According to Hubspot, companies that
run and maintain a blog have 97% more inbound enquiries and 53% of marketers say that
creating blog content is their top inbound marketing priority. So, creating valuable,
informative content for your users is imperative.
By creating content that is relevant to user’s questions, blogging boosts your SEO quality, specifically blog posts that use a variety of on-page SEO tactics that give you more opportunities to rank in search engines and drive users to your website.
It all starts with the right keywords
The very foundation of any successful SEO campaign is routed in your keyword research. When you’re writing a blog post, it pays to see what kind of keywords you want to rank for before you start frantically typing away. So, do your research!
The simplest and most cost-effective way of doing your keyword research is with the Google Keyword Planner. This gives you valuable insight into what words and phrases people are searching for and approximately how often per month.
While the numbers aren’t exactly as accurate as Google would have us believe, they are the best indication we have of how much traffic we could potentially get from various keywords. All you need to do is input some of the keywords you can think of and Google will even show you similar words that are being searched for. Cool right?
Content quality impresses Google
From an SEO perspective, quality is important because Google measures it. While this might seem slightly difficult to believe, it’s true. Google can measure quality in many ways. In fact, one of the most recent Google updates; Panda, is specifically focused on quality.
These are some of the best SEO tips to help your content rank:
- Content Length - longer, more informative and detailed content ranks higher.
- Multimedia - add images and video - especially YouTube videos. YouTube is owned by Google.
- References and Citations - quality content is well researched.
- Low Bounce Rate - people staying on your site longer is important.
While Google can’t exactly read your content, it can read measure the quality of your content. So keep these quality factors in mind when creating content – those extra details can make all the difference.
Sites that are of poor quality have slowly started to disappear from the Google rankings and unless you have a solid strategy in place, it will stop you from ranking too!
On-page SEO you should do every time
The following is a very simple breakdown of the areas within your content that you should be paying attention to every time you publish.
- URL - The URL should
- Title - This plays a couple of roles in SEO because it is your post title and appears on Google results pages. Make sure it includes your keywords (If it makes sense) and keep it below 55-60 characters.
- Meta Description – Users won’t be able to see this on the actual blog post, but these few sentences are what people read in a Google search result. Include your keyword if you can and keep it below 155 characters.
There are other factors that can effect on-page SEO that we can’t hope to cover in sufficient depth here, though we do recommend that you check out some of our other blogs about SEO. Particularly these posts on getting your new content indexed with Google fast and even how to optimise your content for Google’s featured snippets.
We create and implement effective SEO strategies here at our Digital Agency in Leeds, which improve your organic search visibility, strengthen your backlink profile and help to drive conversions. If you don't have the time or resources to create the content for your site, then leave it to our experience copywriters here at Ascensor. Contact us now to find out how you can best use your blog to drive traffic!