By Renu Sharma
You created a blog post which is full of useful information, facts, and data. But your post is still not making it to the top of search engine results? What could have gone wrong? What can you do to improve visibility, and drive more traffic to your site?
This post will take you through some of the most successful ways to optimize your blog posts. But what does this involve?
It means that you need to optimize your blog post content and webpages for search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) of blog posts has never been as important and beneficial as it is now.
That’s because blog posts play an important role in generating website traffic. In fact, blogging can help you generate 67% more leads. And when you optimize your blog posts for search engines, you can generate more high-quality, relevant traffic.
At times optimizing a blog post can be challenging. Especially if you are doing it for the first time. How can you analyze your competitors? What tools should you use to optimize images? How should you decide which keywords to use?
Well, you don’t have to worry. This post will guide you through a few important tactics that you can utilize to optimize your blog posts for SEO.
1. Define Your Audience and Blog Topic
It is crucial to define your target audience, as you can optimize the content accordingly. As a blogger, you should clearly determine aspects like age range, gender or interest of your audience. This will help you to figure out what your audience is looking for in online content.
Defining your audience will also help you to identify the most ideal topic for your blog post and make sure your post is relevant and useful to your target audience. If you create content that your audience is going to value, there’s a good chance you can generate the maximum number of clicks and shares on social media.
2. Do Keyword Research
Keywords are the words people use to search for something. After you decide on your topic, you need to do keyword research. This will also give you some inspiration on the title for your post.
The purpose is to make a list of keywords significant to your target audience, and ultimately use those keywords to boost your traffic. The Google Keyword Planner is a free tool which will help you find relevant keywords for your business.
3. Research and Analyze Your Competitors
After you are ready with your relevant keywords list, use them to conduct a search on search engines like Google or Yahoo. Prepare a list of websites that come up in the top 10 search results that are related to your industry. Theses website or companies are your competitors, for which you need to conduct a detailed analysis.
By using competitor analysis tools, you can analyze the websites on parameters like domain age, social shares, inbound links, etc. Use keywords as a parameter to analyze your competitors, and find out why their posts have a good ranking.
Through the analysis, you can learn a lot about your competitors and design your blog posts accordingly.
4. Optimize Your Content and Meta Descriptions Using Keywords
You can optimize your content by using the relevant keywords you have compiled previously. But it is important that you use these keywords evenly across your post. You should use them strategically with the right level of density, so that it generates maximum traffic.
Include the keywords in titles, headings, sub-headings, meta descriptions, etc. The title is crucial because that’s where you make your first impression. Your readers will take one glance of it and decide whether or not they should continue reading.
At the same time, the keyword should also be included in the title to improve its search visibility. A word of warning though, don’t include keywords everywhere in your post just for the sake of doing it.
Meta descriptions, also known as search descriptions, are a very important aspect of blog post optimization. They give a very simple reader-friendly summary of your blog to your audiences, which helps people decide whether or not your post will be helpful for them.
Make sure you implements keywords here as well because it is one of the most important blog ranking factors.
5. Use and Optimize Relevant Images
Images attract the attention of your audiences. A study conducted by Backlinko showed that using a single image can enhance your ranking in search engines. Make sure you use vibrant and colorful images conveying information related to your topic.
You could also try adding the right text details to a relevant image as per your blog post. The pictures shown below point out the difference between an image with and without text details.
When brands use only words to convey their message, only 10% of people tend to remember it. But if the brands use relevant images along with the text then nearly 65% people can remember the brand’s message.
You need to increase the readability of the images by saving them using related keywords. You can also use tools like Canva to optimize the size of the image as well. Ensure that the scaled image is uploaded in the smallest possible file size so that it doesn’t take too long for the servers to load your page.
6. Use Structured Data to Markup the Blog Post
Structured data is a code that is read by the search engines, and displayed in a certain way in the search results. Having structured data for your post will enhance the ranking on search engines because in 2016, Google added structured data to their ranking factor algorithm.
Tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper can help your business get started with structured data. This tool will help Google to understand the content of your post or website. Then the content is used for search engine results, and it will be richer in terms of information. That’s why it is known as “rich snippets.” Rich snippets can be developed by adding required data to your website.
As an example, search for OnePlus 5t in Google. You will find all of the vital information such as battery capacity, weight, dimension, etc. under the URL itself.
Final Thoughts
Although great content is a fundamental requirement for a successful blog post, just creating excellent content doesn’t guarantee you maximum traffic or shares. Nonetheless, if you follow these simple yet important SEO strategies to optimize your post, you’ll be able to increase your reach.
These strategies can drive traffic, clicks, shares, and most importantly, increase the ranking of your website in search results. Let us know if you use any other blog post SEO strategies in the comment section below.
