Blog content — all business owners know this is important, but few know how to use it properly. If you’re writing a blog for your website, you need to make sure it is search engine optimised. Without this SEO focus, your blog content just isn’t going to get the attention it deserves. At Impressive, we know SEO like the back of our hand – and we’ve got a few tips for you. Check out our simple guide to achieving SEO perfection on your business’ blog posts.
Hone Your Audience
Understanding your audience is crucial to developing engaging, search engine-optimized blog content. Who are you writing your content for? Think about your products and services — who are buying these products and services, and what is their motivation? Back this up with concrete data you have received from your customers, and build your audience profiles. Make sure your blog content is targeted at one of these profiles.
Get Your Keywords Right
The idea of jamming your content full of keywords is very, very old-fashioned. You need to write naturally, creating content that precisely meets the needs of your audience. But this doesn’t mean you should forget about keywords altogether. Research which words and phrases your audience is using in their searches, and then build these organically into your content.
Bring in Diverse Media
Audiences love engaging images and videos that capture their attention. This will impact your SEO because it encourages visitors to stick around and click on links. Google also loves these pieces of multimedia and likes to include them in its rich media snippets, boosting your visibility. Remember to accompany your multimedia content with alt-text and captions to maximise the impact.
Focus on Page Performance
Images and videos are important, but don’t overdo them. Google applies Core Web Vitals to its SEO algorithms — metrics that measure page performance, loading time, and stability. These technical aspects are crucial, as you need to give your audience a great experience if you want them to stay on your page and convert.
Demonstrate Your Expertise
You have vast expertise in your field and passion for your subject — so make sure that shines on through. Keep Google’s E-A-T principle in mind, i.e. show your Expertise, demonstrate Authoritativeness in your content, and make sure your audience finds you Trustworthy. To do this, you’ll need to cite strong resources and references in your content. If you quote a fact or statistic, make sure this is linked to an external page with high authority, like a scientific study or a national newspaper.
Keep Quality Standards in Mind
All of your content needs to be of high quality, engaging your audience and encouraging conversions, as well as the SEO boost you crave. Bear in mind, though, that some types of content are held to a higher standard than others. Anything that could have an influence on the reader’s health, well-being, political views, or financial situation could be classed as YMYL content — Your Money or Your Life. Google holds this content to a very high standard, so you’ll need to make sure these pages meet the E-A-T principle without fail. Research your content carefully, and cite your sources!
Be Device Agnostic
This is basically a fancy way of saying that your audience needs to be able to reach you on whatever device they are using. Make sure your pages are optimized for mobile and tablet as well as laptops and desktops. Run tests and analysis on different devices, and check that your content displays clearly and completely on all of them.
Don’t Neglect Titles and Metadata
Titles and metadata have huge impacts on your SEO strategy. For starters, Google and other search engines need to be able to crawl and index your content, understanding precisely what it is and what it relates to. Keywords and phrases in your title and meta description will ease this process along. Secondly, customer behavior also has an important effect on SEO performance, so you need to make sure your customers can tell precisely what they are looking at — titles and metadata provide the hook you need to catch the reader’s attention, increasing clickthrough rates, securing engagement, and supporting better SEO.
Take Your Blog SEO to the Next Level
Are you ready to do more with your blog content, achieve SEO perfection, and maximize your conversion rates? The team here at Impressive can help. We are the experts in optimizing your pages and engaging your audience. Reach out today to discover more about what we can do for you and get your Free Marketing Plan today.
