Millions of blog posts around the world are published each day. With so much content out there and every business trying to get their audience’s attention, many blogs won’t get very far at all. This is especially true of blogs that aren’t optimized for SEO. SEO is necessary for any of your business’s blog posts to get noticed, and while many have a lot to blog about, they might not understand even the basics of blog SEO. If you aren’t careful, you could put a lot of work into a blog that isn’t SEO friendly and will struggle to ever gain any traction.
Here are a few things you need to do if you want your blog posts to perform well in the SERPs.
Do Keyword Research
You want to ensure that you know what your audience is looking for and that you include the right terms to attract them. To do this, you need to conduct keyword research for every blog you write. This is especially important if you aren’t sure what to write about. Good keyword research will tell you exactly what people are looking for and how many are looking for it, so you can determine what the most important topics to cover are.
However, you do have to understand how to find the keywords that will be the most impactful for your blog. While you might want to use the keywords that get the most searches, these will also likely be the ones with the most competition. Long-tail keywords can help give you the best chances of ranking highly for these searches, rather than generic terms with a huge amount of competition.
Add Headings
You’ve likely seen headings in many online articles you’ve read, but you might not think to include them in your own. Headings are much more important than you might realize for many reasons. First, many people today don’t pay close attention to every sentence in a blog post, especially if it’s a long post. Instead, they skim for the details they’re looking for. If they don’t find the information that’s most important to them quickly, they might just leave. By breaking down content into headings, people can easily see what each section covers and where they might find what they want.
If you have a longer piece of content, headings can also help keep it organized and break everything up to make it look more appealing. If all people see are large sections of text one after the other, they might not want to get into it. Headings can make a blog post much more approachable.
Not only are headings helpful for users, but they can also be beneficial for search engines. Headings can make it easier for search engines to understand what your content is about, especially if you optimize heading titles to include your keywords. This can help give your content a better chance of ranking for these searches.
Optimize Your Meta Description
The content included in your blog post isn’t the only thing you need to optimize. The meta descriptions for all of your pages and posts also need to be optimized for SEO. While what you write in your blog is important, the meta description will be the first thing that users in the SERPs read. This is the brief description that shows up under the title of your page in the SERPs and can be an important deciding factor when people search through their results.
A good meta description should be no more than 160 characters, so you want to make the most out of the short amount you have to work with. Within these 160 characters, you should compel users to click on your website and read your blog post about all others. The next time you write a blog post or publish a new page, you can’t overlook writing a call to action that stands out.
Determine the Right Length
Determining the right length for a blog post can be difficult. While some might say that every blog post should be long-form and well over 1,000 words, this isn’t always the case. Some topics don’t warrant a lengthy, in-depth article, and the people interested in these topics aren’t going to want something that explains more than they need.
However, while there is no specific number that is guaranteed to make your blog more successful, many of the high-ranking pages are in-depth, long-form content. This isn’t necessarily just because they’re longer, but rather, because they provide value and give users what they want. When you begin writing a blog post, you need to have a good understanding of what users are looking for and what word count will provide that.
Include Internal and External Links
Google values content that provides the most value to users. One way you can provide more value through your blogs is by including internal and external links to information to supplement your post. If you reference a topic that you’ve already covered on another page or post, this could be information that users are also interested in or could benefit from. Of course, you want users to stay on your website as long as they can and get more page views for your other content. In some cases, you might not have anything that you’ve written that covers this but have a reliable source on another website that does.
Adding links to your content is another way that you can help search engines and users get more from your content. Linking to your own content gives search engines more opportunities to crawl and index it, which can help improve the way you rank. External links help show that you’ve done the research and know what you’re talking about. If you have sources for your claims, this can only help make your content more reliable in the eyes of search engines and users.
Continue to Optimize Over Time
A lot of work goes into publishing a blog post, but that doesn’t mean it’s over once it’s posted. To get the most out of your content marketing efforts, you need to continue to put work into your blog posts even after they go up. Some information will become outdated and new keyword opportunities might come up that you missed before. Updating old content can help your posts continue to bring in traffic, even after they’ve been published for a while. There’s no reason for older posts to go to waste when they can still be beneficial, so it’s essential that you don’t forget about them once they’ve been posted and go back every now and then to optimize.
Improve Your Blog SEO with ENX2 Marketing
Not only is writing a blog post itself a lot of work but ensuring that it’s optimized for SEO is even more. If you want your blogs to help you achieve your digital marketing goals, you’ll need someone to help you do it. Instead of trying to do everything on your own, invest in content marketing services. At ENX2 Marketing, we can help you create amazing, impactful blog posts that are exactly what your users are looking for.
Contact ENX2 Marketing today to find out how we can help improve your blog!