Your company’s blog can be a powerful tool to drive traffic to your website. However, that doesn’t mean that just having a blog will do the trick. Blog SEO is critical to ensuring that when your target buyers are looking for answers, they find your content.
In this post, we’ll dive into the topic and explain why optimizing your blog posts is a must for results.
What Is Blog SEO?
Blog SEO describes the optimization of the content that lives here. It includes both on-page and technical aspects on the backend. Here’s what it entails.
On-Page Optimization
This part of SEO is what you’re writing. The best practices for this include:
- Choosing one focus keyword: If you optimize around multiple ones, search engines get confused.
- Using the keyword in the title, first paragraph, and subheaders. But you’ll want to make sure it’s the proper density, and you’re not using it too much. Tools like Yoast, the plug-in for WordPress, will evaluate if you’re using it enough or too much.
- Ensuring that your content has a high readability score. Measuring readability includes using shorter sentences, simple words, and active voice.
- Having enough content on the page. At a minimum, your blogs should be 400 words. Longer can sometimes be better for SEO, but don’t ramble on just to meet the word count.
- Adding internal links to your blog posts.
Backend SEO
On the backend of your blog, you also need to follow parameters:
- Meta titles and descriptions should include the keyword and be the correct length. Of note is that meta descriptions can increase click-through-rate (CTR) when well written. That means using the keyword and making them interesting, as that’s what appears in search results.
- Your blog slug should include the keyword.
- Images should have alt tags that use the keyword.
- Responsive design and mobile optimization are also important for blog SEO and ranking.
- Page speed will also impact SEO, so make sure you compress images.
- A sitemap is also necessary, and it helps search engines find your blog posts and crawl them effectively.
- Blogs should be a subfolder, which means it’s just website.com/blog versus a subdomain.
- The distribution of your blog content also impacts your SEO. Sharing content on social media or other channels can increase engagement. This can boost your ranking because search engines see it as a sign of credibility and quality.
Following all these parameters can improve your SEO efforts. They won’t guarantee you’ll be in the first spot. That depends on how competitive the keyword is (how many posts are trying to rank for it), among other factors.
Why Does Blog SEO Matter? Let’s Look at the Data
Many of the customers that enter your site will visit via a blog when searching on a topic, not your home page. A recent survey of bloggers placed SEO as the third most important source of traffic. That’s usually quality traffic as well since these users are looking for information.
Additionally, more traffic to websites is from organic search, at over 53%. Thus, it’s an important way to be found. This same report also noted that SEO drives 1000% more traffic than social media posting.
Based on this data and how buyers find products and services, a blog with healthy SEO is essential for driving traffic!
Need Help with Blogging?
Consistently publishing blogs is crucial for ranking. However, many small businesses don’t have the time or expertise. We can help. Contact us today to chat about our SEO services.
