If you’re a blogger or you have a blog on your business website, you’re probably wondering if you’re making the most of SEO opportunities on your blog.
So here are 5 super simple, actionable SEO tips every blogger needs to know to make sure you’re optimising your blogs!
1. Install Yoast SEO (and use it!)
Yoast SEO is a super powerful SEO plugin. It is easy to use and will mean that once your posts start appearing on Google, they look great and are well optimised for your content and keywords.
2. Connect Google Analytics and Search Console
By linking Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you’ll be able to see Search Console data in Analytics, without having to switch between the two.
The key thing I like to look at is Search Terms which can be found under Acquisition/Search Console/Queries. You can see exactly what terms people have searched to make your blog appear in the search results.
If you see something that you haven’t written about or could write more about, create more content around it.
3. Write ‘Google-able ‘ Post Titles
NEVER underestimate the power of a great heading! If your heading matches or almost matches the phrase that someone searches for, you are MORE LIKELY TO APPEAR on the results page! And that’s the whole point of SEO!
Think about what people would Google to find your post and try and work it into the heading.
‘How To’ is a great way to start a blog heading as searches about how to do things are at an all-time high. This is especially great for video content as well and if you are using YouTube. A quick search on YouTube for ‘how to’ shows there are 495 million results – that’s 495 million how to videos just waiting to be watched!
Forget the fluffy, airy-fairy titles that don’t really convey what your blog post is about. Get straight to it – people will be more likely to click through if they can identify that your content is just what they are looking for.
4. Use Headings
Don’t just write one massive block of text and hit publish. Most content these days is scanned, very rarely do people read every single word as we’re all just too busy.
List posts are a good way to start getting used to adding headings and sub headings in your posts.
Headings are easily scannable so people can pick up on your key messages without feeling like they have to spend 10-15 minutes wading through waffle to work out what they can learn.
You can also use your headings as H1, H2, H3 etc. headings which are a good SEO element. You can do this in WordPress by clicking on where it says ‘Paragraph’ and has a drop down menu above your content box.
5. Add Internal Links
Everyone tells you for SEO to be successful you need to get other people to link to your website.
But it’s equally important to link to your own website! Creating links between your posts and pages gives some SEO value too.
When you create links, don’t create them on useless words. An example would be this sentence from one of my recent blogs:
“A couple of years ago I wrote a post about the cost of living in Perth.”
Now often you’ll see bloggers put the link on ‘wrote a post’, but this is a massive wasted SEO opportunity. Where you should put the link here is on ‘cost of living in Perth’.
Google looks at the words you link on as an indication of what the post is about. Clearly linking on words like ‘wrote a post’ or ‘click here’ tells Google absolutely NOTHING about what the content on that link is about.
The best way to create internal links is to try and add links on your keyword phrases. So in the example above, my post was targeting ‘cost of living in Perth’. So those are the words I need to create internal links on to get the most SEO link juice I can.
If you’ve written a post about, let’s say, how to make strawberry jam, you’d write:
‘Check out my awesome new post about how to make strawberry jam!’
And you would put the link on ‘how to make strawberry jam’ – NOT ‘new post’!
So there you have 5 super simple and actionable tips for how to SEO the shit out of your blog posts!
I hope you found something useful you can take away and implement today. If you have any questions, I’d love to hear them – leave a comment below and I’ll answer as soon as I can!
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