Blogging or having a business website is a proven method for increasing your business’ brand awareness and returns on your digital marketing campaign. However, once you have your shiny new business website, the only way to make your investment worth it is to get potential customers clicking on it to find your excellent content. You need to take dedicated steps to boost your blog’s organic traffic, such as taking SEO training online, and this article will enlighten you on 7 of the best steps to make Google reward you and increase your overall rankings and search traffic.
SEO: everything you need to know
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a set of practices used to boost your blog’s quantity and quality of traffic through organic search engine results. This loosely translates to the steps used in bringing plenty of visitors to your site who are interested in what you have to offer by getting your site that prestigious position on the first two search engine result pages.
The factors that influence a website’s position on the SERPs are many and unpredictable, but some of the ones you can expect include:
- Domain level keyword usage
- Brand Features such as the presence of the domain or brand in the news or media, and its offline usage
- Link features such as anchor text distribution and quality of the linked sources
- Social metrics such as the number of shares on Facebook and Twitter
SEO is all about ensuring that the factors above are adhered to to ensure that the Search engine bots crawling through your site can read through the content on your website and find conformance to the factors above. It also ensures that your readers will like what they see on your website enough to keep them coming back.
Why do companies need SEO?
Many businesses with intuitive and engaging blogs know that SEO will make their site more searchable, but there are many other reasons why you should consider optimizing your site for search engines. These include:
SEO builds brand credibility
Your potential customers will trust you better if they can readily find your business blog on their favorite search engine. Having good site visibility shows your potential clients that you are an authority in your industry, yet authority is built over time through positive user behavior, plenty of social media shares and quality backlinks profile.
It improves user experience
Your business blog’s visibility is also a sign of the UX other visitors have had on your blog, and if your bold is first on the SERPs, it shows that your website is being rewarded for many things, including having a good UX.
It is a long term strategy to keep profits coming in
SEO takes ling to show its results, but when the results come in your business will reap the rewards of improved visibility and profits for many years.
Ways to improve blog traffic:
Below are some of the reliable ways in which you can improve your blog’s traffic:
Research the most relevant keywords in your field
Keyword research is an important part of your SEO strategy, and one of the things to determine is what keywords are applied most in your industry and specific blog posts. These may occur naturally, but consider using tools like SEMrush and Google AdWords Keyword to find out the best keywords to apply on your blog. Once you have a list of keywords, include them in your blog post title, subheadings, anchor texts, and the first 100 words of the post. Again, you want to avoid stuffing your posts with keywords, as this makes your blog look spammy, and Google will penalize this.
Social media
The power of social media can also be harnessed in improving your website’s visibility. Promote your blog widely on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and urge your blog followers to share your link with their friends. You can also use a program like Hootsuite to post links to your most recent pieces on social media automatically.
Post share-worthy content
Google will automatically rank posts that are more relevant and engaging better to give its users a better reading experience. You can do this by posting readable content (shorter sentences and paragraphs and bulleted points) and posting evergreen content. Evergreen content is that which remains relevant regardless of the time of year or season and is thus capable of generating continued success and readership.
Your content also needs to be thoroughly researched, accurate, and unique. Consider having longer pieces (1,500-2,000 words), as longer posts rank better.
Add images
People love to see images, as they tend to leave a more significant impact that all the words in your post. They also capture readers’ attention better and show rather than tell your ideas. According to Backlinko, pages with at least one image rank better than their counterparts without.
Add an SSL certificate
If your site does not already have an SSL certificate, it is about time you got one. Security is a crucial factor in the ranking of a webpage, and an HTTPS-enabled site will boost your SEO, make your site secure for your readers, and make it safe for you to sell your products online.
Take measures to boost your site loading speed
Google has used site loading speed to ranks websites since 2010, and the rate at which your site loads is a significant determinant of UX, and is thus a determinant of how well your site will rank. You can improve your site speed by optimizing your images, clearing your blog of accumulated browser cache and irrelevant database fields.
Take a course in SEO
SEO is a rather complicated area, even for experienced digital marketers and tech gurus, which is why you need to take SEO training courses. These programs will teach you how to use relevant webmasters tools, give you guidance from the experts, and empower you to optimize your site for search engines yourself.
Conclusion:
As seen above, every business with a blog needs SEO to maximize on its website’s returns on investment. Taking an SEO course will enlighten you on the specifics of search engine algorithms to help you expose your blog to the community of online customers.
