Blogging has shifted drastically over the last 10 years. A blog is no longer just an online diary or a place to share your latest home renovations – it’s become a crucial tool for professionals to help their business. A well-optimised blog will increase your Google search rankings, make your website more visible to searches and in turn, increase traffic to your website by 55% more than a company that doesn’t blog.
So, do you know how to optimise your blog posts to make them more search engine friendly?
Unfortunately, we have seen it too many times, where businesses have a blog page, but fail to keep it updated, some going over a year! Recent statistics from HubSpot state that companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads monthly than companies that don’t have a blog.
Here are five simple search engine optimisation (SEO) tips to help get your blog noticed.
RESEARCH
Keyword research is essential for on-page optimisation. Chances are you are including keywords without even realising it, but now you need to make sure the keywords you do include are relevant to your blog topic. There are so many online tools to help you find keywords applicable to your blog post that you may not have considered. Google AdWords Keyword Tool and SEMRush both offer great tools that allow you to find keywords and even discover what words and phrases your competition are using to bring traffic to their website.
UTILISE KEYWORDS
Now you have your relevant keywords, it’s important to use them where they will have the biggest impact on readers and search engine crawlers indexing your content. Try to include them in the following places:
- Title
- Headings and subheadings
- Introductory sentence
- Concluding paragraph
- Anchor text (text you hyperlink to other related pages on your site)
- Title tags and meta descriptions
A word of warning: Don’t over saturate your content with keywords as this will irritate your readers, but you may also get penalised by Google. A couple of strategically placed keywords will do the trick.
OPTIMISE IMAGES
Every time you upload a photo to your blog, you must include keywords in the file name, populate the alternate text field with a brief, keyword-rich description of the photo.
REFERENCE WITH LINKS
When you mention another article in your blog post, include a link to the information you are referencing. Not only is it good blogging etiquette, but you may also get lucky and receive a link back, which will only widen your readership further. Reliable links are valuable for any site looking to rank higher in search engine results pages.
OPPORTUNITY TO SUBSCRIBE
Offer readers the ability to subscribe to your posts via email when possible. This allows your blog followers to have instant notification of your latest posts without having to periodically check your site for new content. This will also mean your business at the forefront of their mind more times than you may have been beforehand.
USE SOCIAL MEDIA
As a small business, you may be utilising Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or other social media platforms to create connections with potential and current customers. Why not promote your blog content on these sites for more exposure? Free programs like Hootsuite make it easy to schedule posts ahead of time!
Now that you’ve seen the benefits of running a business blog, you might be eager to get one started on your site. If you need help with your blog content, SEO or any other digital marketing, please get in touch with our team to discuss your project further.
