Search engine marketing or SEO is incredibly important for digital marketing. Optimising your websites’ SEO will help your brand become more visible to people who are searching for keywords that relate to your business on search engines. This includes Google Search, which we all know is incredibly lucrative! SEO can take the form of blog posts, links and other media, and is incredibly important for web traffic.
So, we’ve all heard of SEO, but how can it be used for blogging? And how is your current blog actually faring? Your friends and family might want to read about your top 100 Christmas songs of the decade, but is that actually relevant for your audience?
So, how can blogging, with a focus on SEO blogging, help improve your search engine results? We think blogging is one of the best SEO solutions out there – and we’ll tell you why and how to get going.
Having good quality blog content encourages your audience to read more, ie. stay longer on your website. Which is good for SEO.
12 SEO Tips for Blogging
The whole point of utilising SEO is to show search engines that your blog is a relevant, high-quality resource for people looking within your industry or subject. Did you know that you can gain 97% more links to your website by blogging? It can be confusing to know how best to start doing this, so here are some expert tips for SEO blogging.
- Choose a few relevant, valuable keywords to use throughout your post. There are some key formatting tools you can use to amplify the visibility of your keywords, including placing your keywords in titles, subheadings, opening and closing sentences, anchor text and meta tags.
- Do your research! You shouldn’t assume which keyword is best. There are a few keyword research tools you can use, including Google Adwords and SEMRush. The benefit to spending some time researching your keywords before creating your blog post include the possibility that you may have missed some pertinent ones!
- Don’t engage in keyword stuffing. This is much like stuffing a travel bag, except for the fact that nobody wants to read a page that is littered with unreadable text, while you can live with an extra heavy bag for a day!
- Intention is important. Remember that your blog post should be answering a question, much like your audience will search for your business to answer their own questions. This is also something that Google’s algorithm will look for, so you should set your intention before you start writing. Make sure your keywords match the intent of your reader.
- Pay attention to structure. Keep paragraphs short. Your blog post should be pleasant and easily readable. Make it interesting!
- Add links when it seems to make sense. Try to make associations with other blog posts of yours.
- Consider the length of your blog posts. Longer-form text tends to perform well on blogs – but that doesn’t mean a shorter blog post won’t do well. The key is to remember to focus on quality rather than quantity (and ideally, both at the same time).
- Think of a good title. You don’t want to bore your audience with the longest list they’ve seen since primary school.
- Make sure you’ve optimised other elements of your blog post excluding the writing. This includes any images used, your meta description, alt text, videos, images and anything else you use!
- Keep your blog updated regularly. This can strengthen your SEO ranking position, and is another incentive for viewers to keep visiting your blog.
- Ensure your blog is mobile-friendly, or is equipped with a responsive design. For every Google search done on mobile, Google displays the mobile-friendly websites first.
- Spend some time updating your old blog content. While it’s still a good idea to focus on new blog posts, repurposing your older content is also well worth the effort. You could also remove older content that is no longer relevant to your audience.
The benefits of blogging as one of your SEO solutions
You’ve now been armed with some expert advice about how to go about SEO blogging. Now you’re probably asking ‘What are some of the benefits to putting time into turning your blog into one of the most viable SEO solutions?’
Well, firstly, it’s a form of affordable SEO. For instance, if you were to look at buying Google Ads and PPC marketing, your budget can easily spike up if you suddenly gain a lot of attention. That’s because you have to pay every time someone clicks on your ad.
With SEO blog writing services, you could structure your payment plan with your writer to suit your budget. You may agree on a set amount of articles per month, and a set article length to go along with it. This can work out to be much cheaper than PPC and a relatively affordable kind of SEO, as it doesn’t involve high-price bidding on select keywords like PPC.
You could also look at trialing SEO blog writing services on an ad hoc basis – we’re sure your SEO will improve, no matter how many articles you commit to!
Additionally, using SEO blogging will also make visitors stay on your website longer. Someone who visits your website from a blog post is likely to stay and read the entire post. This will help your ranking, especially because there are many front-page Google results that users will click on and leave after a few seconds. Writing a blog is also a great way to get in some long-tail keywords that may seem out of place on a social media post.
Furthermore, a quality blog post also gives other websites more reasons to link to your website. This is called external linking, and is hard to create without SEO. Google views your website as trustworthy when other websites link to it, so this is something that you really should be aiming for. It makes sense that other websites will point to you for guidance, since you’ve got pages and pages of well-written blog posts that they don’t have – and they still want to be helpful to their audience!
If you’re still not convinced, you might want to consider that a blog can help you connect with your audience. While this might not be an explicit algorithmic criterion, it can contribute to linking factors.
If your audience loves the posts you’re putting out, they’re more likely to share the post with their friends and family. This will drive more traffic to your blog, website and any other resources that may be featured on your blog post. You could even gain email subscribers and sales this way. If this happens, Google will recognise you as an authority in your industry/subject because they can see that your content is well-liked.
Last thoughts
SEO can seem tricky at first, but it doesn’t have to be. SEO blogging is one of the most affordable ways to increase your status amongst your viewers through high-quality content. There’s a few things you should consider when blogging with SEO in mind, including format, relevant keywords, posting regularly, interesting blog structure and more!
While blogging isn’t the only kind of SEO you can opt for, SEO blog writing services, like those offered by Sparrow Digital, can act as strong boosters within your digital marketing strategy. Get in touch and let’s start a conversation about how we can make a useful and SEO-friendly blog for your company!
