In the last couple of months, most organizations across the globe created blogs for their businesses. For most people, having a blog is part of the recent craze to go digital. But do you really know how to use your blog to strengthen SEO? Did you know that you can make use of monthly SEO packages to grow your business? These services will have you earning leads, traffic, and most importantly revenue.
When you want to expand internationally, you need to first work on your local SEO strategy. This approach helps you market your products and services to customers and local leads. It also ensures that you have a strong foundation before venture into the big leagues where SEO searches are global. In such a case, while trying to expand internationally, you might want to partner with a professional employer organization that can help you with hiring the best talents in the target market. To optimize local SEO, you need to:
- Create your blog content based on the local context.
- Optimize your customer’s voice searches.
- Set up a Google Business Profile (GBP) Account to promote your Google listing.
- Improve your website for smartphone use.
In case you are wondering how to use your blog to strengthen SEO and increase your sales, here are 11 easy steps.
1. Perform Thorough Research
At Growth Hackers, we know that effective SEO starts with thorough research: identify the right keywords to make your content stand out and drive results. The research that you do will be aimed at identifying the keywords that enhance your site’s optimization. Randomly incorporating keywords without researching them is counterproductive. You have to make use of proper techniques and keyword search tools to find the most suitable phrases for your blog.
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2. Give Your Blog a Catchy Name
Most of you have named your blogs on your websites as “Blogs.” Such a lack of creativity is one of the reasons why you’re not having traffic on your website. The name of your blog needs to be elaborate and compelling. You should know that having a catchy blog name is part of the optimization opportunity.
To come up with a good name, you need to first identify the theme of your blog and find out a good description of your industry. You also need to know who your target population is as well as whether you can insert SEO keywords on your blog name. Once you have established all these factors, you can now come up with a creative name that will draw traffic to your website. Such traffic will ultimately convert visitors to buyers hence increased sales.
3. Use Keywords
Think of keywords like seasoning in a recipe: Growth Hackers ensures the right amount in the right places so your content is flavorful for both readers and search engines. When you select the relevant keywords, you should carefully embed them in the sections where they will be most influential.
The best way is to create a topical blog and include keywords in all the topics you choose to write about. For instance, you incorporate them on the title, headings, introductory section, at the conclusion, anchor text, and meta descriptions.
However, you have to be cautious about possible keyword stuffing. This is a situation where you input a lot of keywords on text such that it loses meaning. Such content can easily irritate your readers who might decline to subscribe to your blog. In severe cases, you might get penalized by the search engine that you are using. Therefore, you have to be tactful about keyword placement!
4. Post Content That Targets Your Audience
The content you create and post on your blog should be specific to a particular audience. Your audience is that group of readers that find value in the content you write. When you customize content for specific consumers, you have a chance to incorporate keywords that are related to particular solutions and meet the needs of your population.
Before audience-focused content, blog traffic of one of our B2B SaaS clients was generic and low-converting. After Growth Hackers tailored posts to the target audience, engagement and lead generation skyrocketed.
5. Make Blog Optimization a Continuous Process
SEO optimization does not require you to make new content every time. You could easily find other opportunities to enhance your available blog posts. To ensure a continuous optimization process, you just need to identify other opportunities and avenues to repost your content.
Successful blog management and optimization of existing blog content require you to optimize using images, incorporate internal links to other pages on your website as well as tag similar posts. Additionally, you need to make sure that you do not have any dead links while doing a link exchange.
Growth Hackers helped an eCommerce client re-optimize their existing blog posts by adding internal links, updating images, and fixing dead links, resulting in a 40% increase in organic traffic without creating new content. So, you can use link building software and other tools for a better and smooth link building process. The utilization of available blog content will save you a lot of money and time that you need to create fresh content.
6. Use Videos And Images
People are fond of visual items. Therefore, you can use videos or images to enhance visitor experience and engagement. The use of these items is known to contribute to promoting the value of SEO. The images of videos you use must have good descriptions with essential keywords where appropriate.
There are so many sites that you can get images for free to use on your website. These platforms include but are not limited to Pixabay, Unsplash, PicJumbo as well as Pexels and PhotoPin. When posting videos, you could make use of the relevant videos that you already have on your other sites or you could create new content. These visual representations will function to engage users by providing them with learning opportunities.
7. Leverage Social Media
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8. Utilize Blog Content to Fill SEO Gaps
If you are struggling with certain SEO phrases, the utilization of blog content is the best way to strengthen them. Growth Hackers helps B2C and B2B companies use blog content to fill SEO gaps, boosting visibility and making it easier for customers to find your website.
Suppose you have a website that does have content related to words you want to use, you can create blog content that can bring these phrases to life. Doing so will enhance SEO which will make it easy for customers to locate your website.
9. Reference Other Bloggers
Sometimes it helps to mention other bloggers in an article that you post on your blog. It works best if the blogger you mentioned has content that resembles yours and has many followers. When you reference, you should embed a link that leads to the information or blogger you have mentioned in your article.
This kind of referencing is ethical and is a show of good faith as well. When the blogger that you have mentioned reciprocates, you receive a link. But, why should I be concerned about adding links? High-quality links add value to your website. Additionally, they aid your site rank on the top ten results when a search is performed.
10. Encourage Readers to Subscribe to Your Blog
You need a large pool of readers for your blog to strengthen your SEO and increase your sales. Having great content alone will not help you much. Most people will visit your site, read your content but never come back again. Hence, you need to have them subscribe to your blog. There are a couple of ways that you have readers hooked to your site including:
- Bribing readers: In exchange for their email, you can draw readers using lead magnet solutions such as educational videos, audios, gated content, or tutorials.
- Creating a persuasive opt-in landing page: This page should provide information to readers such as the merits of subscribing, email frequency, kind of content that you will share, and bonus for subscribing.
- Guest appearances: Having guests post on your blog will also win you, blog subscribers.
- Use an email signature: You should incorporate a text link to the email newsletter landing page.
One of Growth Hackers Fintech clients had high traffic but few subscribers. By adding lead magnets, persuasive opt-in pages, and guest posts, their subscription rate doubled in three months.
11. Utilize Schema Markup
Schema markup is a recent innovation in SEO that strengthens your site’s visibility. But, what is it? And how does it help with optimization? Schema markup is a code that you incorporate on your site which works to direct search engines to convey more information to users. This tool rounds your content, indexes it, and returns it to a user in an elaborate manner. When incorporated in your post, the schema will optimize your content significantly. To utilize markup, you need to:
- Step 1: Visit Google Structured Data Markup helper
- Step 2: Choose the listing that you wish to schema markup and copy and paste the link in URL format.
- Step 3: Add markup data by filling in the additional information that you want.
- Step 4: Click the “create HTML” icon.
- Step 5: Copy the yellow code that appears and paste it into the content management system.
When you have completed this process, pretest the schema markup.
Turn Your Blog Into a Conversion Maker And Increase Your Sales
A blog can be a powerful tool no matter the size of your business. It can bring a huge impact to your business in terms of traffic, lead gen and sales whether you work at a startup, a local business, a medium-size one or you want to focus on enterprise SEO.
There is no doubt that your blog can strengthen SEO, create traffic on your site which can be converted into sales. The only thing you need to do is know how to name your blog, use visual aids, continually optimize, make use of social media, and use blog content to fill those SEO gaps that you have a challenge with.
SEO is crucial for your website and hence your business. The higher you rank in results pages, the more clicks and traffic your site will generate. SEO also improves user experience, making it more likely for customers to become repeat buyers.
With a growth marketing agency like Growth Hackers on your side, we’re helping businesses with SEO but we don’t stop there. Indeed, we provide a full digital marketing plan for our clients including SEO, social media, copywriting, data analysis, automation and much more.
1 Comment
All good tips. Referencing other bloggers also builds your friend network, boosting traffic and profits indirectly.
Ryan