You know that putting out regular content for your audience is one of the best ways to increase your reputation in your niche, and you know that blogging is one of the best ways to put out regular content.
But if you’ve been blogging for a while and you’re not getting much traction in the search engine rankings, it’s probably time that you started getting more strategic in your approach.
Learning how to write for SEO when you’re writing your website’s static pages is an important skill, but writing blog posts for SEO has it’s own important do’s and don’ts. Yes, there are areas of overlap, but there are some strategies specific to writing blog posts that are important to keep in mind, as well.
In today’s blog post, I want to give you five simple, low-tech things you can do to start your blog posts moving up the rankings in Google and other search engines. Once you get these nailed down and are doing them habitually, there are some more technical tweaks you can add on top of these five practices, but these are really the “fundamentals” when it comes to boosting your blog’s rankings.
In following blog posts, I’ll give you some more technical tips and show you how to use a keyword research tool to help you find blog post topics that will rank.
Here’s my list of five basic blog post tactics to help you optimize your posts for the search engines.
Tactic #1: Start with Your Ideal Customer Avatar
If you’ve followed my advice from previous blog posts, you’re already very familiar with the concept of a customer avatar and have probably already written yours.
If you haven’t read my previous blog posts on the topic, well then, shame on you. : ) Here they are again so you can go back and learn how to create your customer avatar:
“Who Do You Serve? Creating Your Customer Avatar”
“Fleshing Out Your Customer Avatar: Bringing Your Ideal Clients to Life”
“’The Conversation in Your Client’s Head’: Using Keyword Research to Flesh Out Your Customer Avatar”
If you haven’t yet created a customer avatar, here are the basics:
Your customer avatar is a very detailed description of your ideal client (for services) or customer (for products), the kind of person who would be interested in your products or services as a solution to the problems he or she is having.
Knowing who your ideal clients and customers are is obviously crucial for your business for all kinds of reasons, including:
- It allows you to create presentations that are on target for that audience.
- It allows you to create products and services specifically designed to solve this audience’s problems.
- It allows you to speak in the language of your audience in all of your communications with them.
And when it comes to writing your blog, the logical starting place every time you sit down at your computer to write up your next blog post is to look back over your customer avatar, put yourself in his or her place, and ask yourself, “What topic is my ideal client or customer interested in learning more about right now?”
Brainstorm a list. This gives you a “topic pool” to start from that you know will at least be in the right ballpark. Then, refine this list with…
Tactic #2: Find Long-Tail Niche Keywords
OK, I said at the beginning that this post would be about “simple, low-tech things you can do.” I’m going to fudge on that just a little bit because this tactic does involve some tech, but it’s minimal and it really is simple.
For this tactic, you want to take one of the topics from your “topic pool” you created in Tactic #1 and plug it into a keyword research tool. I just wrote a blog post recently reviewing three such tools and came to the conclusion that Ubersuggest was the clear winner. You can read the full review and my recommendation here:
“Which SEO Keyword Research Tool Is Best for Your Business?”
But whatever tool you decide to use, plug the keyword you’re thinking about into the search field and run the program to get the results. Most keyword research tools return a list of terms and phrases people actually enter into Google or other search engines, how many searches people have done using each term in the past month, how much competition there is for the term (how many other web pages out there are also trying to rank for the term), and usually information about how much it would cost to buy an ad focused on that search term. Since we’re really not talking about buying pay per click ads today, we can ignore that last metric.
Now, when I say that you should look for “long-tail niche keywords,” here’s an example. I just typed the keyword phrase “SEO for blogs” into Ubersuggest. Here are some of the results it gave me (terms and numbers of searches)
- SEO for blogs 2,400
- SEO tips for blogs 210
- SEO best practices for blogs 50
- SEO for food blogs 50
- SEO for travel blogs 30
Now, if you were writing a big, broad post about using SEO in blogs, then by all means, use “SEO for blogs.” It clearly has the most searches. If you’re doing something more specific, though, you want to look for more narrow, specific (long-tail) keywords. “SEO for food blogs” and “SEO for travel blogs” are both long-tail keywords. No, they don’t have tons of searches per month, but if you’re writing a blog post about using SEO for food blogs or travel blogs, you’d be much better off using those exact terms and “fishing in a smaller pond.” Your post will be much more relevant to exactly the people you’re writing for.
A keyword research tool isn’t the only way you can find long-tail keywords on your topic. You could also type the term into Quora (www.quora.com) to find out the language people are using to ask questions about your topic.
You could also just type your term into the Google search box and see what related searches Google suggests to you (these will appear just below your search term as you type it in, and also at the bottom of the results page).
Tactic #3: Use Your Keywords Strategically
Google is all about returning results that are relevant to what the person is searching for. The more relevant the results, the happier the searcher is, the more he uses Google and the longer he stays on the page. This means that he will be exposed to more of Google’s ads, which is how they pay the bills.
That’s all just a long way of saying that Google is very interested in figuring out exactly what your blog’s posts are about so they can show your post to the right people. All you need to do is help them out a little bit by making it very clear what your posts are about.
There are two simple ways to do this. First, make sure that, once you’ve figured out what your long-tail keyword is for your post, you include that long-tail keyword in your post title. So, using our previous example of “SEO for food blogs,” you might write a post titled “SEO for food blogs: How to Take a Bite Out of Page One.”
The second place you want to include your long-tail keyword is in the first 100 words of your post. Google indexes your page content from top to bottom, and including your keyword term in the title and early on in the post helps Google understand what your page is about more quickly.
Tactic #4: Publish Longer Content
You’ve probably seen a lot of blog posts that aren’t much more than glorified paragraphs—maybe 500-800 words. That seems to be the sweet spot for length that a lot of bloggers go for.
Hey, I get it. It’s easy to dash off 500 words. You sit down at your computer and pretty soon you’re done and heading out the door.
But it’s really hard to write anything of substance and quality in 500 words.
And that’s why Google has a clear preference for longer, meatier posts. The idea is that, if you’re taking the time to write 1,500 words or more, you must have something to say that will be of value to others. Of course, that’s not necessarily true (I’ve known a few people who could talk all day and not say anything of substance), but it’s probably true in general.
So, make sure you give your readers some substance. That will definitely help you to rank higher over time.
Tactic #5: Guest Blog on Higher-Ranking Sites
While you obviously want to spend most of your time writing blog posts for your own site, there’s a lot to be gained from guest blogging, as well. Being published on someone else’s blog exposes your work to a new audience, some of whom may become followers of yours if they like what you have to say.
Here’s how you go about it:
- Read lots of blogs in your field and identify the ones that seem to be serving the same or a similar audience to your own blog. Pay special attention to the ones that seem to have a large following.
- Identify a topic that you believe would be of value to the audience of your target blog.
- Contact the blog owner and propose writing a post on the topic for them. Be open to changing the topic if they’d prefer you write on something else.
- If you get the gig, write the blog post.
- Make sure that the blog owner will give you a paragraph at the end of your post to say a few words about your own blog and give a link to it. This gives your blog a “backlink” (a link to your site coming in from another site), and if the other blog has a good reputation and high Google rank, it will definitely help your own blog’s ranking.
That’s it. Start with what you believe your audience wants. Use keyword research to find out exactly what they’re searching for—especially the long-tail keywords they’re using as they search. Use that keyword in your title and early in your post. Make your content longer and meatier than the average blog out there. And whenever possible, try to get your writing in front of other relevant audiences to build your reputation and grow your audience.
Five steps. Easy-peasy.
Do this like washing your hair—every day, wash, rinse, repeat—and soon your blog will be climbing the Google charts.
Happy posting! And please leave a comment below and let me know if you’ve discovered some other valuable blogging tips while writing your blog.
