SEO is the most important weapon of any successful marketer’s arsenal. It’s what helps you drive all of that yummy traffic towards your website. Without it, search engines wouldn’t be able to find you so easily, as they would be totally lost and directionless, leaving you behind your competition. Imagine it like this: your search engine would have to drive blindfolded through thousands of pages just to find your blog. No wonder it’s killing your traffic! If you tried the same in real life it would be utter suicide. Therefore, you want to do the complete opposite of that and prepare that search engine for the long journey towards your blog and make it as harmless as possible. So, check the oil, bring a spare tire, and buckle up and enjoy the ride as I explain how to make your blog posts more SEO-friendly.
Optimize your content for mobile users
As mobile phones have taken the lead in overall online traffic over from PCs, almost 60% of all the traffic by some estimates, Google has decided to update its search engine algorithm for mobile-first indexing. What this means is that sites which are more optimized for mobile phones will get priority over non-optimized ones, as the traffic coming from mobile phones will impact the site’s rankings for desktop users as well. So, start off by optimizing your content, especially your images, for mobile phone users. You can use free stock images as they come in high quality. Make your texts easier to read and scroll through on mobile devices by formatting them in a way that fits on any screen perfectly. Compress images to increase their loading speed and make sure they can be enlarged when clicked on, that is if ants aren’t your target audience. Next, utilize AMP for that extra speed boost and use responsive pages as they use only one URL, instead of two, for both desktop and mobile, to avoid cutting your traffic in two.
Build strong links with your content
If you want your content to appear high in SERPs, you need to work on building strong links to increase your page authority. Despite your blog’s relevant size, creating unique content for your particular niche will generate more organic links as people will generally find your content extremely useful (but more on that later). This, in turn, will pass on their page authority to yours. Yet, the most important thing to note here is that not all links are created equal. Those that don’t add anything to your page’s reputation should be removed altogether, as links with a bad rep will only harm your SEO efforts. What’s more, apart from using inbound links, you want to maximize internal links as well. For example, if you happen to mention something that you’ve already covered in a previous blog post, add a link to it and get the juices flowing. This allows the re-distribution of your authority to your other pages and helps Google understand the layout of your site a lot better, thus ranking it higher in search as a result.
Proper use of keywords
Oftentimes people make the rookie mistake of using too many keywords, which is called keyword stuffing, for their blog posts, which then gets them penalized by Google. No doubt they’ve read somewhere that these are the key, no pun intended, to generate more blog traffic. However, you only need one or two relevant keywords max in your text to achieve this effect. Moreover, you want them situated as ‘naturally’ as possible, to get the right kind of visitors, which you do by utilizing long-tail keywords. For example, using ‘cars for sale’ is too broad and there will be too much competition for it, whereas ‘second-hand cars for sale’ is more specific and will generate better results, ‘ second-hand Ford cars’ even more so. In addition, once you’ve found your long-tail keyword, you want to place it in several locations. This is usually between 3 to 5 words, an example of this is “home phone service in Virginia“. Namely, in your page’s title, header and body, URL, and its Meta description. All of these will have an effect on your rankings, so use them to your advantage.
Create 10x content
Finally, as mentioned earlier, you want to be creating killer content that is “ten times better than the best result that can currently be found in the search results for a given keyword phrase or topic”, as described by Rand Fishkin. What this all actually means is that you want to deliver content that’s of high-quality, that’s also useful and entertaining and helps your users solve a specific problem by providing them with answers. For example, you should always back up your info with trustworthy sources and statistics, infographics preferably, to get your content more accurately fleshed out and detailed. Also, inspiring the sense of awe and joy is an added bonus. All of this combined will result in your content being shared over the internet in large numbers, especially on social media, and also provide tons of useful backlinks to juice up your authority as well.
All in all, don’t let your visitors get lost in the woods and use these strategies as breadcrumbs to guide them towards the safety of your blog.
Emma is a digital marketer and blogger from Sydney. After getting a marketing degree she started working with Australian startups on business and marketing development. Emma writes for many relevant, industry related online publications and does a job of an Executive Editor at Bizzmark blog and a guest lecturer at Melbourne University. Interested in marketing, startups and latest business trends.
