Consistent blog posting is a great way to improve your ranking in Google’s search results. However, just sticking to the basics like optimizing keywords and using the right phrases won’t cut it. It is important to understand that Google’s algorithms have evolved continuously during the past decade.
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Guide to Improve Your Blog Post’s Impact
There are roughly a thousand algorithm updates every single year. They typically range from minor tweaks to overall optimizations. They’re also geared towards helping users find the most accurate and relevant content. Hence, you need to make sure you measure up to Google’s standards for those metrics and beyond.
To gain organic traffic, you need to go one step further. Here is a 7-step guide to help you improve the impact of your blog posts on your target audience:
1. Adjust Your SEO for COVID-19
The one topic that is dominating the global conversation right now is COVID-19. The novel coronavirus has affected everything, from business to the economy to entertainment. Hence, you need to divert your blog posts to fit that narrative right now.
Yes, it’s only going to be a short-term spike in the long run. However, current signs indicate that this pandemic will go on for months on end. While none of us wants to entertain that though, the search algorithms will continue to serve up information on it. Better to capitalize on that shift right now than regret it later.
You don’t necessarily need to blog about things related to coronavirus. However, you can put little anchor texts and keywords in your blog posts related to it. Chances are that whatever you’re blogging about, researching about or marketing for, it will be affected.
Hence, you can easily fit in a few keywords or a few paragraphs about how the virus has impacted you. You can even use it to market a few products that will genuinely help people during the pandemic.
The COVID1-9 pandemic shows us the magnitude of global events and the impact that they can have on user search. Since search is now indistinguishable from the national, global, and local conversation, this will continue to be true. Whenever there is an unusual circumstance; know that adapting to it will help you reap the rewards of SEO optimization.
2. Google EAT is Here to Stay
Google EAT was a major update to Google’s search algorithm in a few years. It highlighted the importance of making content not only accurate, but also trustworthy and authoritative. Whatever you could do to make your content more trustworthy would now help you climb up the search results.
This update isn’t a tweak to an algorithm, a new ranking factor or a new algorithm by itself. It’s a general update that will influence your ranking for years to come. Hence, taking your information from more authentic sources, adding more value to your posts, etc., is now fully incentivized. Not only will it help you climb the search rankings, but will put you in Google’s good graces.
Create an Identity Online
Google EAT also incentivizes creating a small biography for the contributor to your posts. This helps Google to index those posts, according to their author. The biography and how authentic it is helps Google to identify the same author across multiple platforms.
This change to Google’s search has been made to recognize authoritative authors and sources. Thus, if the author is credited with valuable, quality content, then they will be favored in the search results. This, of course, doesn’t make it so that the author is favored for every topic. Someone writing on health will be favored for health-related topics, and so on.
To ensure your blogs are indexed, you should create a small biography for yourself and concentrate on quality content creation.
3. Long-tail Keywords Go All the Way
Long-tail keywords are now the standard that you have to meet for keyword optimization. They are favored over short-tail keywords due to their ability to accommodate conversational phrases.
Conversational phrases tend to be the style of queries on the internet today. This is partly due to the prevalence of voice search and voice assistants on most devices. Hence, people don’t structure their queries as precise statements. They tend to ask full questions or structure their queries as vague statements.
To take advantage of this, you should place long-tail keywords in the blog headings, sub-headings, and titles. You should also make sure that the keywords are placed near content that answers queries. Even if you position the keywords near the adjacent information, you should get a lot of hits.
While this isn’t easy and you can struggle to fit the keywords naturally, it has a good payoff. A good content development service should help you out in this regard. You should consider hiring article writers to pump out a consistent number of blogs every week/month. That way, they’ll be optimized for search with long-tail keywords.
4. User Experience and Mobile Optimization
User experience and mobile optimization have become two key tenets of technical SEO. Most of the browsing that takes place on the internet is through mobile devices. This includes tablets as well, but it’s mostly through smartphones.
Secondly, the user experience that you get on a website determines whether you would want to visit again or not. This can include the layout, visual aesthetics of the website and the way the content is structured.
Mobile optimization and user experience, thus, go hand in hand. Most website creation tools usually have mobile optimization built in. However, you should play with the controls a little to see what works and what doesn’t. You can try different themes and resize the post borders.
Lighten the Load
Making your site mobile-friendly doesn’t just involve making things aesthetically pleasing and symmetrical. It also involves making sure that your content is readable and viewable. What that means is your content should be structured for viewing on a mobile device. This involves making the content endlessly scrollable and making the visuals light and speedy.
The former refers to opting for an endlessly scrollable webpage instead of multiple-page posts. The scrollable webpage is preferred over splitting a post into multiple pages. For one, it requires less clicking or tapping. For another, it removes multiple page loading times from the equation.
Making the blog visuals lighter refers to opting for a standard image size and a standard video length or size. This doesn’t mean that you can’t upload beautiful images or high definition video. It just means you should opt for less is more. That way, your website won’t require a high bandwidth to load content. This will only make it easier for people to view your posts.
Improve Site Loading Speed
Improving a website’s loading speed now counts as SEO optimization. If you think about it, this makes sense logically. No matter what site you go to, if it loads slowly, you will eventually bounce. In fact, estimates show that slow loading speeds lead to users bouncing in a matter of seconds. This will contribute to a higher bounce rate for that site. This will affect its search results ranking.
A high bounce rate tells Google that you site is either uninteresting, irrelevant, or doesn’t have the technical SEO required to rank in search results. Hence, optimizing your website for fast loading speeds is essential.
5. Create a Section for the Best Content
While off-page SEO optimization helps you to attract traffic, while on-page optimization helps keep it. One great way to use the latter to your advantage is to create a section of your website to host the best content.
This can be content that you were praised for in the comments or content that was shared by an authoritative figure. It could also be content that generated a lot of traffic or topics that are still ranking high in the Google search results.
Creating a separate section of these topics can help you to attract a high level of consumer traffic. You can even build off those topics and create sister posts that elaborate on certain aspects. While these adjacent content-related posts may not get the same number of hits, you will definitely generate traffic.
6. Trends are Short Lived But Useful
As illustrated above with the example of COVID-19, trends shape conversation. While trends may be short-lived, there is no denying that they are responsible for short-term spikes. Those count for a lot of ad revenue and conversions.
Some users may decide to subscribe to your website or become customers of your company as a result. Hence, pumping out blog posts that take advantage of current trends may be shameless, but it’s effective nonetheless.
Try using Google trends or other sites that keep track of search traffic to search for topics that will work for you. Go for short-term spikes. It’ll help you gain more users/conversions/subscribers in the long run.
7. Backlinking and Linking to Authoritative Posts
The entire point of the Google search algorithm is to give you the most reliable and authentic information. Hence, any website that is well-sourced or accurate will be given preference over others.
The best way to do this for any blog post is to link it to an authority. Say you’re quoting a figure, a percentage, a statistic, the result of a research, etc. All of that should be linked to its original source. You can also link to a source that cites the original since that works too.
Through this, a loop is generated that allows Google to index your post along with those with great authority. In essence, this makes your post stand out amongst others. Eventually, Google will favor your post over others that don’t have the kind of authority that you have. That is very valuable for a long- term traffic boost.
While this may take time to register, the most authentic and well-sourced blog posts tend to last the longest. Others that are optimized through keywords and well structured may see a short-term spike, but they won’t last long.
You may have come across posts on the web that are several years older while searching for something new. Others may actually be more than a decade old. You may actually come across a few articles that are organically on the first page of search results that are two decades old. That can actually happen. It depends on how much information they contain that is still relevant and well-sourced.
These tips will help you improve the authority, the relevance, and the quality of your blog posts. The more readable, accessible, and trustworthy they are, the more they will be highlighted for queries.
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