Blog SEO: How to Get Readers to Your Content
You’ve decided to start writing some blog posts to draw people towards your website, but you’re either not seeing the results expected or you’re not sure whether it’s worth your time. If so, you aren’t alone because many struggle with this debate every single year. Often, businesses start writing blog posts, quickly get frustrated by the lack of interaction, and then stop creating articles.
If you can relate to this and want to know whether blogging is the right way to go, we have the perfect guide for you today. As well as answering whether or not you should be blogging to get exposure, we’ve got some tips you can utilize to get your content in front of more readers (and potential customers).
Will Blogging Boost My SEO?
First and foremost, will blogging actually help your business gain exposure? Will it allow your website to climb the search engine rankings within your niche? In short, the answer to this would be a resounding ‘yes’.
Considered an ‘on-page SEO’ strategy, blog posts allow your website to gain relevance and authority — two features important for search engines such as Google. When you use Google, you expect to find an answer to your question on the first page, right? With this mind, Google has a responsibility to get the websites most likely to answer a question onto the first page of results. If they succeed, the user is happy and Google is more likely to see this same user return in the future.
For your business, this means you need to provide content that answers the questions of people in your market — something that can be achieved with blogging. Useful blog posts give you relevance in the industry.
If you’re worried that your content won’t get to a large audience, check out our tips for tapping into a wider market:
1. Keywords
As one of the founding factors of SEO, keywords are just as important today as they were in the early days. However, it’s no longer good enough to include terms relating to your niche twenty or thirty times per blog post; remember, Google and other search engines are looking for genuinely useful content that can provide value to users.
Instead of writing blogs aimlessly, we recommend picking one or two primary keywords and choosing content around these themes. Since you know people are searching for these terms, you can build the article around them and provide content that’s valued. Unfortunately, for those who want to spend five minutes on an article and get it posted quickly, you should know that keyword ‘stuffing’ is likely to be penalized so you’ll need to include the keywords naturally.
Important takeaways about keywords:
- Find less competitive keywords/phrases by experimenting with long-tail keywords. Often, you’ll find it easier to rank with these types of keywords. Even if the traffic is smaller, you’re more likely to find people who are looking for a service of your kind.
- Don’t feel the need to squeeze six keywords into a blog post. Instead, create different blog posts with each focusing on one or two.
- Consider keywords relevant to voice search. This type of search is growing in popularity and focuses on keywords derived from conversational questions.
- Use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and Ubersuggest to find the keywords that can help your blog gain traction.
2. Title
In addition to using keywords, the title of your post also plays an important role. By using your primary keyword in the title, you have an opportunity to communicate clearly with the audience what a particular blog post is about. Of course, we aren’t suggesting you write a title and then just put your keyword at the end. If you ever confuse your readers, the boost you see in SEO will be offset by the lack of people clicking on the article.
Include your main keyword in the title naturally, sell the story, make sure it’s obvious what the content discusses, and ensure that those looking for an answer to something know that it will be answered inside.
3. URL and Meta Description
When crawling a page to assess its relevance, one of the first things a search engine will come across is the URL. With this in mind, you need to pay attention to the URL for all of your blog posts and see if you can include the keyword just as you did with the title.
Furthermore, a step that many content creators often forget is the meta description. You’ve seen the little piece of text under a URL on search engines that either explain what’s inside or show a sneak peek of the article? Despite popular belief, this will not affect your ranking on the search engine. However, what it will do is influence users into choosing your page over every other. If they’re seeing three or four pages that could all be useful for what they need, having a good meta description could be the difference between success and failure.
On the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs), keywords they searched will be highlighted in bold so make sure your meta description contains the keywords for which you want the post to rank.
4. Internal Links
Next up, you can’t control when other websites link back to your content but you can control your internal links. In fact, you’re in a position to do as much internal linking as you think will be beneficial for your website. Whenever you add a post to your website, consider previous content and whether it makes sense to link them to each other. As long as you use relevant anchor text (with a keyword, if possible), it provides value to the user and extends their experience.
For search engine algorithms, this is a great step to take and it also improves the experience for users.
5. Responsive Design
Have you ever looked at your content on a mobile device or a tablet? Considering more people are consuming content and browsing the web on these sorts of devices than ever before, we highly recommend ensuring your content is available across all platforms. If your website doesn’t have responsive design (i.e. it doesn’t adjust proportions for different screen sizes), your content will struggle to rank on search engines.
In terms of SEO, all inbound links back to your site will be centralized, i.e. they won’t be divided between two different URLs for different devices. Ultimately, this means that it’s easier for Google to see the value of the post and you won’t have to work twice as hard to see results.
6. Topic Tags
While many of our tips have been explaining things you should be doing, this one is more of a warning for those who go over the top with topic tags. Yes, topic tags can be a great way to organize content. No, you shouldn’t have lots of topic tags that are similar.
When a post has multiple topic tags with a similar meaning — for example, ‘blogging’ and ‘blog’ — it is the same as showing the post to search engines multiple times. For each post, we recommend looking for a minimum of 15 topic tags and making sure they aren’t too similar.
7. Alt Text for Images
In case you aren’t already, images in your blog post are a great way to boost SEO and make the post look more appealing to visitors. Have you ever opened a page, seen it full of text, and clicked away? Images can help with this problem and aid your content.
That said, search engines will only look for images with alt text; this is essentially a textual description of an image so the search engine can scan it like the rest of the content. While adding keywords to your alt text may not be something that instantly puts you on the first page of results, it’s still worth the effort considering it only takes a few seconds.
8. Google Search Console
Finally, we often find that people just aren’t taking advantage of the many resources available to them. For example, Google Search Console — a free tool — allows you to assess all sorts of analytics that help you better understand your content and how it performs. In particular, we like the ‘Search Analytics Report’ because this tells you how people are finding your content and which keywords they’re using.
Not only will it show keywords, it’ll also show your position for said keyword, so it becomes keyword research tailored to your content. Over time, you’ll find the keywords that generate clicks while also allowing a strong position on Google.
Conclusion
With these top tips, there’s no reason why you can’t draw people towards your blog posts. Although it may feel like a marathon at times, we urge you to keep plugging away and taking advantage of these tips. Eventually, the results will show and you’ll see the value of blogging for SEO purposes on your website.
