How to Use Your Blog to Improve Your SEO - Path & Compass
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14 Jan How to Use Your Blog to Improve Your SEO

Posted at 07:00h in Branding + Websites, Small Business Marketing, True North by
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SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a marketing tool we get asked about a lot. For businesses looking to reach customers on the web, SEO is an important part of your strategy and one that particularly requires patience. And while there are countless ways to implement SEO, blogging is a great way to bolster your website’s SEO. The problem is that many (MANY) businesses are not leveraging their blog strategy and posts in the most effective ways. Here are ways that you can use your blog to improve your SEO and online visibility.

Post Regularly

We’ll keep saying it: consistency is key. In order to be most effective, you need to post blogs regularly – just like social media. By creating content on a regular basis, you keep the Google bots fed with new content and rank higher in the SERPS (Search English Results Pages). We recommend 2-4x month, posting on the same day of the week. To make this easier, create an editorial calendar to plan out your blog content and posting schedule ahead of time. Corners are commonly cut in last-minute content creation – tedious SEO best practices often being the first to go. If you know this struggle is real for you, head over to our post on how to create consistent content.

Create a Post Around a Specific Keyword

The key to effective SEO is to write your blog with searchability in mind. Your posts need to written to amplify a specific keyword. For example, this post focuses on “blog to improve your SEO” as its keyword. You will see how this keyword is in the blog title, blog url and the content of the post itself repeats the keyword (just the right amount – repeating a keyword more than a few times in a post will penalize you). It is important as a business to target many related keywords as it gives more opportunity to rank on Google and similar. Not just your business name or key service. Unique keywords, too that are less competitive will give you the upper hand in SEO. If you’re stuck on the best SEO keywords and phrases that apply to your business, take the time to determine your client’s pain points.

Create Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content that is continually relevant and stays “fresh” for readers – no matter when they happen to come across it. It does not include seasonal or time-sensitive content (unless your business is seasonal focused). But why are evergreen blogs good for SEO? Because they can live forever, delivering traffic and leads over a long period of time. The age of a website (or post) is a point in your favor regarding SEO. These blog posts will often rank higher in search than your website for certain keywords and boost Google’s perception of your authority. All leads to better SEO. Evergreen content can include:

  • Top Tips or Advice
  • Instructional “How To” Tutorials
  • Inspirational ideas
  • Audience or Service-specific

Take a gander through our blog posts over the last few months and you will see how most are evergreen content that will be relevant for months to come. ‘Old’ evergreen content is also easy to reshare on your social media feeds, maximizing your efforts.

HyperLinks

There are two types of links that you can include in your blog posts: internal and external. External links lead to a site outside of your own web domain. Meanwhile, internal links go somewhere else on your own website. You should always aim to use 1-2 of each type of hyperlink. The goal of links is to build authority as Google sees linking between sites as a confirmation of your relevancy and influence on a topic (ranking those with more links higher). Internal links also encourage readers to dive further into your website (and more specifically, your sales funnel). Word of caution here: you can’t rig the system by peppering your posts with links. Google will actual penalize this tactic.

Use Yoast SEO for WordPress

For our fellow WordPressers out there, Yoast SEO needs to be your SEO best friend. A search engine optimization plug-in for WordPress, Yoast will assist you in creating SEO friendly content for each post, offering tips to improve as you craft your post as well as a training academy. You can also set your focus keyword, meta description and improve the post’s readability with YoastSEO. Other web platforms have similar SEO tools built-in but they only work if you use them and work best when you use them for every post (and page) on your site.

Play the Long Game

Using your blog to improve your SEO is a game of patience – all SEO is really. Ultimately, Google is ranking the longest standing websites, with regularly posted, relevant content, confirmed by links the highest. It takes time to build your blog archive but when you have done it using these SEO best practices, you will reap the rewards of your efforts. Play the long game!

Is your business growing, and you need all the marketing things but don’t have the time to (or interest in) keep up with blogs? Let us do it for you! A partnership with Path & Compass takes over the work of implementing strategic plans & marketing services that will make your business and your life better. Sign up for a FREE coaching call with our founder Krista, or grab our New Business Checklist below, to make sure your ducks are in a row.

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