Many brands have already understood how important a blog is as part of their marketing strategy, and others are joining the trend every day. But just as important as having a blog is knowing how to optimize it. That’s why today we bring you an SEO guide for blogs so that your content can be positioned and you can achieve more organic traffic and sales. Take it!
Why do you need a blog SEO guide?
If you’re a small business, start-up, or SME and know little about how to start a blog, we understand that the process can seem astronomical. A successful blog is not just about writing about a topic, but clicking “publish” is it. Strategy is needed, especially when the intent is to promote a business.
You will need more than just creating excellent quality content. You will need to put extra effort into optimizing your blog – and each post – for search engines as part of your marketing plan.
Whether you’re an experienced blogger or a beginner, it’s essential to know what the latest blog SEO techniques are being implemented and how to use them to succeed.
Need more time to do extensive research? Don’t worry. You’ve come to the right place. Below we offer you the best SEO guide for blogs with which you can orient yourself whenever you create new content.
As a result, search engines will improve your organic ranking in the Google SERPs, making your brand and content appear higher every time someone searches for keywords related to your field.
SEO positioning for blogs aims to be among the first results on the first page, but how do you achieve it? Following these tips.
1. Define your keywords
Once you have your website, you need to start creating the content for it. Part of that is writing high-quality blog posts. In the past, this was enough to get the first position in the Google results, but with the constant updates of the algorithm, it is no longer enough to position.
Instead, it would help if you focused on the right keywords to reach your audience. You can use Google to search for your products and services by putting yourself in the shoes of your target customer. What would they write to find you? For example, if you have a website that sells tickets for music events, you want to appear when people search for “rock music concerts” or “buy concert tickets”.
Some tools, such as Google’s Keyword Planner, Semrush, or Ahrefs, tell you which words are the most searched for in each category and their degree of difficulty (there are words with more competition than others). After doing keyword research, you can create a list of keywords that fit your brand well.
Remember that a keyword is not necessarily a single word, it can also be a phrase -the so-called long tail keywords- that will bring you more visits because the more specific the keyword, the more chances the user will find what they are looking for and perform A purchase.
Create a mind map for brainstorming and keeping track of keywords (as seen in the example below). This will help you choose the ones that work best for your audience.
2. How to use keywords
Once you have defined your keywords, you must incorporate them into your content. This step of the blog SEO guide can be tricky.
The first mistake novice bloggers make to use the keyword as much as possible in their posts. This is called keyword stuffing, and instead of improving search engine results, it will probably generate a penalty that will worsen the positioning of your website.
Don’t make this mistake and put your keywords in specific places, such as:
- SEO title: the more the keyword is at the beginning, the better.
- First paragraph: the more at the beginning, the better.
- URL: place the primary keyword in the slug, that is, in what goes after the slash /. Keep it short, a maximum of five words.
- Alternative text (alt text) of your images.
- Subheadings – Put your keywords in some H2 and H3 subheadings, but sparingly (not all).
- Body: incorporate the keywords throughout the text of the post. Again, be moderate, do not put them in each paragraph because it will be excessive.
- Meta description: it appears in the search engines below the title and describes the post’s content in a few words. Make sure to make it exciting and to place the main keyword.
If you follow these instructions for using keywords in your articles, you will be able to structure your content better and obtain better results in terms of SEO.
Keep in mind that at the end of the day, while keywords are important to Google, they can never replace well-written and interesting content. Your blog posts must grab your readers’ attention so that they want to stay on the website and interact with your brand. This will considerably improve your ranking in search engines.
3. Competitor keyword analysis
Benchmarking is very important when choosing and using keywords in your niche, which consists of analyzing the SEO behavior of competing brands. It helps to know what keywords the competition ranks for and how they use them.
Review the first results that appear with the keywords you want to implement. What’s on the first page?
Look at the titles, descriptions, tags, length of the content, the use of keywords within the text, visual elements, and in the “related questions” section to refine your strategy.
This will give you a good idea of how to structure your content and how you can create one that is better than what your competition is posting for that keyword.
You will also find reviews on sites linking to your competitors useful. This information can be obtained with tools like Ahrefs. It is excellent for finding websites that could link to your content, especially if posts link to several of your competitors, since adding you will be fine.
To have good SEO practices for blogs, you must use online tools that help you make strategic decisions
4. The ideal extension of a post
The ideal length for a post has been debated for years regarding SEO for blogs. A consensus has been reached that posts with the best results have between 1,500 and 3,000 words.
Remember that the longer your content (if it is also of high quality), the longer readers will remain interested in your page, which also influences your SEO ranking.
There are other essential factors to consider when it comes to writing long content:
- Does your content need to be extended? Only add words and sentences to extend it because you won’t add value.
- Prioritize responding to your readers’ concerns first.
- The longer the content, the longer it will take to create it. A piece of about 1,000 words can be quicker and easier to create than a 3,000-word article that goes into depth.
- If you can cover a topic in a short post, do it. You will have visits, and it will rank well if the post fulfills what it promises and answers the readers’ questions.
If you decide to create content that is always over 2,000 words, it will be tough work, your productivity will decrease, and you will eventually feel burned out. Instead, create smaller pieces and occasionally a longer, more detailed one.
5. Visual elements
Visual communication is a key aspect of content creation, and it is not just about having a nice logo but other elements that can impact search engine positioning. That’s why images, videos, infographics, charts, and other schematics should be part of your blog SEO guide and appear in all your posts.
Images don’t just help make text look better. If they are optimized, they also help to position your content. Some recommendations are:
- Save the images on your device and name the files with the keywords of your post.
- When uploading them, use the alt description to place the keywords (if there are many images, do it in some but not all).
There are a few types of visual elements that make content stand out from the crowd of blogs:
- infographics
- graphs and tables
- GIFs
- Header or featured image
- Memes
- Screenprints
- Videos
The infographic example shows the content in a more aesthetic, friendly, and easy-to-understand way.
When including these elements, keep the following visual SEO recommendations in mind :
- Optimize the size of images: huge files make pages load slower, which is penalized by Google.
- Image Credits – Always include your image credits to add credibility to your content.
- Include a featured image – This makes your website’s blog post and blog section look much more attractive.
- Improve readability with your images – Lean on visuals every 300 words to improve readability.
6. Links for SEO
For small businesses that are getting into the blogging and SEO sphere, coming up with a link strategy can seem confusing and difficult. However, the only thing you should know is that Google’ bots’ follow the links and consider each one as a positive vote for the page to which they lead, which helps them to rank better in search engines.
You must prioritize that the links are placed in the keywords that you have selected for your brand.
Here are some types of links you can place, request, or achieve:
Internal links
Your blog posts should always have internal links that lead to other relevant pages on your website. This invites readers to read on, learn more about your brand, and eventually make a purchase. In addition, it will help Google better understand your website’s structure.
However, only link to some things on your website, and the link must be contextual and extend an idea already presented in the text.
External Links
They consist of external links to your website that you include within your content. In them, you link to other brands from complementary markets. If you link to external sources, does it mean readers will leave your page when they click on them?
It would help if you were not afraid of using external links within your content because they help position your site within the industry.
Also, the higher the domain authority of the content you link to, the more SEO value it will bring you. Google will recognize that you are linking to trusted sources, and search engines reward sites that link to other websites in their niche.
Linkbuilding
“Link building” refers to external websites that link to your content. Linking within your site is something you control, but you can’t control who links to yours (although you can intervene with strategies to make it happen).
Link building is a crucial step in this blog SEO guide. The more links you receive to your content from authoritative websites, the better ranking you will have in Google since others linking to you is synonymous with quality and reliability.
These links from external websites that lead to yours are known as backlinks.
Some methods you can use to get backlinks are:
- Cold Contact – You can use tools like Ahrefs and Hunter to build lists of contacts who might want to link to your site. Then you write to them asking them to add a link to an article related to your category, or, if they already mentioned you but did not place a link, you ask them to add it.
- Guest posts: you write for external websites where you can add your website links.
- Broken links: You find broken links that have to do with your keywords and contact the websites to replace the content with your link.
All this can be complex if you are a beginner. If you want to learn more, in just 7 classes, you can become familiar with all the aspects of SEO with the SEO course from Pulsión Digital.
7. Responsive Design
You may be wondering what responsive design does on this blog SEO list, so we invite you to think about the last time you went to read a blog post. Was it on your laptop, your tablet, or your phone?
Today 90% of organic searches happen from mobile phones. Users are discovering and reading more content on mobile devices, while the computer is preferred for work and leisure (video games, series, and movies). This means that your blog needs to look great on smartphone screens.
This is why responsive design is so important. If your blog is structured to look good on your laptop rather than on a smartphone, you will be losing high levels of traffic, and Google will penalize your positioning.
8. Blog Promotion
Promoting your content will improve your SEO for apparent reasons. The more you spread your content, the more people will see and engage with it.
There are some aspects to take into account when promoting the blog so that it has SEO benefits:
- Share the blog on social networks.
- Invite other brands or influencers in the niche to share the posts (many times, you will have to pay or make collaboration exchanges to achieve this)
- Create a video blog on Youtube based on the content of the blog.
- Group several posts to create an ebook
Promoting your blog can have a huge impact on SEO ranking. Keep the content from doing all the work on its own.
Blog SEO Guide Conclusion
Everything we share with you in this blog SEO guide will help your small business get more organic traffic and brand visibility; in this way, you can boost your sales.
However, this is only 5% of everything you can do to improve the SEO of a blog, website, or online store.
