Is there any way to keep your business-related digital activities active during such challenging times?
Yes! One of the ways to do this is to capitalize on your website and blog content to make sure that you continue communicating with existing and potential customers and followers.
Even if your local business is closed now due to the quarantine, the search engine traffic hasn't been closed for you - you can still share your ideas, collect feedback, plan future campaigns, etc. Why lose these opportunities?
In this post, I want to focus on the basics of SEO and online marketing for businesses that are pretty new to blogging. I want to illustrate how you can build a solid foundation for your business blog, make it optimized for users and search engines, without spending a dime on costly software and services.
A crisis comes and goes, but your content stays and will keep working for your business in the years coming, so let's see how you can get the most of it.
1. Fix technical SEO issues and improve load time
If you could only do one thing to your website, it should be onsite optimization. If your blog cannot be crawled, if it takes too long to load or it can't be legible on mobile devices, your awesome content won't stand a single chance to catch the reader's attention.
To check how "healthy" your blog/website is from the technical point of view, you can do an SEO audit with any free tool of your choice.
Even if you are not tech- and SEO- savvy, try to find some time to leverage any online tool and analyze the reported issues - the issues found on your website and fix the critical ones. That is important. Without it, none of the rest of this thing even matters.
I'd recommend starting the audit with these issues:
1.1. Check the content restricted from indexing
If some URLs on your blog are blocked from indexing, people won't be able to see them in search results. So, make sure that important URLs are always available for indexing.
1.2. Fix broken links and unnecessary redirects
A few broken links are not huge SEO trouble for your blog, but if a site has hundreds of them, it is logical to conclude that the content has not been updated for quite a while. Search engines do not favor outdated and abandoned pages.
Also, check the list of redirected pages and fix long redirect chains (pages with 2 and more redirects) - these can badly impact the indexing of your blog pages.
1.3. Optimize your blog to improve its loading time
Site speed is known to be a search engine ranking factor and for a reason - it greatly influences user experience, something Google's serious about. So, why risk your rankings and ignore the site's performance?
Since page speed plays a role in ranking rise and fall, so it's a good idea to follow Google's advice and optimize your blog load speed by:
- Avoiding landing page redirects
- Enabling compression
- Improving server response time
- Leveraging browser caching
- Minifying resources
- Optimizing images
- Optimizing CSS delivery
- Prioritizing visible content
- Removing render-blocking JavaScript code
And as your competitors will optimize the performance of their websites as well, you'll need to monitor and fine-tune your blog periodically.
1.4. Review structure-related issues on your blog
Now take a quick look at the structure of your blog, check the internal links, and analyze click depth.
During one of the Google Webmaster Central hangouts sessions, John Mueller revealed that the number of slashes in a URL does not matter. What does matter is how many clicks it takes to get to a page from the home page? So, make sure that your most important blog pages/posts are not more than two clicks away from the blog's homepage.
This idea will also help you plan your blog structure using the self-styled topic clusters. The topic cluster model ideally consists of a central 'pillar' page linking to multiple pages of cluster content that all link back in turn to the main pillar page.
If you decide to use this model, you'll need to choose the specific topic, your pillar content page (a.k.a. important landing pages), and surround it with relevant posts (cluster content). Pillar and cluster content get connected via hyperlinks. And it'll be great if you manage to create cluster content using different formats, such as how-to guides, infographics, podcasts, webinars, video series, downloadable content, email newsletter, etc.
1.5. Make your blog mobile-friendly
Finally, make sure that your blog is responsive to different devices and screen sizes. Again, this impacts hugely on user experience in addition to your search rankings and traffic.
There's much more to technical SEO undeniably, but if you manage to address these 5 factors, it's going to be a very sound foundation for further optimization.
And if you want to dig deeper into the techie stuff of SEO, subscribe to this blog.
2. Content ideation, set goals, and research keywords
Now that we know our blog content is necessarily crawlable and can be accessed by users and search engines, we can safely turn our focus to another part of your blog optimization - content planning and keyword research.
First things first - how do you come up with catchy ideas? If you write on a regular basis, I am sure you've already hit the point of writer’s block. The good thing is that inspiration may come from anywhere for your posts but just keep it relevant to your niche.
Here are the steps I'd strongly recommend you to follow before you start writing:
2.1. Define the goal and the audience of your new post
Do you want to attract a new audience? Do you need to convince your existing customers about anything? Or are you planning to share some big news that will hopefully create a social media buzz? Whatever your goals are, get certain about them before you start writing. This way, you'll be able to determine the related metrics (sign-ups, social signals, sales, etc.) and later on quantify them.
For example, your goals may look likes this:
- Get in the top 3 search results in Google for the "targeted" keyword
- Achieve at least 50 sign-ups
- Get 10x more unique page visitors per month
- Increase social media following by 5%
Well, you get the idea! You can write down your goals somewhere to remind you of what you're aiming to achieve.
2.2. Find primary and secondary keywords
There are a few keyword research tools on the internet that offers excellent service for free. Most of them focus on the 3 main steps:
- Insert a seed list of starting terms
- Extend this list using keyword research tools
- Refine your list using competitive research
Sounds clear?
Nowadays search engines tend to emphasize more and more semantic search - analyze search intent and match contextually search results with query. Point to remember that, user's search behavior is changing simultaneously.
For example, five years ago, a user could search for "buy used computers in edge city", while today's searcher may use voice-activated search assistants and say, "find me local PC stores with the biggest discounts".
So how do we group semantically related key phrases?
Say, you're writing a blog on "how to choose an SEO company" in Google AdWords Keyword Planner (you may choose other tools later to expand the list) and type in your keyword.
After Google’s keyword tool finishes collecting keyword ideas, you'll see them neatly organized in groups.
Just by looking at these groups of phrases, I can plan out the structure of my future post (or posts, if it's going to be a series):
- Best SEO company
- SEO companies near me
- Best SEO companies for small business
- Best SEO companies in the USA
Not enough ideas? Then take a keyword idea that has a high KEI (keyword effectiveness index) for your topic and analyze it further. You can do a Google search to see a list of the sites already ranking for your selected keywords for research.
You can select the most relevant keywords and if you need even more phrases for your posts, check out the other popular keyword research methods in Google - autocomplete search feature, related searches, competitor domain research, related questions, and combinations of keywords.
All set? Let's move on to the next step.
2.3. Check your keywords for traffic and competition
You should have ideate a wide-ranging list of key phrases by now, but how do you choose the 2-3 keywords for the post from the list? You'll need to take a closer look at keyword metrics and select the queries with the highest KEI.
Generally, you should look at:
- Search volume
- Competition
- Keyword difficulty
Typically, keywords with high search volume and low to moderate competition are the best, but sometimes you may find that all have high competition. In this case, you need to do further research and discover how difficult it really is to rank for this key phrase.
You'll need to sort keywords by calculating KEI for each keyword – the higher the score, the profitable it'll be to consider.
2.4. Analyze search intent when selecting keywords
One more thing, when you select your primary and secondary keywords, figure out as accurately as possible the searcher's intent behind all of these search terms and phrases so that the content can match the context.
There are three core categories of search intent – navigational, informational, and transactional (or commercial).
To target informational search queries ("SEO checklist for new websites"), you create how-to guides, videos, very detailed instructions, infographics, etc. People need solutions and you provide them with the necessary information.
When you target transactional search queries ("which is the best SEO company in India?"), your content should sell a certain product/service. For instance, it can be a detailed review of digital marketing agencies that help handle your SEO requirements most efficiently and effectively.
3. Create and optimize your post
Now that you know whom you're targeting and which questions you're going to answer through your content, it's time to get creative and start writing the post.
3.1. Identify the problems and solutions for your readers
If you're still undecided about the topic of your post, keep in mind that the top 3 popular categories of blog posts are:
- Answer a question,
- Provide a numbered list (checklist), and
- Provide a guide or a how-to tutorial
It might be a good idea to look at your direct competitors' content and see how you can provide additional value that's different from what other people have created. For instance, you can share some unique views on the topic, or provide new stats you've collected, or present case studies with interesting outcomes.
If you feel unsure about any topic ideas, here are some more ways to discover them:
- Analyze the comment section (eligible for your and your competitors' blogs). Spotted the questions that pop up more often? Jot them down and think of covering good detailed answers to these questions.
- If you're super active on social media (and you should be as a digital marketer at least!), ask your followers what they'd like to learn from your next post.
- Take a look at the related forum discussions – which topics are popular or get more comments and answers?
Finally, do some SERP exploration to see what Google/Bing finds relevant for your topic/keywords and see if there are any content gaps that you can fill up. If you find those potholes and manage to fill them with your uniquely developed content, you have a very good chance of taking over the top-ranking positions.
3.2. Discover competitors' top performing posts
When you've completely run out of new content ideas, you can take a look at the top-performing posts of the market leaders.
By diagnosing their posts, you'll find out the estimated traffic each page gets, as well as the hint of keywords this page is ranking for.
3.3. Plan to cover different types of content
Now you should also think about the types of content you'll construct. To make your content more user-friendly, consider presenting an idea in form of images, videos, graphs, GIFs, infographics, memes, newsletters, news releases (PR), and flowcharts.
For example, “how-to guides and step-by-step instructional content” may require less effort than “conference presentation and event materials”, but can prove much more effective in your industry. Or, publishing “original research and compelling statistics” will be a better choice because are more demanding than “industry news, information, and analysis”.
One more thing, don't forget to add links to useful sources – readers won't exit from your website, instead, they'll explore your blog as a credible and informative resource they can rely on (and mention too!).
3.4. Make your post smart for both humans and search engines
Finally, when you're done with the draft, take a look at what you've created. Does it look simple to read, and more important – is it smart enough? If you can't like the post you've written yourself, there's little chance other people will. Here's what you can do to improve this:
- Break up your content with subheads
- Add bulleted lists
- Create meaningful captions for supporting images and graphs
- Highlight the most important parts and calls-to-action
Surely you may ask, how is this related to SEO? It is. If visitors coming to read your post bounce immediately, that may negatively affect on site's rankings. Many SEOs believe user behavior signals are becoming more and more significant for search engines, and you shouldn't overlook them in your blogging.
3.5. Optimize on-page elements
Let's revisit the list of keywords you've selected for the post. Make sure the most important keyword (i.e., the primary keyword) goes in the page's Meta title, headline, and possibly URL.
After that, you can use all the secondary key phrases in:
- Content (pay special attention to the first two paragraphs),
- Meta description
- Images' file name and ALT attribute
- Heading and sub-headings
- Link anchors
There's no absolute formula on how many keywords and how many times each keyword you should use in the post, but be careful not to over-optimize your posts. Otherwise, your blog can be hit by Google's Panda penalty.
So how to determine the number of keywords to use? The safest way is to analyze the search results and see how the competing sites are using the terms you target. Doing it manually – by clicking on each result on SERP, visiting the landing page, and searching for the keywords on to the page – is one of the best ways.
You must conduct periodic research on your top-ranking competitors to find out where your website lags behind or, on the contrary, goes overboard with keyword usage.
By doing competitor research, you can optimize content logically and improve the stats in Google Analytics. Another tool – Google Search Console will help you if you need to fine-tune your website’s SEO.
The tool will also provide you with a big list of recommended adjustments – suggestions collected crawling your website to improve the site’s health.
3.6. Use rich snippets and Schema markup
Some blog posts in search results are more noticeable – draw attention and get clicks unsurprisingly, right?
If you have some visuals, recipes, or a good featured snippet opportunity (list posts, how-to instructions, etc.), you should definitely add markups to your content through editing the HTML code. Check out the guides on structured data available for free on the web for beginners to learn which type to choose and how to implement it correctly on your webpage including the blog.
3.7. Proofread the post
Well, this one's evident. Nobody (read both the readers and search engine spiders) will consider your blog/ content as a genuine source of information if you often mix up "weather" and "whether," or "affect" and "effect." If you can be watchful with your words and grammar, building trust for you with the visitors to your blog will become easier.
When proofreading your post, make sure you check the 3 main aspects:
- Spelling
- Grammar and
- Consistency
You can also use tools such as Hemingway App and Grammarly, or hire a freelance proofreader to get this task done faster and also skillfully.
4. Plan outreach and link building
Typically, another process begins right after you hit "publish". It's time for your targeted audience to learn about your blog post through share it across social media networks or email newsletters. As you may know, it won't happen automatically, so let's talk about how you can ensure your post gets the attention and backlinks optimally.
4.1. Make it easy to share your post
Obviously, you should place the social media icons on your blog page and don't be hesitant – ask your followers and/or subscribers to share the post and express their opinion in the comments (if available). Now the question here is where exactly you should place social sharing buttons on your blog page?
As a general rule of thumb, I recommend you to:
- Pick a prominent position
- Place the buttons in close proximity to the content being shared
- Watch out for UX and UI issues
Also, keep in mind that "near-zero" sharing buttons may provide negative social proof. As a consequence, social media buttons can hurt the conversion rate. Since there are very few social sharing stats (for instance, likes and retweets, etc.) displayed right on the pages, visitors may feel unsure about the depth of the content.
So if you're afraid your numbers will look too low, consider adding the buttons without a counter.
4.2. Share your post on social media sites
Use the power of social media automation tools to let the world in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. know your new post's out. Create multiple content snippets for your social media posts, so you'll be able to share them regularly across a variety of networks in a customized way.
If appropriate, share a customized piece of content (an extract of the original blog post) in form of an Instagram story or a short video on Facebook telling people about your new blog post and how it can help them solve their problems.
In addition to the popular social media networks, you may also submit your post to the many leading social bookmarking sites and online communities/forums.
If possible, find other niche-specific sites, and share content there too.
4.3. Place links from older posts
If you have relevant posts that you've already published, links to them from the new content and vice versa. That's a win-win case – people reading older posts will be able to discover this new piece, while the search engines will index the new content, follow the links to the old posts faster.
4.4. Reach out to influencers
First of all, if you've mentioned a brand (a person or a company) in your post, let them know about it. You can do that the following way:
- Send a notification email if you've already communicated with this influencer
- @Mention them in your tweet
- Mention them in Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn posts
The chances are quite high that the brand will recognize your effort and amplify the post’s outreach on social media platforms.
Secondly, you'll need to use a social media monitoring tool, to see who's talking about a topic similar to your blog content. Reach out to them politely ask them for their review of your content since your post can be useful to the person's followers and subscribers.
4.5. Re-optimize and repurpose old content
You don't have to write new content all the time – instead check your Google Analytics account to find the posts that bring a consistent level of traffic to the blog.
It's possible the content is not up-to-date on those pages so they are losing rank on SERP slowly – you can update content on these pages and start getting an increased amount of traffic by crawling back again top of the SERP.
Here's what you can do:
- Link to some new findings and studies
- Add answers to the "People Also Ask" questions
- Add Schema markup to those posts
- Enhance the formatting or layout
- Target some new keywords
- Add videos or images
- Rewrite title and Meta description
- Re-promote your updated blog post on social media
It could be a good idea to schedule those content checks and update your posts periodically, based on Google Analytics and/or Google Search Console performance data.
4.6. Focus on the process, not on the outcome
Now, be patient a bit more - do not expect to get instant results after you follow the above steps – as you'll need to repeat the routine for possibly dozens of posts to see what's exactly working for you. It may happen that you'll need about 90 minutes for keyword research, selection, and on-page optimization, and a week to promote the post on social media sites, bookmarking sites, forums, and online communities.
The important thing is to set up and continue the process, do experiments and analyze the result. And eventually, you'll just see that most of your posts keep getting new traffic, backlinks, and higher rankings.
Endnote:
How do you usually manage the optimization process for your blog? I'll be happy to see your questions and tips in the comments below!
