What’s the most crucial aspect of implementing a content marketing strategy? Of course, it’s essential to consistently publish relevant, insightful, and engaging content across various marketing channels. Also, you must outline a plan to promote your content to the right audience.
However, all your content marketing efforts will be of no avail unless they drive organic and targeted traffic to your website. This, in turn, means you must use your content to improve your website’s search engine ranking.
It’s essential because Google receives roughly 40,000 search queries every second. Moreover, 85% of search engine users prefer to click on organic listings in search results. 44% of people also report that they’ll click on an organic search engine listing even if they aren’t familiar with the brand.
So, if you want to skyrocket website traffic, you must ensure that your blog posts and articles make it to the top of relevant search engine results pages (SERPs). In other words, you should use the right search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to optimize your content.
However, writing SEO-friendly blog posts is easier said than done. It isn’t just about integrating a few relevant keywords into your content. Even if you’re planning to outsource blogging to reputed content writing services, it always helps to have a deep understanding of the SEO best practices for content creation.
In this blog, we’ll outline a few useful tips to help you create SEO-friendly blog posts that’ll take your website to the top of relevant SERPs. Let’s get started.
If you’re familiar with content marketing and search engine optimization, you already know the importance of keyword research. But when it comes to SEO-friendly content creation, traditional keyword research will only take you so far.
Instead of focusing on broad and generic keywords, you should optimize your content using relevant long-tail keywords. This is because long-tail keywords are often associated with a specific search intent and help you attract qualified website traffic.
When it comes to SEO, being a one-hit-wonder isn’t particularly useful. If you want to skyrocket your website’s search engine ranking, you must consistently publish high-quality blog posts that are useful for your audience.
The best way of doing this is to create a rock-solid content calendar that outlines your publishing and distribution schedule. It’ll help you visualize when the next blog post is due and if there are any pending tasks related to it. Also, it’ll help your team collaborate and monitor the progress of individual content assets.
In the early days of SEO, you could easily climb up the SERPs ladder by flooding web content with irrelevant keywords. But the heydays of keyword stuffing are gone. Today, such black hat SEO tactics can put your website in the bad books of search engines.
In the worst-case scenario, this could get your website banned from search engine listings. That’s why you must avoid unnecessarily using too many keywords in your blog posts just to increase the keyword density.
Instead, you should strategically place relevant keywords in different sections of your blog post, including:
It can go a long way to help readers scan your content, thereby boosting engagement rates. Also, it’ll help search engine spiders understand what content a blog post includes. This, in turn, will go a long way to improve your website’s search engine ranking for relevant keywords.
Most bloggers and content marketers have an affinity for long-form content. This isn’t surprising considering that long-form content gets over 77% more backlinks than shorter blog posts. However, you shouldn’t make a blog post lengthy just for the sake of it.
Carefully analyze the topic, keywords, and your target audience’s needs to identify the optimal length for a blog post. Also, you must consider whether you have the adequate expertise and resources to publish long-form written content.
Internal linking can be instrumental in boosting audience engagement and helping search engines navigate your website. Also, it helps enhance the reader’s experience and provides more value to them.
Make sure you include relevant and useful internal links that are related to the topic of your blog post. However, keep in mind that inundating the content with too many internal links can be distracting and disengaging.
Do you use any other techniques to publish remarkable SEO-friendly blog posts? Share your suggestions in the comments section below.