When you spend hours or even days writing and perfecting your blog post, not getting enough traffic can be disheartening. You want your hard work to pay off by attracting a large audience. Fortunately, there is a solution. You need to use SEO (search engine optimization) writing strategically throughout your content to get desired traffic and rank high on Google. Blog posts that use SEO, planned and structured quality content with optimized headers rank the best.
Before you start worrying about how to master becoming the best SEO blog writer, bear in mind, your content should have an easy-to-follow, natural flow. You can get higher traffic by using the appropriate title, headers, and such keywords as working remotely. When you learn to use the right wording, placement, and tools to make your blog post stand out. If you are keen to make the most of your blogging, here are a few tips on how SEO can help to achieve your goals.
Address Your Audience’s Pain Points
Remember, your primary reason to write blog posts is to help your audience find solutions to their problems. You can craft high-quality posts by researching what problems your audience may struggle with, and their areas of interest. Try to put yourself in their shoes, and use your expertise to offer them solutions you already overcame. Identifying and targeting your niche is crucial, to addressing those you can truly help with advice. Chances are, the rest will drop out.
Why Your Headings Matter
When you use the same keywords your target audience use, your chances of ranking high (ideally on the first page of Google) are higher. Your main title should include your keyword. It should be catchy, even a bit cheeky, using at least one word of emotion, and about 12 words. You can polish your title writing skills by using the effective and free tool, Coschedule Headline Analyzer.
Your post should entail subheadings with keywords (H1, H2, H3, H4). Today, the intent behind keywords is more important, than only focusing on your keywords. This is due to the large number of blog posts that are SEO optimized. The best keywords to use in your content are long-tail, 3-5 words. Your Meta description appears in Google search under your blog’s title. You should describe your blog’s objective short and neat, only using 1-2 keywords here.
How SEO Works - Keyword Research
To help your audience find your content you must outrank your competitors. If you don’t target the exact or close match of keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for. If you miss out on this step, they won’t find your content and website. To search for optimal keywords you need to use a keyword research tool.
You should always be up to date on the appropriate keywords your target audience may search for by conducting keyword research occasionally. Nevertheless, once you optimize your content with specific keywords, you don’t want to change your already written content. Doing so would make you lose out on its benefits. And as mentioned above, you need to give it time for your audience to find your blog post. Also, place your keywords as naturally as you can.
Hyperlinks You Should Use
Ideally, you shouldn’t link your keywords to an internal or external link. The benefit of linking your content to renowned websites is that your readers can learn more about the subject, what’s more, it proves you have done your research. Using statistics to underpin your content ideas from reputable sources can help you gain the trust of your audience.
Linking to other blog posts or sites is also beneficial in creating trust, and keeps your audience on your site longer. When using internal or external links, make sure you use natural language. Otherwise, using a call-to-action tone may sound too salesy, and can scare away your audience. On the contrary, descriptive and supportive keywords, such as find your SEO guide in the description box, can be helpful.
Formatting Your Sentences and Paragraphs
Contrary to our instant lifestyle, Google doesn’t prefer short blogs. Longer, more in-depth, well-researched blogs are the winners. The ideal blog length can be somewhere around 2,000 words. You make search engines work more this way. However, reading such long posts may be challenging for your audience. Try to keep your paragraphs no longer than three sentences, and break down longer sentences into two parts. Use bullet points after longer chunks of text.
Compressing Your Images
Make sure to compress your images. Google rewards faster loading pages because it improves user experience. Your images should be well under 100KB. The Squoosh app can help you compress the size of your pictures without compromising on quality. You should always check the speed of your page with the free Google PageSpeed, it analyzes your page and gives recommendations.
Consciously Build Your Links
Link building can get you a higher ranking. The more website links back to your content, the more trustworthy Google will think you are. If you can write high-quality posts that other sites will consider linkable, it can be a win-win. Conducting and sharing your research or unique interviews with experts on a topic can be highly valuable for your readers, drive more traffic to your site, and rank your page higher.
Endnote
Make sure when using SEO blog writing, you give ample time for your audience to pick up. This means you need to post at least one high-quality and well-optimized post weekly for at least 6 months to get results! Patience can pay off in the long run, don’t let this element sabotage your business success.