Creating an SEO Strategy for your Blog

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

You’re not alone in wondering how to create a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy for your blog. Hundreds of businesses and marketers across the globe are struggling to attract organic traffic to their websites. It’s tough to know where to start, but if you follow a few key steps, you’ll see a big difference in your organic traffic. While SEO can seem like a complicated endeavour, this article will cover keyword research, content, and some of the technical aspects of your website.

Create a Roadmap

Before you begin, you need to have a plan. This is especially true if you’re working with a team, so everyone is on the same page. In addition, it will allow you to quantify your objectives for a specific project, such as increasing the click-through rate on your offer, increasing traffic, getting more sign-ups, etc.

Good SEO roadmaps will outline the components your team should work on and give a priority rating for each task in the plan. You can even give a timeframe for each task to complete so that the project doesn’t stagnate as crucial components of your SEO strategy fail to materialise.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is merely researching the topics and phrases your target audience searches for within your niche. Starting with Google is a good idea. You can search for suggested keywords related to your blog’s topic and make a list of keywords in a spreadsheet.

Another good tool is Ubersuggest, which has a free and paid plan. While not as extensive as tools like SemRush, it will give you a decent amount of data you can use.

Remember that keyword research aims to rank your content higher in search engines. When you know how competitive a keyword is, you’ll learn how difficult it will be to rank your site for it. The ideal keyword has a high search volume, but low competition; competing for keywords everyone uses means it will take a lot of content and time to rank. A good tip is to search for long-tail keywords if you’re in a competitive niche.

Don’t know what to include in your blog posts and other content? BuzzSumo’s “Questions” feature is a handy way to discover relevant questions from many forum posts. Quora also is a wonderful site to peruse to find out what people are talking about and what questions they’re asking. Considering these questions can be a great way to put helpful content on your website and even get some link-building in if you answer questions on Quora.

Analyse Your Competitors

Analysing your competitors is crucial if you want to see what kind of traffic they’re getting and find weaknesses in their SEO strategy. You can also find new trends in your niche and other keywords they’re ranking for.

While expensive, SemRush and Ahrefs can help you study your competitor’s backlinks and will provide a deeper level of traffic analysis. This will include how many visitors they receive each month for a specific keyword. Ideally, this should be completed before you start your site, but it’s better late than never.

It would be best if you didn’t overlook their social media posts. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube can all give you valuable insights into what your competition is doing.

Ultimately, you want a good idea of what your competition ranks for and how they’re accomplishing that. Being able to reverse engineer it will give you a leg up.

Create Quality Content

Google loves content, and the old phrase “Content is king!” rings true today. The best content answers a pressing question, solves a problem, entertains, or informs. Good content gets shared, goes viral, and makes Google your new friend.

Read more about improving your Google Ranking in this article.

This is where your keyword research pays off, as now you’ll know what’s easiest to rank for. That way, you can start getting instant rankings before tackling more challenging keywords. Make sure that when you incorporate them into your articles, you do so in an organic way.

The trend with Google now is lengthy content that’s broken up into sections. Each section ranks for specific keywords, so you don’t necessarily have to keyword stuff a long blog post anymore. Unfortunately, short blog posts don’t rank as well anymore.

Remember to proofread your work and ensure readability for your visitors. Your content must meet their needs and expectations, as a high bounce rate can negatively impact your SEO.

Link Building

It’s not enough to post great content, as important as it is. For example, suppose you want Google to view your blog as an authority. In that case, you must use outreach techniques to create relevant, authoritative links to your site. Of course, excellent and engaging content will increase your chances of gaining backlinks.

Having third-party links to your site is vital, especially if you’re in a more competitive niche. Links from reputable sites demonstrate your blog’s popularity and authority within that niche. As such, you should focus on creating backlinks from high-quality domains.

Use Key Performance Indicators

SEO KPIs (key performance indicators) are the metrics you should measure when analysing your marketing efforts’ effectiveness. KPIs measure your SEO strategy against your goals to see what’s working or not. In addition, they can help hone your keyword optimisation and improve your SEO strategy.

KPIs ideally should be viewed in conjunction with your business goals, not analysed in isolation. You can use them to tailor your content, social media, and link-building to improve your SEO and site ranking.

Another aspect of KPIs is improving your return on investment (ROI), so you can see how your efforts affect your bottom line. This can also help you if you’re running any ads in addition to improving organic traffic efforts. In other words, your budget will thank you.

In Conclusion

SEO strategies aren’t something you should throw at the wall to see what sticks. To do it effectively and without wasting money on expensive tools, you must formulate a plan and follow it. Take action on these steps, and you’ll be on your way to helping your site get more organic traffic.