Good things take time, and blog posts are no exception. Fellow blog writers will understand, the journey from topic selection through to publishing your work can command hours of our time.
Of course, if the blog post doesn’t generate the traffic you hoped for, it can leave you feeling a little deflated, especially after you dedicated so much time and effort into writing it.
Naturally, you’ll want your content to rank highly on Google so you have the best chance of being discovered and having people click through to your site. But how can you improve your ranking on Google?
3 magic words - Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short.
Help Google out through your use of headings, from H1 (your main title), to H2, H3 and H4, which should be used to break down the subtopics within your blog. This will help Google’s web crawlers understand what your blog is about and the different sections within it.
It’s easy to lose sight of the people your blog post is ultimately being written for, especially with all this SEO talk and trying to please Google. It’s important to write high-quality blogs with humans in mind, that answer the queries your target market has around your industry, products and services.
You want your page to load as fast as possible for the sake of creating a good user experience, but did you know Google rewards pages with fast loading speeds too?
Images can be lethal on your page loading speed if they’re not compressed to a smaller file size. This tends to become an issue if you have multiple images over 100KB each.
You shouldn’t have to compromise on quality either, and with free apps just like squoosh.app, you don’t have to!
You want your potential customers to find your content and an SEO friendly way to do this is by targeting the keywords they are searching for. But how do you know which keywords they’re searching for?
That’s where keyword research tools come in! One of the most popular sites is Ahrefs (the full version will require a paid subscription), however another popular site (and free to access) is Google Keyword Planner - it allows you to see what keywords users are searching for and their popularity by search volume and how those searches have changed over time.
If you want to rank well on Google, you should focus on building a link building strategy.
But what is link building? It’s the process of building the number of inbound links from other reputable, high quality websites. These are also referred to as backlinks.
A backlink essentially acts as a thumbs up to Google in saying that the content of your blog post is of good quality and worthy of being shared, which will allow Google to trust your content and increase your ranking on the search engine results page (SERP).
Writing for SEO (while keeping the human on the other end in mind) can help your content rank higher on Google, making it more discoverable among searchers. It’s important to know that you won’t see results right away, and that this process takes time and effort. Remember, good things are worth waiting for.
