Five Steps to Optimize Your Blog

You started your journey. Every week you grab your coffee, let that inspirational wave hit you, and start writing away. You are proud of your blogs, and your friends and family compliment you on your work quality. However, analytics is painting a different scenario. The traffic you are getting on them, especially organic traffic, is not what you hoped for. If that’s the case, it might not be because the content is bad per se – you might just have to optimize your blogs. Lucky you, we have five killer tips below!

Optimize your blog for both humans and SEO

Writing great content is the bedrock of a successful blog campaign. However, your article is not going to be read by humans only. Google bots will (hopefully) crawl your blog to know what it is about. Properly using H tags, focusing on one keyword, and properly naming images will help Google bots know exactly what your page is about and rank it properly.

Focus on one keyword

Writers may be enticed to develop many ideas throughout one single blog post. That might be great for your readers, but no so much for Google crawlers. One of the first steps into SEO is to find a focus keyword. According to Yoast, a focus keyword is:

A focus keyword is the search term that you want a page or post to rank for most.

Even though you might be enticed to expand your blog and go into a rabbit hole, remember that it’s best for organic search if you focus on one idea only. Some topics are long and complex and may need to be split into two, such as the Five Steps to Optimize Your Blog and the Top Four Benefits of Blogging.

Have a cadence

This may be the hardest step to obliged to. Having a cadence is crucial for a successful blog campaign. If you are a reader, you would like to know when you going to get new content. Weekly, bi-weekly, monthly – all of these are acceptable. Establishing expectations, especially for content availability, is crucial to building a solid following.

Share your content

If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain. The same applies to content. If you don’t have an established blog, chances are that you are going to have very little traffic if you don’t advertise your work. You should take advantage of your marketing channels to disperse your content, such as social media and email. Besides getting traffic to your blog, it might even help your organic rankings.

CognitiveSEO published a study where they saw a ranking jump from 74th to 8th after the company got 20,000 unique visitors from Reddit. Regardless of how much social media and email traffic helps with SEO, it definitely won’t hurt to try.

Optimize your blog for speed!

How fast your page loads has been a major factor for organic ranking for years. Google wants to provide its customers (those people searching) with the best experience possible – and there is nothing more annoying than a slow website. Google states that anything loading slower than three seconds is considered slow, and many claim that below two seconds should be the goal. We just ran a quick speed test in our homepage, and it is loading well below one second!

Make sure your page is loading fast, otherwise, users may bounce before it even loads, and Google will most likely penalize your organic rankings.

 

Creating content should, without a doubt, be done with your audience in mind. However, optimizing your content can transform a well-written blog into a traffic-generator, lead-creation piece of content. Don’t miss the opportunity!