Business blogging is arguably one of the most underutilized tools in the SEO realm. Is your company utilizing a business blog yet? If not, there is no better time than right now to change that. If your company does have a blog, it is important that all its blog posts be optimized for SEO.
The first thing to understand is just how important a business blog is. Consumer surveys show that more than half of internet users have purchased a product or service after reading a blog post from the company in question. If you want that kind of action on your blog posts, customers need to be able to find them. And finding them requires optimizing blog posts for SEO.
Blog Posts and Search Engines
Blog posts and search engines were made for one another. Having an active and regularly updated blog can help your site rank better by giving search engines more content to look at. The more content your site offers, the better engine algorithms can determine whether your site is the one that users are looking for.
Here are some important things to remember:
- Though search engines prefer longer content, create a mixture of short-form and long-form pieces.
- Focus on quality. Posts should be well-written, mistake-free, and relevant to your audience.
- Blog post topics don’t have to be explicitly about your company’s product or service. Related topics are okay as long as they are of interest to customers.
Speaking of your customers, blog posts are an opportunity to connect with them on a more personal level. Never underestimate the power of that connection. It can lead to higher conversion rates. It can also lead to your content being shared on other platforms, especially social media. Every external share increases a post’s SEO potential by building a link back to your website that search engines can recognize.
On-page SEO Tips for Blog Posts
Finally, let us talk about some actual tips for optimizing your blog posts. None of these are exceptionally technical. If you know some on-page SEO basics, you should be able to implement all these tips for your blog.
- Topic & Keyword – When you choose a blog topic, choose a relevant keyword that goes with it. Also, develop secondary keywords that you’ll use throughout the post.
- Keyword Placement – Your primary keyword should appear in your title and first paragraph. It should also be scattered throughout the post along with your secondary keywords. Note that keywords should always be used in a natural way. Never force them.
- Subheadings – Break up your post by using subheadings. Google loves subheadings in that they help algorithms better understand the content. Using keywords in subheadings can win you ‘bonus points’ with Google.
- Images & Videos – Adding images and videos to blog content makes the content more attractive to visitors and more relevant to search engines. Every blog post should have at least one image properly optimized for SEO. This means compressing your image and giving it a proper title with some relevant alt text.
We recommend rounding things out with an on-page SEO plugin or tool designed to help you maximize every aspect of site SEO. If you are using a popular content management system, like WordPress for example, you’ll discover there is no shortage of plugins. A good SEO plugin like Yoast or MonsterInsights can help you:
- optimize blog titles
- optimize blog URLs
- easily create meta descriptions and titles
- recommend how much you should use your keyword in your post
Your company’s blog represents a fantastic way to connect with customers on a more personal level and simultaneously improves search engine performance. Needless to say that both internet users and search engines appreciate quality business blogs. If your company isn’t blogging yet, commit to starting as soon as possible. If your company is already blogging, commit to optimizing each and every post for SEO.
We consider ourselves to be experts in creating and optimizing blog content. If you’re struggling or want to have a team of specialists handle your blog content, contact us to start.