3 Important Blogging Tips to Help Your SEO
The idea of blogging can send some people running for the hills, especially those who find writing creatively a challenge or feel they have nothing interesting to say. Often this results in businesses refraining from blogging, but they are missing a great opportunity to improve their brand’s performance online. Here are some all-important blogging tips to help your SEO.
- Use keywords to your advantage
If you’re responsible for your company’s SEO (search engine optimisation), you’ll probably have conducted a keyword research exercise to understand search volume that best represent the services you offer. Chances are, your site will be optimised for a number of these popular keywords, but not all of them. Consider using some of the redundant keywords to steer your blog content.
As an example, if you are a footwear retailer, the keywords your site is optimised for could be “men’s shoes” “women’s shoes”, “party shoes” etc. However, during your research, you could come across the keyword phrase “what your shoes say about you”. Granted perhaps an irrelevant term for your site’s content, however you could utilise this keyword to write an article about what people’s shoes say about them as a person, with a fun analysis of each shoe type. This would generate traffic to your site for this keyword.
Be careful not to use a keyword that you have already optimised your site for. You don’t want your blog page competing with an existing page on your site.
- Post as regularly as you can
Adding blog pages to your site is great as it counts as fresh content, increases your site’s pages and creates link opportunities to other relevant pages. Essentially this generates a network of information resources, which Google sees as very valuable to the user, prioritising it higher up the search engine results pages.
The average company posts once every two weeks, but if you have the resources, or have a content agency willing to do the work, you could post as much as once or even twice a week.
Think about what questions your content answers and who you are trying to target. If you are stuck for a subject to write about and you’ve exhausted all redundant keywords, consider your target audience first and what their needs are and write content that helps to solve this need.
- Make social media your medium to promote your blog
Adding regular blog content to your site is one thing and if you’ve optimised it and linked it well to other information sources, it may start to gain traction in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Position). Social however acts as your personal media channel to push your content inexpensively to your target audience.
Using your social media profiles to promote your blog pages has several benefits:
- Google returns social media search results as well as web pages. Connecting your blog to your Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts, you are increasing your chances of being picked up by search engines.
- Social media is a powerful sharing tool. Users can be brand advocates simply by sharing the content you post, if it’s deemed compelling. The more your brand is mentioned online, the more Google views it as trustworthy, which can add weight to your search results.
- Sharing content this way enables other users, including businesses, to reference your blog in their own online material from research they have done using social media. This increases backlinks to your site, which another great ranking signal for SEO.
