Thinking about starting up a blog for your company website or want to improve your existing blog content? For successful blog performance, optimizing your blog for both search engines like Google and user engagement is incredibly important.
A strong, active blog widens the search visibility of your company, brand, products, and services to valuable potential customers online. Users who are performing Google searches related to your business, offerings, or industry. Running an optimized blog campaign will help you develop each of your posts for potential customers. And in a way that’s best aligned to your potential customers’ search intent.
How to Optimize Your Blog
Track Targeted Keywords
To begin optimizing your blog SEO and user engagement, you’ll want to have targeted keywords in mind to tackle. A great way to keep track of your keywords, organize them, and see their potential search volume, is by utilizing HubSpot’s inbound marketing software for keyword tracking.
While there are other keyword research and tracking tools available, HubSpot provides a wonderfully productive marketing software. The software includes a user portal for setting up organized keyword tracking campaigns, along with a host of great inbound marketing features like website analytics and social post scheduling.
When narrowing down keywords prior to post-development, it helps to search the keywords yourself in Google to observe the top 5 or so ranking page results.
These competing domains and pages will give you a sense of how difficult it would be to rank for said keywords. Although keep in mind, that the results will vary for users in regards to location-based keywords/queries and geotargeting. Google will serve local users local content results that it believes makes sense for them.
Develop Contextual Content
Once you begin developing a blog post with a targeted keyword phrase and topic in mind, taking note of important on-page SEO factors will get you posting in the right direction. Here’s how you can start optimizing blog SEO.
On-page SEO factors to keep in mind for optimizing your blog posts:
- Keyword or variation of target keyword in Search Title Tag.
- Making use of short, keyword-rich post permalinks.
- Wrapping your primary post title in an <h1> tag.
- Wrapping subheadings in <h2> and <h3> tags.
- Incorporating 1 or a few outbound links to other sites.
- Adding 1-3 internal links to your other posts/pages within your post.
- Improving page speed and social usability of posts ie. comments.
- Making sure content is mobile-friendly or responsive.
- Blending LSI (semantically related) words into the copy.
- Optimizing image alt tags, titles, resolution, file size.
- Posting longer, more comprehensive posts.
- Satisfy the user search intent behind the target keyword and topic.
Optimizing Over Time
Unless a large blog writing operation is taking place, many companies may find it challenging to hit all of these SEO factors for blog optimization in the first draft. Revisiting and revising your older blog posts over time will help you hone in on the blog SEO factors listed above.
Looking for a custom SEO service that combines optimized blog content? Contact us today for a free search presence audit, proposal, and quote.
HONE Digital Marketing is a digital marketing agency based in Lubbock, Texas.