From small businesses and sole traders to large companies, every business with an online presence should be doing Blog SEO. And every business should have an online presence!
We’ve published several blog articles in the past about blogging for business and why it’s so important for your online visibility, brand identity and reputation, customer engagement, and other ways it can benefit your enterprise.
Just publishing anything when it comes to your blog, however, isn’t enough! You need to understand and determine:
- Why you are blogging
- Who you are blogging for
- What you are sharing in your blog
- Where your blog is being published
- How to get your blog seen by the right audience
- How to make sure your blog supports and enhances your overall digital strategy.
About Blog SEO
Just like your website must be optimised for SEO (search engine optimisation) to be ranked highly in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), so too must your blog be optimised.
Did you know that having a dynamic onsite blog helps with your overall SEO strategy and can dramatically improve your results when you do it right?
Bloggers drive traffic to their posts in an array of ways, and SEO is currently the third most common way to achieve this, only behind social media and email marketing.
Blog SEO involves optimising:
- Your content
- Your site’s structure
- Your HTML code
These activities incorporate:
- internal and external linking
- on-page optimisation
- page speed optimisation
- mobile optimisation
- responsiveness
- and much more.
Best Writing Practices and Tips for Your Blog’s SEO
- Select one main keyword per blog post.
Any SEO campaign revolves around high-quality, relevant keywords and phrases that reflect search terms your target audience will enter to find your products and services online. Every blog article you post should focus on one of your chosen keyword targets – this gives Google something to focus on, enabling it to understand what your content is about and avoid confusing the algorithm. Long-tail keywords (e.g., “emergency plumber in northwest Sydney”) as opposed to single-word phrases (e.g., “plumber”) are less competitive and are easier to rank.
DO NOT STUFF KEYWORDS! Once you’ve selected your primary keyword, ideally include it in your Title and Main Heading (H1 Tag) and then no more than once or twice per 100 words of copy. (i.e., keyword density of 1-2%).
- Plan your blog article. Consider what you want to say, what your audience will appreciate, and how to remain on-brand for your business throughout in terms of content, voice, tone, etc.
- Consider your article structure. Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. Your blog is telling a story! You need an introduction and a conclusion as well as the body of your content.
- Use H1, H2, H3 Headings. These help to break up your content into more readable sections for the benefit of both your human audience as well as search engine algorithms.
- Use relevant related keywords. Choose and use relevant secondary keywords. These include similar phrases to your primary keyword, synonyms, and related words.
- Optimise your blog article length. Blog articles need to be a minimum of around 500 words – and certainly no fewer than 350 words. Longer articles can be extremely effective if you have a lot to say and you write well – but know who your audience is and whether they’re likely to be “in for the long haul” with longer articles. We find that anything from 500-1000 words is the “sweet spot” for most blog posts, and usually, no more than 1500 words, lest you overwhelm your audience. Just make sure that the content is not repetitive, too verbose, or irrelevant as you strive to achieve your word count.
- Link! Hyperlink to relevant existing content via your blog – to your landing pages, home page, and other blog articles you have published. This is internal linking. Also, where appropriate, consider one or two (at most) high authority, high quality, reputable external links to other websites (but not your competitors!) – just make sure these open to a new window so you don’t take audiences away from your page.
- Don’t forget Metas. When you publish your blog, you’ll need to add Title/Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions. Google uses these to help rank your content and inform search engine users about it. Your title is limited to 60 characters and your description to 160 characters, and each should incorporate your focus keywords.
- Proofread and edit. Never publish content of any kind without proofreading it and editing it where necessary. You may need someone else to help you with this. This includes spelling, punctuation, grammar, and syntax.
- Share appropriately. Ideally, your blog will publish to its landing page section on your website, as “BLOG”, “NEWS”, “RESOURCES”, or similar. Your blog posts should be shared with your audiences via your social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc), as well as your email newsletters and other channels.
- Blog regularly! Successful SEO requires that your website is dynamic – and your blog is an easy way to achieve this by regularly publishing fresh content. You should aim to post a new blog article AT LEAST once per month. If possible (and appropriate), fortnightly or even weekly is better – but only if you have something to say.
A word about ChatGPT and other AI composers: There’s a lot of buzz around using ChatGPT and similar tools to create content. While these can be incredibly helpful for getting an idea “off the ground”, the content produced is often not of high quality. It can be generic, repetitive, and even nonsensical. It is also easy for search engine algorithms to identify – and in terms of SEO, using AI to create content may do your website more harm than good.
Here at SEOcycle, we don’t recommend using AI to write blogs or website content.
Need Help? Get in Touch with SEOcycle.
Let’s face it, running a business is a full-time job and most people don’t have the time or inclination to spend those precious hours while they’re “off-duty” creating quality written content. Moreover, like anything else, writing is a skill and many people’s talents simply lie elsewhere.
If you need help getting your blog off the ground, or for ongoing blog articles, get in touch with us today.
Our Head Writer is also a co-owner at SEOcycle and has been writing full-time in-house for us and also other clients on a freelance basis for more than ten years. Australian-born and tertiary-educated, she has broad experience writing for hundreds of websites and blogs across a very diverse range of industries, sectors, and niches.
From medical to retail, history to family law, trades to metaphysics, counselling and complementary health to fashion and design, digital marketing to tourism to wellbeing to the NDIS, and everything in between, we can help with almost any topic area for both website content writing and ghost blogging. We can also assist with proofreading and editing.
All content delivered by us is 100% human-generated (we do not use ChatGPT and similar tools), written by an Australian English-as-first-language speaker, SEO-optimised, 100% unique, and competitively priced.
We can also help with your overall SEO requirements for the best results.
Get in touch with us for help with writing for your business blog – everything from ongoing regular blog articles to topic ideas. We’ll be delighted to hear from you and provide blogging content that will captivate your audience and get you seen online.
