When you add fresh content to your website with blog posts, search engines really take notice. But do you know how to maximize that 'SEO juice"? Yes, I totally made up a term by expanding the slang term link juice to cover ALL aspects of search engine optimization, not just the flow between internal and external links. Let's dig in to all the aspects needed to maximize the SEO juice to that fresh website content added with blogging.
Regular blogging on your company's website is great, it keeps current clients learning more and staying engaged. You can also use this fresh content to share as resources or examples of your expertise with prospects who are in various stages of the buyers journey. However, in order for blogging content to pull people to your website like we teach with inbound marketing methods, you also have to include search engine optimization tactics (SEO) to your blogging skill set.
A well written blog post just isn't enough these days. We live in a digital age where people are searching for information on the internet (or with Siri and Alexa) multiple times a day. SEOTribunal reported that an average person conducts 3–4 searches every single day.
My search habits are much higher for sure, are yours?
As an editor-in-chief, Adam Pasch was averaging 76 searches per day! I'm not nearly as active as Adam, but I'd say using Alexa to find information has definitely increased my search volume. But what happens after we've searched? According to Brightedge, in 2018 50% of website traffic came from organic searches. Search engines make that possible by crawling through pages on the internet and indexing those pages so that when you type in a search they can match it with pages they have indexed. Needless to say, if you aren't making your blog posts indexable by search engines, you could be missing out on a lot of traffic!
So, how do you get your blog content noticed by search engines?
A while back, we compiled a list of best practices to create blog posts for SEO and provided it as a downloadable offer on our resources page. It walks you through not only the actions that you need to take but helps explain those aspects along the way. Here are the main things you need to keep in mind for optimizing your blog post:
- Do your Keyword Research
- Write to Your Audience
- Descriptive Title in under 70 Characters
- SEO Rich Body Text
- Enticing Meta Description in under 160 Characters
- Images with Alt Text
You can download your own copy of the blog checklist from our website resources section.
However, for those able to invest in a marketing automation tool, HubSpot makes this optimization process so much easier! HubSpot has an optimize button in the sidebar within the blogging portal that prompts you with each SEO rich aspect! I made a quick video for you about what it looks like and how it helps.
See how much easier that is with the HubSpot tool? If you want to know more about blogging in HubSpot, Amber created a great tutorial blog post a while back that you can also review.
Whether you have access to HubSpot's blogging portal or not, it really is worth your time to optimize your blog posts for SEO so you can entice both search engines and prospects with your educational content for years to come!
