Whether you own a website that has millions of monthly visitors or you’re just starting, SEO has been one of the most cost-effective ways to drive people to your content. In 2023, the case remains the same since 75% of those who might be searching for your services don’t click past the first page of Google Results. Are you on the first page?
When trying to grow an audience, SEO blog writing is a must. However, trying to stuff in too many keywords can easily push your readers away. So content creators and website managers must strive for the best of both worlds.
Does writing blog posts help with SEO? Yes, absolutely. Stick with us to the end of the article because you won’t need SEO blog services after you read it!
What Is Important to Consider for SEO?
Regardless of whether you are running a blog or your blog is just a part of the website you are managing, content marketing drives people to come visit. Here’s a good structural view of what a page must have in order to be indexed and rank properly:
- To be a part of the XML sitemap. (Or, in the case of blog articles, the parent directory part of the sitemap).
- Quick loading speed. The faster your page loads, the better ranked by Google it will be.
- To target specific keywords.
- To resonate with what a person would look to read after typing in these keywords in a search bar.
- Free value upfront.
- No keyword stuffing.
- Proper Meta tags – Meta title and descriptions relevant to what would make the user inclined to click on your article through Google or Bing.
- Proper H1 and H2 tags, good article structure.
There are practically two things that you must achieve to have a good SEO ranking. First, you must make people click on your articles, and second, they must stay for a longer period on your website. We can sum these two things up with impressions CTR (click-through rate) and average session per user in Google Analytics.
Carefully monitor these metrics, and do tests on how to improve them, and in the long run, you will have tremendous success.
Identify the Right SEO Keywords to Target in 3 Simple Steps
Contrary to popular belief, the right keywords can be found with or without the usage of professional tools. When it comes to blog writing for SEO, identifying the keywords of your competitors is very easy. Let’s be smart here.
1. Step one: Find a good article from a competitor on a similar topic.
2. Step two: Copy the text of the article
3. Step three: Check this cool thing out. Paste the well-performing text from your competitors, and you will instantly see the most commonly used keywords in it, by frequency. For example, if you paste this article, you will get these results:
And if you scroll down a bit, you’ll see the most used bigrams and trigrams, which are complex keywords:
If that doesn’t seem like a whole lot of help, then you are probably not ready to use more complex keyword research tools like Semrush or Ahrefs because they provide you with a ton of features that might just be too overwhelming.
Aside from content SEO optimization, there are two other aspects we should pay a closer look to, as well.
On-page Optimization
As mentioned, load time and proper URL and website structure are essential to your website getting indexed and your pages ranking properly.
There are things that will slow down your website, and despite all the SEO blog writing you do or pay for, you might not rank as high as you want to. One of these things is the usage of gifs and super-heavy images or videos embedded on your website.
Hit “F12” on your browser while opening your website incognito, and pay close attention to the Network tab.
Then check the size of each element, and if there are any elements above 500kb, that’s bad news. Optimize all the images by converting them to .webp format and reuploading them. That will greatly increase the speed of your site, especially for mobile users using 4 or 5-g networks.
Off-page Optimization
Having a few hundred backlinks from high authority websites will undoubtedly help all of your pages rank higher, regardless of whether they are specifically linked or it’s just your domain.
It’s more important, however, to do guest posting on relevant platforms and websites that can allow you to expand your audience in a similar niche. Always prioritize backlinks not only by domain authority but by the core audience that they can provide you access to.
Building a Better Website Ecosystem
Step up your SEO game by following the tips in this article, and eventually, you will start ranking higher and higher. But in the meantime, make sure not to forget other core aspects of your website like Ad optimization, subscriptions, and Adblock recovery. Luckily, there are services like Publir that greatly automate the process for you. Give it a look!