You may be creating a whole host of great content, but maybe it just quite isn’t getting the rankings you desire. Perhaps it’s time to assess where your SEO is going wrong, and how your blogging efforts can change in order to better market your content.
Google is forever changing its algorithm, and there’s now more content than ever floating about online.
That’s why it’s essential you optimise your blog and individual blog posts in order to ensure it gets the highest rankings possible, and that your content doesn’t go unread.
Not doing Keyword Research
When putting together a content marketing strategy or campaign, keyword research should play a pivotal part about what you write about, and how you go about optimising your content.
It’s all very well writing great content about a particular topic, but if that topic isn’t going to attract the right sort of readers, then this is a mistake. You need to be attracting visitors that may be the kind of people interested in what you have to offer.
Not offering value
Many businesses do blogs posts with the aim of just promoting their own products or services, and optimising it for search engines.
Content really needs to offer something to your customer. Whether it’s something interesting, useful, humourous, or beneficial in any other way. Consider why people would want to read your content.
If you address the needs of the reader, they are likely to stick around. If they do, this signals to Google your content is good, and helps your SEO.
Avoiding Long-Tail Keywords
When writing content, many marketers forget to target long-tail keywords.
This often includes phrases or keywords such as how, what, where and why. Consider what phrases people may be searching for related to your products or services, and questions they may be typing into Google. You should aim to be answering these, and putting the question or other longer phrases people may search for in the title.
Not altering Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
While the title of your content or blog post may be great, perhaps the title tag is too long, or simply not enticing enough.
By changing the title tag or meta description, you can encourage more people to click through, and ensure it gains higher search results rankings.
Failing to optimise headers and content
Many blogs have the title tags and meta descriptions down, but marketers forget to optimise the actual content itself.
Optimising the headers and the keywords within the content itself can have a big effect on your SEO.
Avoiding Semantic SEO
Similar to the long-tail keywords, semantic SEO helps with searches or questions to understand the searcher’s intent, and the meaning of the search itself.
Google brings up results based on text and keywords, guessing which content is best. Semantic search however, Google attempts to understand the content. Semantic SEO helps Google to understand, essentially.
Create content that is readable, and answers potential readers’ questions that drives readership and inbound links. Focus on giving your readers value, rather than purely looking at the technical side of SEO. This can help gain impressions for multiple keywords or phrases.
Keyword stuffing
While you need to include keywords in the copy of your blog posts, a very high keyword density isn’t a good thing.
If you are keyword stuffing, then this could raise flags to Google that you are producing spammy content.
It also doesn’t help with readability, which Google will judge. But also, readers are more likely to hit the back button, which gives poor user signals in Google’s eyes, which leads to poor search results rankings.
Internal linking
If you’re not doing internal linking on blog posts, this is a mistake.
Internal linking helps Google to crawl deep linked pages, and it also increases the crawl rate, which is all beneficial for ranking more of your pages. It also helps to define site architecture and signify important web pages to Google.
By linking internally, you’re also helping to distribute link juice or authority amongst other pages you deem important.
While it isn’t as powerful as backlinks, it does help boost the SEO of pages you link to somewhat. SEO is all about doing every little thing right, and this is one more slice.
Take a look through your blog and put links on high-quality pages, to other high-value pages to distribute authority internally.
Poor copy
Many people think only about the SEO of blog posts, and forget to ensure the copy is actually any good.
Remember to write for your readers and potential customers, and don’t solely focus on getting them to the page. What good is it if lots of potential customers land on your page, and don’t find the answers they are looking for, or simply cannot stand the copy on the page itself?
Focus on building awareness and giving value to customers. This helps with your branding, creating a voice for your brand, and establishing your brand as a thought leader.
Unoptimised images
If your blog posts feature images, then it is worthwhile optimising a few of these elements.
Ensure images aren’t too large of a file size, as this leads to poor load times. They should also be formatted as jpegs, or PNGs.
Alt text of images should also be filled in, in order to position images to rank in the image searches.
Failing to market content
Creating content is a great start for SEO, but relying purely on organic search isn’t the be all and end all.
You will need to have a content promotion or marketing strategy to supplement your organic search listings. By marketing your content, it can also help your SEO.
Have your team share content on social media, or ask influencers to share it. In theory, if your content is good enough, people within your industry should want to share it anyway.
But don’t forget to repurpose old content, and market it. Perhaps there’s a great blog post you wrote a year ago that’s still relevant, and gets lots of views. Why not create an infographic out of it?
Otherwise, try contacting websites who have linked to similar websites or content, and see if they will link to yours. You could also try paid ads to drive traffic to your blog posts.
Overall, SEO takes a lot of work, but it’s not hard to ensure your blog posts are optimised to a good standard.
Ensuring all the on-site errors are dealt with is just one part, but you should still be assessing the more “human” side of SEO, to ensure readers and Google see your blog posts as top quality content. SEO requires you to continually improve, so it’s time to refine your content that will hopefully get you more traffic and customers.
