Blog SEO – tips for boosting your rank in SERPs
Blogs have been around the internet for over 20 years. However, their role has completely changed since the days they were a form of a public diary. Currently, blogs can be divided into those written by bloggers and companies. While writing a personal journal can be a goal itself, maintaining a company blog brings many additional benefits.
Remember, it’s hard to be successful when your website is on the eighth page of Google’s results. Yet just a few years ago, it was enough to be systematic in blogging to appear high up in SERPs. Nowadays we have many blogs and many competitors, but the top spots in SERPs (Search Engine Result Page) are still achievable. But is it worth positioning a blog?
Why is it important to have a company blog?
Corporate blogs have been popping up like mushrooms for the past few years. Furniture stores write about home furnishings and colors in your bedroom. Floral retailers describe individual plants and the compositions you can create with them. Dental blogs tell you what toothbrush to choose, and online and offline toy stores outdo each other with lists of “10 gift ideas for a 5-year-old. Why the surge of content creators? The competition is growing because the game is worth the battle. Maintaining a well-read blog is a great way to gain the trust and affection of web users, but a blog that has a relatively small number of readers will also benefit your business.
Does blog positioning make sense?
The blog itself is a tool for SEO positioning – it speeds up the rank results, increases its effectiveness, and facilitates the work of the SEO specialist. At the local level, a well-maintained blog can “pull” a website to high positions in search results, while in the face of a wider competition it is a strong asset for Google bots, which look more favorably on systematically updated websites.
How does a company blog support SEO efforts?
Creates new subpages
Blog articles allow you to expand the number of keywords your site is ranked for, which means more opportunities to gain traffic. More traffic sources result in more users on your site and more conversions.
Builds a network of internal linking (onsite optimization)
Well-created internal linking in some cases may even position a subpage for a selected key phrase. In addition, it makes it easier for users and Google bots to navigate the site and encourages them to visit more subpages on your site, so it …
Increases time spent on your website
A blog builds user engagement and encourages users to explore content on your page. The more readers sinking into reading individual content, jumping from article to article, the longer the average time spent will be. Google robots like this.
Answers precisely to user queries (the so-called long-tail queries)
Statistically speaking, potential customers are more likely to decide to buy from a specialist who answers their questions in detail. For example, for an aphid control company, “aphidicide” (averaging 1,300 searches per month) is a phrase that can bring a lot of hits to the site, but this: “how to get rid of aphids?” may have a higher conversion rate, even though this phrase is only typed 320 times per month. The more long tails, the better for your site.
Blog positioning is a task that most site owners can probably handle, without specialized SEO software or tools. Just by dedicating some time to your blog, it can become a great source of revenue for your business.
A company blog from the clients’ point of view
In addition to supporting your site’s SEO, the blog serves several other extremely important functions. Perhaps the biggest benefit of providing compelling content on a blog (i. e. content marketing), is building an expert image in the eyes of potential customers. This is how bloggers create their personal brands, promoting themselves over time as influencers.
Some customers make their purchasing choices in an extremely simple way. They type the name of the products or services they need into a search engine and choose from the first few offers. However, a significant number of internet users shop strategically. These ones read, analyze, compare, gain knowledge. By the time they decide to buy an air purifier, they already know by heart the full classification of air filters from EPA to ULPA with special emphasis on HEPA filters and the compelling story of their development for the US Manhattan atomic bomb program. Why? Because they can. The Internet is a vast treasure trove of knowledge and if you want to increase your chances to gain conversions, make its users want to learn from you. Interesting articles make you credible as an expert in your field.
You provide dog training, and you’ve posted step-by-step instructions on your blog on how to teach your dog to give a paw? Cheers! It worked and now I know you know your stuff. It didn’t work? I think I really need the support of a professional. I will write to you to find out more. A blog is also an additional channel of communication with your customers. Importantly, your already acquired customers will feel looked after, knowing that you are constantly sharing your expertise and support with them.
What should you keep in mind when maintaining a company blog?
Surely you already understand that a company blog is a showcase for your brand and there is a huge potential there that you would be foolish not to exploit. If you take care of it, you will gain the trust of your customers, who are much more likely to click on the “Contact” tab or put the product in the shopping cart. An old, unresponsive, clunky website is a signal to customers that also the development of your company stopped two decades ago. You don’t have to do SEO for your blog, but optimizing it and adapting it to current trends (at least in graphics) are essential to the effectiveness of your efforts. Blog optimization is not a one-time task. It’s systematic work that requires persistence and a clear focus on the goal.
If you don’t lack consistency and don’t abandon the “company blog” project after a few weeks, after some time. It can be a few months or a year, but in case that you deal with a bigger competition, it may happen that you will achieve the real benefits of running a blog only after two years. Then, you will feel the number of your customers growing like a snowball rolling through all your articles on the site. Internal linking is also worth mentioning here. New articles linking to older posts give them a new life, so posts from several months ago can still work for your success.
Taking care of a company blog can be a task for one (very busy) person or for a whole team, depending on how much time you can devote to maintaining and optimizing it.
The effectiveness of a blog in increasing conversions depends on:
Creating valuable content
Users are looking for interesting, factual, and useful articles written in a clear and linguistically correct manner.
Blog optimization
Both the content and other elements of your company blog should be in line with the current search engine requirements.
Building a positive brand image
A blog helps build relationships, so the way you write, the graphics you use, the topics you cover, and the opinions/comments written by people who have already used your offer translates into how your potential customers see you.
10 steps to blog optimization
Blog optimization is easier when you plan it step-by-step and work on it as you go. Each step is important, so it’s a good idea to learn a little more about each issue.
Systematicity
It’s relevant to both Google and readers. Google bots appreciate your commitment to creating new content, finding regularly updated pages more valuable to web users. Internet users, on the other hand, encouraged by the interesting articles you offer them, may become regular readers of your website. Last post in 2019? Keep in mind that stopping blogging can make people who come to the site think that the business has closed. Schedule at least one entry per week, and to guard against emergencies, create some more in advance.
Blog categories
If your company’s offerings (and therefore your blog’s subject matter) are quite broad, divide your blog into categories. Users won’t be wandering around the site looking for articles on a topic of their interest, which in the worst-case scenario could result in them stopping further browsing.
Keywords
The article will bring traffic to your website when it appears in Google for the keywords your customers are searching for. They must, of course, be in line with the content of the page. A pushy stuffing of texts with keywords may harm the page (thin content). Write in a natural way, focusing on quality content. Keywords can occur in all kinds of variations. Google knows languages pretty well and can do a declension.
Friendly links
It’s a good idea to include keywords in the URLs of your posts. A friendly link is short, readable, without unnecessary characters, and relates to the content of the content on the page. If the URL contains a key phrase, separate the individual words with a hyphen. The underscore can be misread by a search engine, and any space in the URL will show up as an unfriendly action, e.g. “%20”.
Unique content
Duplicate content is one of the most common misdemeanors you can be punished by Google. The search engine is committed to offering valuable content to users. When describing your product on the blog, never re-upload the description from the product subpage, but re-create it. Also, do not copy content from other sites in whole or in part. Plagiarism is never a good option.
Length of content on your website
Google doesn’t officially say what amount of content on a subpage builds its credibility. Too little text undoubtedly rubs up against the aforementioned thin content or a low-quality text. An entry that is too long, on the other hand, will bore the reader, who will close the page without reading it to the end or fall asleep before reaching the summary. The minimum length of a blog post is approximately 4000 characters with spaces. The maximum, on the other hand, is the moment when we have exhausted the subject.
Attractive content
Expert texts that exhaust the given topic and at the same time relate to other articles on the blog, build the so-called topical authority. Both readers and Google robots will perceive you as an expert when your site comprehensively covers topics in a particular industry.
Structure of the content
Rivers of text will not encourage users to read your articles, so it is worth dividing the entry with subtitles (according to the “general to specific” principle), using highlighting, paragraphs, boldings (<strong>), and bullet points. Google robots will also appreciate the use of h1, h2, etc tags.
Internal linking
You don’t have to cover the same topics every time. Offering readers a link to a page that describes the issue in more detail will save you time and encourage visitors to browse your website. It will also help Google bots “understand” your webpage. The easier it is for them to navigate your site, the better for your search engine rankings.
Content Optimization
Finally, once you have prepared a blog post, make sure that keywords are present in the article’s URL, title, subtitles, alt attributes of images and graphics used, title and meta description tags! It’s a lot but when creating a winning SEO strategy you must take care of as much as you can. As a result of the actions described, Internet users will know what to expect from the page linked by the search engine, and Google will have no doubts as to which keywords your website should be displayed on.
Make sure that your previous blog posts also meet the above optimization guidelines.