TJ Vasquez
Developing an effective SEO strategy is essential when it comes to operating a successful business. The products and services you provide are only as good as the way you market them, as even the most incredible value isn’t going to sell itself. Your target audience has to be aware that your brand exists, and having a great SEO blogging strategy is one way to ensure that happens.
If you’re trying to develop your SEO, take a look at these five strategies that may work for your business.
SEO Blogging Strategy 1: Develop Educational Resources
A major part of what skyrockets a brand’s SEO is the value it collectively presents to the company’s target audience. Blogging affords brands so much variability when it comes to establishing authority and credibility within a certain community. While the main goal of blog content is to inform and inspire an audience, there are so many unique formats that can be used to adequately present the knowledge you’d like to share.
To stand out among your competitors, you want to position your brand as one that’s in touch with its audience. Your brand needs to know what your customers want and be able to provide it more efficiently than any other brand. If you want to make sure that your brand is seen as an industry leader and expert resource provider, developing a selection of educational content related to your desired topic is a great approach.
Instead of posting a weekly blog post covering an industry-related topic, expand upon that topic and create supplemental content that allows your audience to delve deeper.
Let’s say you’re a carpenter and your audience mainly consists of DIY enthusiasts who want to learn how to take on home improvement projects. You could write blog posts covering a few beginner’s woodworking projects, or you could develop a library of helpful resources. You might decide to create a step-by-step series covering all the basics of woodworking, teach your viewers about different wood types, the hardware to use on certain projects, and which techniques to follow for the best results.
In addition to blog posts, your resource library might include:
- How-To Articles
- Infographics on Various DIY Projects
- FAQ Pages
- Do and Don’t Tips
- Images for Your Tutorial Steps
- Video Demonstrations
- Cost Comparisons Between Materials
- Maintenance Routines
- Expert Interviews
- Style Guide Slideshows
- Instruction Levels (Beginner to Advanced)
By having more than simple blog posts on your website, you’re offering your audience and potential customers a substantially greater value. You’re answering their questions, teaching them how to pursue tasks they’re interested in, and giving them accurate, relevant information catered to their unique skill levels.
SEO Blogging Strategy 2: Grouping Your Content
Depending on the range of topics your brand blogs about, grouping your content might be worth considering if you want to improve your SEO. For brands that cover several closely-related topics through blogging, a segmented audience often forms naturally. Though every member of your audience has shown an interest in the content you publish, subgroups within that audience will likely have interests that differ from other subgroups.
A blog operating in the technology and business environments might write about topics like workplace productivity, technology news, managing mental health, and professional development. Though each of these topics is broadly connected to both business and technology, the blog’s audience will likely visit for one of those topics instead of the lot. Some readers will prioritize tech industry content while others want to learn new skills or prevent workplace burnout.
These interests are unique, so to make visiting your blog an experience that’s catered to the various segments of your audience, grouping or clustering your content is key.
To cluster your blog content, determine how many unique yet relatively broad topics you write about. You can refer to performance metrics and SEO analysis to study the ways your audience segments react to the topics you cover. Posts with the most engagement will likely fall into a specific category, and when you have a list of them, you can create clusters.
Returning to the example, the tech and business blog might choose to create topic groups, clusters, or categories like Technology, Self-Care, Professional Development, and Office Efficiency. By organizing content according to these categories, the individual or team managing the blog has made navigating to relevant content easier for readers with special interests.
They don’t have to scroll through the list of posts in chronological order. Instead, they can choose a category, filter out anything that doesn’t interest them, then browse through a selection of material they find relevant.
SEO Blogging Strategy 3: Quality Over Quantity
When it comes to the keyword aspect of your SEO blogging strategy, less is often more. Ideally, you’ll want to insert your chosen keywords into your blog posts in a couple of places, assuming they fit sensibly.
For example, you’ll probably want to add one keyword or phrase to your blog post’s title, the page’s meta description, title tag, and a couple of the section headings. When it comes to adding keywords to the body of your blog post, quality is way more important than quantity. When using keywords throughout your blog post, it’s essential to confirm that all of your sentences still make sense. If adding keywords in a specific area interrupts the flow of the passage it’s in, choose a different section or rework the paragraph.
When you’re done adding keywords to your blog post, they should account for roughly 1.5% of the word count.
This is what’s meant by “quality over quantity,” because there is no way that stuffing keywords into your blog post as many times as possible will yield the same positive results as creating a high-quality piece of writing.
Keyword stuffing actually has the opposite effect. When search engine algorithms notice that a blog post uses a specific keyword 20 times in a 400-word article, the page gets penalized. If you want search algorithms to promote your content, steer clear of excessive or unnatural keyword usage.
SEO Blogging Strategy 4: Enhance the User Experience
Though the concept of SEO relates to the way search engines rank online content, the user experience is still one of the most essential elements of an effective SEO blogging strategy. You want to make your content easy for search engines to find and promote, but at the same time, the content you publish is for your audience to view. Your overall goal should be to attract potential customers to your website, and provide them with organized, informative content that’s easy to consume.
To keep organic traffic coming to your web pages, take a few steps to enhance the experience that internet users have on your website.
Determine User Intent
Understanding user intent can make it easier to provide your audience with information they actually want. The keywords your readers type into a search engine can give you a good idea of what sort of topics interest them, but that’s not the end of it. If you take time to learn about what users actually want to know in relation to those keywords, you’re going to be able to cater your content to their needs more effectively.
For example, members of your audience might look up broad search terms like “arthritis treatment” and when they do, a selection of local rheumatologists might come up in the list of search results. People who are looking for a doctor’s help will likely find it with these keywords. However, someone who is looking for natural remedies and advice might also use this set of keywords, even though their intent differs from the norm.
Let’s say your brand specializes in helping people with arthritis make lifestyle changes to naturally improve their health. The keywords, “arthritis treatment” might not seem like a fit for your SEO, but if users intend to find natural remedies when they type in the word “treatment,” their intent aligns with the services you offer.
Go for Mobile-Friendliness
More and more people are surfing the web via smartphone or tablet devices, and while having information at one’s fingertips is convenient, this search method can also be a hassle. Not all websites are optimized for mobile device users, so when they visit a website that isn’t mobile-friendly, the page format is a disaster. These pages are slow, hard to navigate, and the text alignment often makes these pages too frustrating to read.
When a mobile user navigates to a website that isn’t mobile-friendly, they leave. Very few people will spend more than a few seconds trying to make sense of a clunky user interface when easier options are available.
To keep visitors from leaving your website just as soon as they arrive, take the time needed to make your site a mobile-friendly one. Various plug-ins and dynamic website formats exist, so adding an element of mobile-friendliness to your site shouldn’t be too time or labor-intensive. Not to mention, making sure that you’ve got your mobile audience covered helps bring more interested parties to your pages.
Increase Loading Speed
Having a page that loads too slowly is detrimental to your SEO success. Usually, if a page takes more than two or three seconds to load, users are going to leave in favor of a page that doesn’t waste their time. People want information as quickly and conveniently as possible, and to ensure you’re doing your best to provide it, make sure your pages load quickly.
You can increase your loading speeds by resizing your images, disabling the autoplay feature for videos, and removing any plug-ins that aren’t compatible with your blog’s format.
Break Up Walls of Text
Neat, properly formatted blog content is always favorable over big blocks of text. It’s important to keep your content scannable so that users can scroll through to find the exact piece of information they’re looking for.
To break up walls of text, use proper headings and subheadings to section your content. Keep your paragraphs short, and organize lists with bullets or numbers. You might also choose to add images to segment your content when appropriate. Try to make your blog posts informative but also easy to skim through if your reader isn’t up for reading the entire article.
Maintain Page Consistency
Keep similar formatting between pages. While some variation might be necessary depending on the content you’re publishing, visitors should feel a sense of familiarity when they visit your website. You want to offer them a consistent reading experience, where your fonts and layouts are all relatively uniform.
Display Neat Menus
Make it easy for your audience to navigate your website. If they visit to read a blog post, they might stick around to explore other posts related to the same topic. If so, you want to ensure that the process of moving from one piece of content to the next is smooth and simple. Have neat, organized menus displayed on your pages, and at the end of your blog posts, provide category links that visitors can choose in order to see more of the same content type.
Guide them from one point to the next instead of pushing them into the dense jungle of a messy website.
SEO Blogging Strategy 5: Perform Updates
The internet is full of frequent changes, whether those changes are related to SEO guidelines or the topics your blog is covering. As new information becomes available, it’s a good idea to use it to enhance previously published content.
Occasionally, explore your old blog posts and see if you can make use of new SEO strategies or update the facts you covered. By updating pieces of content, you can build a more robust library of resources that serve your customers reliably.
Creating an SEO blogging strategy that works well for your business takes time. You’ll likely need to experiment, go through trial-and-error processes, and make adjustments until you have a system that benefits your brand’s model.
If after reading this article, you still need a few SEO strategy pointers, you’re not alone. SEO isn’t easy and for beginners, the whole concept can feel like too much. Fortunately, tools like Juno were developed to assist content creators. This AI program can generate ten pitches in just a few minutes, including titles, meta descriptions, outlines, and article drafts.
All you have to do is provide a few pieces of information, wait for the content to populate, then edit it to your liking before you publish your articles. It’s as quick and easy as possible. Check out Juno’s SEO Strategy Builder.
SOURCES
https://www.semrush.com/blog/blog-seo/
https://seositecheckup.com/articles/the-top-12-advanced-seo-tips-every-blogger-should-know
https://ahrefs.com/blog/blog-seo/
https://www.towson.edu/web-editor-resources/accordions.html
https://www.shoutmeloud.com/create-informative-blog-posts-not-good-writing.html
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-choose-blogging-post-format-ht
