One of the keys to ranking high in search engines and attracting lots of visitors is having a great blog. I use the term “blog” for many different things, so let’s get started with what I mean when I say “great blog” for seo purposes. If you aren’t familiar with the terms “on-page SEO” and “off-page SEO,” I suggest you learn more about them before reading this post. They are both critical to your overall success and backlinks fall under off-page SEO. With that said, one of the best ways to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and traffic is by posting high quality content on a regular basis to.
Here are strategies fot optimization.
Pick the right topic to write about.
Does this sound like the first step of a content marketing strategy? It is. Your content strategy should be informed by your SEO goals, and vice versa. Notice I said “informed by,” not “determined by.”
Here’s the deal: There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of keywords you could pick to write a post about. But which ones are tied to topics your audience really wants to know about? Which keywords will let you write a post that moves your readers toward hiring you or buying from you, even if it’s the first step of a two-year sales cycle?
Those are the keywords worth writing about. Serve your readers first. Serve yourself second. Ideally, find topics to write about that serve both them and you simultaneously.
Choose blog post topics carefully; you’ll be competing for readers
You must pick strategic topics because while it is possible to rank for any keyword, the competition is fierce. You’ll need to craft a post that will sparkle if you want to rank among the two million blog posts published every day.
When I say “rank” for a keyword, I mean getting to the first page of search results. If you aren’t on the first page of results, you’re basically not in the game. Roughly 92% of people don’t go beyond the first page. And 98% don’t go beyond the second page.
It gets worse. First position in the search results gets between 31% and 56% of all the clicks, depending on which study you cite. Second position gets half that – 14%. By the time you’ve fallen to third position, you’re getting fewer than 10% of clicks. It falls off even further as you go down the page, as this chart shows.
With the top results hogging so much traffic, you can see why smart SEO experts urge their customers to go after keywords with less competition. If you can get ranked in first position for a keyword that gets 500 searches a month, you’ll do better than if you ranked even in fifth position for a keyword that gets 2,000 searches a month.
| Searches per month | Keyword position in search results* | Average clickthrough rate | Total clicks | |
| Keyword 1 | 500 | 1 | 31% | 155 |
| Keyword 2 | 2000 | 5 | 5.5% | 110 |
* Your page won’t always be in position two; every time a search is run the results are jostled a little. When I say your page will be in position two, I mean on average.
Pick the right keywords, preferably long tail keywords.
Keywords that have more than three words are called “long tail keywords”. Long tail keywords are a smart place to focus, for three reasons:.
- Advertising: There is less competition for long tail keywords, making them more affordable for pay per click ads.
- Ranking: Since long tail keywords are more specific, they can rank higher in response to the more detailed, longer queries people make today.
- Conversion: The more detailed the search query, the more likely it is that the buyer is further along the in the buyer’s journey, and so closer to conversion.
The conversion rate for a click from a keyword search for “TV” will be low, like less than 1%. But a click from a keyword search for “Sony KDL40W600B 40-Inch 1080p 60Hz Smart LED TV” may have a conversion rate as high as 3%. That’s because long tail keywords (good ones) are used by people who are further along in the buying cycle (or the donation cycle, for you non-profits).
If we add this higher conversion rate into the table from before, things start looking even better.
| Searches per month | Keyword position in search results | Average clickthrough rate | Total clicks | Conversion rate | Conversions | |
| Keyword 1 | 500 | 1 | 31% | 155 | 3% | 4.65 |
| Keyword 2 | 2000 | 5 | 5.5% | 110 | 1% | 1.1 |
Start searching for topics that have long tail keywords you could write blog posts about. You can use to find keywords with low competition. Google’s autosuggest is a free option: just start typing your test keyword into a Google search window, and make note of what Google suggests. Google’s keyword planner is useful to find suggestions for keywords; you’ll need an AdWords account to use it, but those are free. There’s also a free version of SEMRush.
While long tail keywords are the best place to start, you don’t have to use them exclusively. If you’ve got a killer blog post idea that includes a high-traffic, high-competition keyword, go for it.
Write for SEO or for people?
Writing for the web is a balancing act. From a pure SEO standpoint, you start with the keyword research. What are people looking for? How are they looking for it? What questions do they have? From there, you go into the editorial process to decide if you have a story to tell. “I see people are looking for fried green tomato recipes. Is this relevant to our audience? Do we have a unique take?”
If you have synergy between the words people are looking for and a story you can tell, you write the post and then do the final optimization tweaks. From an editorial standpoint, you’re looking for the stories and articles that your readers want to read. In this case, you start with the story, analyze which keywords apply most, and then optimize the story for that one keyword that you want the story to be found for.
Write the best headline possible.
The headline is important because you are creating content for more than just the search engines. Yes, it is important to rank, but the goal isn’t to rank. The end goal is to get real people to read your content and take actions that are valuable to you. A well written title will not only help increase the rank of a post, but more importantly, will increase the likelihood of someone you care about actually clicking on the listing and reading the post.
Structurally speaking: It’s ideal to get the keyword as close to the beginning of the headline as possible. “Long Tail Keywords: Are They All You Should Care About?” will probably do better in the search results than “Should You Not Care About Anything Except Long Tail Keywords in Your SEO?”
But don’t butcher your headlines to force the keywords to the beginning. On average, people spend less than 6 seconds on a search results page before taking action, and they won’t click a poor headline, keyword or no keyword. Remember: it doesn’t matter how high you rank if nobody clicks on your listing.
Use your keyword in the subheaders.
After headlines, the next place to work your keyword in is in the subheaders. These should be marked up as H2 or H3 tags in your post.
Subheaders serve readers as guides that make your post easier to read, but they also make your post easier to scan. People scan posts more often than they read them. If you try to fight this, and force your readers to read every word, you’ll lose. Remember, there are a lot of websites out there. They’re only a click away.
Try to get your keyword in at least one subheader. If you can, add one or two additional variations on your keyword to other subheaders. As Google gets better at deciphering a searcher’s intent, those synonyms and related words gain in SEO value.
Include variations of your keyword throughout your post.
A variation could be plural versus singular, or a closely related term, like switching between “SEO” and “search engine optimization.” Ideally, you’ll use these additional terms naturally. And that’s part of why the search engines look for them. The authors of the search algorithms know that when humans write for humans, they use similar but slightly different words.
Successful content creators are the ones who write for people (not search engines). They don’t use the phrase “Naples Florida time-share two bedroom apartment,” or if they do, they would never use it more than once every hundred words or so. If they did, they’d sound like robots.
Write a long post (usually).
You can write 300-word blog posts. No one is going to fine you. However, there is a lot of data showing that writing long content is the better way to get ranked. This graph from serpIQ shows top-ranking posts are well over 2,000 words:
BuzzSumo analyzed the social share counts of over 100 million articles over eight months, as reported by Noah Kagan on OKDork and found that the longer the content, the more shares it gets, with 3,000-10,000 word pieces getting the most average shares (8,859 total average shares).
There’s a lot of differing opinions on what the ideal length of a blog post is. There are plenty of studies that support long content, but none of them were specifically done on your blog. Also, just because long-form content does well, you don’t have to write a 3,000 word post every time. For example, if you are writing a post to answer a specific long-tail keyword and you can address the topic in 300 words, write 300 words. If you’re writing about a more complex topic, it is unlikely that you can do justice to the topic in 800 words, so that post will probably be longer.
I have two pieces of advice if you decide to do long form content posts:
- Long content is not a license to blather or to write filler content. The reason long-form content works is because it goes into great detail. Long form posts are meant to be the definitive source of information on a specific topic. That’s why they’re long. It’s probably why they get ranked.
- Long form content needs to be formatted correctly, as demonstrated in this post by Heidi Cohen, or your readers will run. Good formatting includes subheaders, bullet points, and plenty of images that directly support the topic.
Place your keyword – and keyword variations – into the alt tags of your images strategically.
Write short descriptive copy for the alt tags of the major images in your post and make sure it’s around 70 characters long. Use your keyword and its variations in these tags.
Alt tags get read by search engines, but they also end up in other interesting and useful places. If someone pins one of your images to Pinterest, the default description of the pin will be whatever the alt tag says.
Conclusion
I have already posted a detailed post about how to optimize blog posts for seo. But this post is specifically aimed at optimizing individual blog posts, since you will find that most blog posts are made up of different pieces which can be independently optimized. Feel free to check them out!