The demand for search engine optimization (SEO) services is increasing. Every online business needs traffic. And for traffic, you need a detailed content marketing strategy — which requires time and research. With more than 600 million blogs live today, it’s never been this difficult to beat the competition and stand out on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Fortunately, the basics of SEO services are still the same. And by executing search engine optimization or SEO basics, you can optimize your blog content for higher rankings on search engines.
The following tips will help you optimize your blog content, boost traffic and get sustainable results with your content marketing efforts.
1. Before Writing a Single Word, Complete Your Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first step of blogging or content marketing. But how can you prepare rank-able content if you don’t even know what people are searching for and the intent behind every query?
Unfortunately, a lot of writers and marketing professionals take keyword research as secondary to the content development process. Once a blog post is ready, they will sprinkle a few keywords here and there.
This approach rarely works because you neither have a clear objective behind a post nor any respect for the flow of a post.
During the keyword research phase, create a list of high-volume keywords and a few supportive keywords, which may not have a high volume, but you are sure you can rank against these in a little time.
2. Separate the Commercial and Informational Keywords
Once you have a list of keywords, you can decide which keywords are worth pursuing and which might be a long shot, given that your blog is still new.
Likewise, separate the commercial and informational keywords so you can use them in relevant posts and positions to answer user queries clearly and concisely.
When penning down a post, set up a clear objective behind it. Your objective might be to attract new people, educate prospects, answer a question, or promote a product or service.
3. Select the Best Format for Your Blog Post
Just like it’s important to set up the right intent while writing a post, it’s equally important to choose the right format for it. A typical blog post can be a product review, opinion, how-to-guide, or comparison post.
If all the articles ranked against a certain keyword on Google are long-form posts or how-to guides, you will have to follow the same format because that’s what users are looking for.
For example, if you want to rank your blog post for the keyword “Best Men’s Watches,” you will mostly find product review blogs or product pages.
4. Create a Powerful Title, Without Stuffing Keywords!
Ask a writer how difficult it is to craft an interesting title. Sometimes it takes hours to finally reach one that sounds interesting and matches the intent behind the post.
And, of course, it would be a bonus if you could add your main keyword in the title. If not, you must be able to fit in its variation at least. But remember, while it’s important to add your keywords in the title, forcibly stuffing keywords into it will ruin the click-through rate (CTR).
If your blog post’s title is clickbait or sounds spammy, nobody would open it, irrespective of the content quality inside. And, of course, this will be a big red flag for Google, which means it will, more than likely, not rank.
5. Add the Most Updated Surveys, Statistics and Research
Don’t think a post ranked on Google will remain at the top forever. No matter how compelling, well-researched and comprehensive your content is, as soon as it gets outdated, a new blog post will replace it.
But that doesn’t mean you need to write a new blog post on the same topic every year. On the contrary, if you update one of your existing blog posts with new facts, research and surveys that may be relevant, your post will be forever helpful for the readers.
So, while writing a new blog post or updating an existing one, make sure you add a lot of authentic sources, white papers, surveys, etc.
