8 (Quick) Ways To Boost Your Blog SEO

A Few Quick Tweaks Will Make Your Blog SEO Go A Long Way

Blogging is a crucial part of any online business, as it’s one of the few ways you can directly connect with customers, offering helpful and insightful content that sets your business apart from the competition. With a captive audience, there’s never been a better time to get writing about your industry sector, helping to educate your readers (and would be customers) about what you do and how it can benefit them.

Sometimes though, blogging can be exhausting, especially if it seems your message is falling on deaf ears. Plus, there’s the time it takes to write the thing in the first place!

If you’re going to the effort of producing a decent blog, no matter how big or small, it’s worth getting every inch of SEO benefit out of it that you possibly can. Here’s a few tweaks you can make to your blog posts that will give them a major SEO boost. Even better, they only take about five minutes!

Write For Readers, Not Google

It’s 2020 and we shouldn’t have to say this, but write for your readers, not for Google. What we mean is, forget targeting a keyword, forget trying to get your blog ranking for specific terms, a blog should be interesting for your intended target audience first and foremost.

Sure, keep your content focused, but make sure everything is readable and, most importantly, useful to your customers. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter how many keywords you’ve crammed in to your blog, it will flop, with bounce rates going through the roof; not to mention leaving a bad taste in the mouth for your readers!

Tip: Readers pick up on knowledge and passion, pick subjects you like writing about. Sometimes, a blog can be a little difficult to write, but if you find you’re forcing it, or writing about stuff you don’t know enough about, put it to one side, come back to it, or ditch the topic altogether.

If you produce easily readable, interesting copy, you’ll see a number of basic SEO benefits. Firstly, time on site will increase, as people are hanging around longer. Secondly, your bounce rate will drop (i.e users will generally visit more than one page) and thirdly, your organic traffic will go up, as people come back for more.

Structure Your Posts

As with all types of writing, blogs need to be well organised, with a practical structure. Use H1, H2 and H3 tags to split your blog into easily digestible sections, with H1 being your main title, H2 being your subtitles and H3 being your subheadings (and so on).

Whilst there’s a lot of debate over the perfect page structure, one thing is sure; it’s a sin to have more than one H1 on any page! If you need some help structuring your blogs, take a look at this one, we’ve pointed out how we do it in red.

Page Structure
H2 & H3 tags help break text up.

Tip: Google uses title tags to help determine what your blog is about. Use simple and clear titles throughout.

Optimise Images

Images are great for boosting the engagement of your blog, but sometimes, search engines can struggle with them. Make sure you optimise your blog images using alt tags and descriptions to maximise your SEO.

Most blogging sites have easy to use media sections, so image optimisation is pretty straight forward. If you’re using WordPress, you can optimise your images by following Dashboard> Media> Library.

Tip: Whilst it can be tempting to stuff your image Alt Text with keywords, stick to the facts. Name your images accurately and use true descriptions for maximum SEO effect.

Add Schema Markup

Schema Markup is a type of language (code) which you can add to your blog using HTML, that will help search engines read and display your posts more easily.

Whilst it can be a little confusing at first, adding schema markup to your blog posts can make all the difference; especially as it helps display rich snippets! There are a number of schema mark up options, but we recommend using the Blog Post Schema

What’s included in blog post schema markup?

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to schema, but generally, you can boost your blog SEO with schema markup, by including the following information;

  • Headline
  • Image
  • Author
  • URL
  • Date Created

Tip: Don’t struggle with Schema Markup on your own! Try out Google’s Structured Data Markup Tool.

Add Some Links

Adding internal links to your blog (linking to other pages on your site) has some major SEO benefits.

Firstly, you’re helping connect potential customers with your services, if you link through to your service pages. Be careful though, if you over do these internal links, readers will switch off from your blog as it becomes ‘salesy’. We recommend using internal links sparingly and only where they are relevant. This should be easier and more organic than you think, especially if you’re writing about your industry sector.

Secondly, using internal links signals to Google that these pages are important (if you’re willing to share them, they must be ok, right?). Make sure you use internal links sparingly on your blog posts, but do keep them in mind; there’s always an opportunity to give your site a little ranking boost here and there.

Time on site and bounce rate (both SEO ranking factors) can be improved using internal links too. Once you have readers on your blog, send them to other pages to keep them interested and signal to Google that your site is engaging. The result? Better organic rankings.

Offer Further Reading

An easy way to keep people on your site, consuming your contnent and building your SEO is by offering a ‘rabbit hole’ of blogs.

If you have multiple blogs, consider adding them as ‘further reading’ at the footer of your page, especially if they’re related content. That way, your readers will click around multiple pages (lowering your bounce rate) and helping boost your SEO.

Tip: Offer a (related) free tool on your blog pages which customer will find useful. These are a great way of building a targeted email list and improving your websites share-ability. Not sure what we’re talking about? Well, we offer a free keyword checker so you can find out what your website shows up for on Google, good eh?

Make Things Easy To Share

Whilst social sharing no longer contributes to SEO, there’s no harm in giving your blog the best growth potential by making it as easy as possible to share!

If your blog is shared on social media (obviously, you should be doing this with every blog you write!), at the very least it will generate traffic. Try adding social sharing buttons such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to your blog posts so they can generate exponential traffic.

Tip: If you’re using WordPress, consider adding Grow by Mediavine, which offers a quick and easy to use solution for your blog.

The Wrap Up

We hope you enjoyed our quick SEO tips for maximising your blog, it’s all simple stuff really, but sometimes it’s worth keeping in mind. If you did enjoy and picked up a thing or two, don’t forget to share this with all your mates, use the (aforementioned) social sharing buttons, either left, or below.

If you’re still struggling, let us help! We’re SEO geeks, so we can help build your Search Engine Optimisation, let’s talk.

 

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