – searchers are just in research mode. More specific or ‘longer tail’ keywords are generally typed with a more profitable intent – people know more and are further down the buying path.
Take for example ‘lawyer’ versus ‘intellectual property lawyer Perth’ – the first will have much higher search volume but the searcher is just researching. The second keyword is longer tail and isn’t likely to be searched as often, but the searcher knows exactly what they need and are looking to appoint a supplier.
Blog articles are the perfect place to bring in these longer tail keywords as it’s difficult to cover them all in your product or service pages. Write articles that target people at all stages of the buying cycle and target topics and long tail keywords that support your core keywords.
Optimise, but not too much
People often think that they need to find a keyword, and then write a blog post with the number one goal of repeating that keyword as often as possible. This is not likely to generate great content. Instead, figure out what you want to write about, keeping your readers at the top of your mind. What information will be useful to them? In the course of doing that and writing well you will already have done a good job of working your keywords into the text – long tail and short, exact and synonyms. Google’s algorithm is changing all the time and now not only recognises synonyms and varied keywords but rewards and encourages writing in this natural way.
Once you’re happy with the post you can go back to ensure it is as optimised as it should be. Is there a way to work your keyword naturally into the title, heading and/or opening paragraph by rewording it a little? Have you included a meta title and meta description? Do they fit the character limit guidelines (~55 characters for title and 155 for descriptions)?
Keep Your Content Relevant and Shareable
To drive your content, you need to keep it relevant, interesting, and give people a reason to share it. People share content because:
- They like how it makes them feel
- They think their friends will like how it makes them feel
- Or they feel like they will seem smart or enlightened for sharing it
Creating your content with this in mind will help you make sure that what you create has the best possible chance to go viral. But that said…
Chase Consistency, Not Viral Shares
You can’t predict what will go viral and what won’t. There’s too much luck and timing involved. Instead of worrying about going viral, focus on steadily increasing your numbers. Look at both views and unique visitors to see the growth of your website. If you do go viral, smile – and then write another great piece tomorrow.
What’s the best piece of SEO advice you’ve ever been given?
