7 Steps to Optimise Blogs for Search Engines
Blogs have become a great tool for businesses to use to drive more traffic organically to their websites. In this blog, you'll learn how to optimise blogs for search engines to increase your visibility on Google.
Here, we take a look at some of the ways that you can ensure blogs are optimised for your website, with the aim of improving ranking on search engine results pages (SERPS) and ultimately increasing website traffic and conversions.
So, what does optimising blogs for search engines mean?
Blog optimisation refers to the process of writing and publishing blogs with the goal of ranking higher in search engines, like Google.
Optimising blogs for search engines, often referred to as blog SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can also involve making changes to existing blog content and structure to improve its SEO score, increasing its visibility and ranking in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). A blog's SEO score shows how well a blog is optimised for search engines.
A 2020 Search Engine Journal study found that the clickthrough rate for websites in position one on SERP is 25%. This number drops drastically to 15% for websites in position two and then down to 2.5% for websites in position 10. When you get to page two of Google, as you would imagine, the numbers are much lower.
This means that if your website does not appear on the first page, there’s a small chance customers will find it organically. Fewer visits to your site mean fewer opportunities to generate leads, enquiries and conversions.
7 steps on how to optimise content for SEO
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Choose topics that people are searching for
To drive traffic from the search engines, you need to write about topics that people are actively searching for. Answering frequently asked questions is a great way to do this.
Blogs that answer questions often appear as Google ‘snippets’ as Google wants to enhance user experience and provide more information on a topic. This provides great opportunities for blog SEO and more chances of your blog ranking on search engines.
For all our organic SEO strategies and SEO campaigns, we carry out a indepth keyword research utilising SEO tools to help us to identify trending topics, competitive keywords, long tail keywords, keyword volumes and keywords great for SEO within a sector. This helps us to understand what users are searching for on Google.
We usually advise clients to focus on a small selection of keywords that are less competitive and also to focus on long tail keywords, where it is easier to establish expertise.
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Ask yourself, what is the reason for searching?
It is important to understand the search intent when your customers and prospects are looking for products and services.
Find out which of your competitors are ranking best for your target keywords, then you can get a better idea of the content format that users prefer. Researching competiton for your target keyword also allows you to scope opportunities for your blog SEO. For example, are you competitors using,
- Images
- Bullet points
- Questions
- Links
- Subheadings
- Long form content
When you find an SEO opportunity, be sure to utilise it when writing or optimising your blog for SEO to increase your chances of ranking higher than your competitors. Essentially, search engines prioritise content that is most helpful, entertaining, and aligned with what users are searching for.
Blog SEO Tip: Make sure content clusters are a part of your SEO strategy.
What is a content cluster?
In SEO, a content cluster is a strategic approach to linking to relevant content on your website that all relates to a central topic. This internal linking SEO strategy involves creating numerous SEO-optimised blogs surrounding one theme or topic and ensuring that each blog is hyperlinked to the others.
The goal of content clustering is to improve your website's authority and visibility in search engines by creating interlinked content that covers various areas of a topic.
Creating a collection of content around a topic can also enhance your credibility, ensuring you are seen as expert in this area.
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Create quality content optimised for SEO
Creating high-quality content is essential for ranking more highly in search results and attracting organic traffic.
According to Google's guidelines, content needs to be useful, interesting, clearly organised, easy to read, unique, and should satisfy search intent. This means you need to consider how your audience’s experience will be when they read it. So, it isn't enough to overwhelm your content with keywords and hope for the best. Your blogs need to be well thought out and planned for SEO, SERPs, and users. Most of all a blog needs to be readable to humans.
Hiring a PR agency, like Dragonfly PR, can help you identify your audience, develop a personalised SEO strategy considering how other digital strategies may complement SEO, and create authentic content that effectively uses keywords to optimise your website and blog content.
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Don’t forget on-page SEO
What is on-page SEO for blogs? On-page SEO is the optimisations of blogs to improve its search engine rankings. It involves optimising various areas on the page to improve its accessibility, relevancy, readability and search ability by search engine crawlers. On-page focuses on factors that we, a digital PR agency, can control on your blog to enhance its visibility.
On-page SEO for blogs include:
- Including a target keyword
- Using header tags and subheadings
- Utilising bullet points for better user experience
- Writing meta tag so your blog appears in SERPs
- Optimising the URL structure to include target keyword
- Implementing Internal linking creating content clusters
- Optimising image file names, alt text and captions
- Making sure your blog is mobile friendly
It is important to optimise blogs for on-page SEO. There's nothing more devasting than spending crucial time on writing a blog to find it does not rank in search results. This could be because your blog is not optimised for on-page SEO. This is where the expertise of PR agencies like Dragonfly PR comes in, to ensure on-page SEO is maximised.
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Use subheadings to break down lengthy posts
Optimising your content for SEO involves ensuring that blog posts are easy to read in order to keep readers’ interest and improve user experience. So, be sure to use subheadings to break down lengthy posts, guiding readers through the content.
You can also incorporate visual assets such as custom images, infographics and videos to enhance engagement. Use short sentences and paragraphs to avoid overwhelming readers with walls of text. Bullet points and numbered lists also help to make content more digestible.
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Monitor Technical SEO Issues
Technical SEO issues can impact your website and blog search engine visibility, indexing and overall performance. One aspect of technical SEO is ensuring that your blog loads quickly on desktop and mobile. Page speed is a crucial ranking factor, faster-loading blogs do tend to perform better in search engine results.
When blogs have a slow page load speed it can lead to a higher bounce rate and a poor user experience. This may be caused by too many large images uploaded to the blogs, or there are many other reasons.
For our clients, we carry out SEO audits to identify potential issues, such as broken links on blogs, index errors, slow page load times and optimisation issues for mobile.
By resolving these issues, we can enhance your blog's visibility, improve user experience and boost your SEO rankings.
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Build backlinks
There is a lot of talk about the value of backlinks recently, whether they are important to SEO or not. But, we’re here to tell you why backlinks are still important for your blog SEO and your SEO strategy.
What are backlinks?
Firstly, backlinks are external links that point to your website and blog. A backlink strategy is essential to improve a blog’s SEO, especially when targeting popular keywords with high competition.
Our expertise lies in generating good quality backlinks from high domain authority publications and websites. For example, the Yorkshire Post or the Guardian newspaper. We carry out this work on a monthly basis for our clients and it has a major impact on their domain authority and search engine rankings.
We can also help identify broken links on your website by carrying out an SEO audit. On your behalf, we can reach out to those linking websites and give them fresh SEO optimised blog content to run as an alternative. This is often welcomed by site owners as it benefits both websites to update outdated content and links.
What’s holding you back? We can start optimising your blogs today!
By following the blog SEO strategies and techniques outlined in this guide and working with a dedicated Organic SEO agency like Dragonfly PR, your blog and web content can reach its full potential.
We often recommend that a website has at least 1-2 blogs per month to help establish your authority, enhance Google rankings and create a great user experience for your site, so people keep coming back again and again.
For more information or advice on writing well optimised blogs that help search engine rankings, contact our team hello@dragonflypr.co.uk or call 0114 349 5341.