The Best Blog Tactics that Drive SEO Results

According to Hubspot, companies that run and maintain a blog get 97% more inbound inquiries and 53% of marketers say that creating blog content is their main inbound marketing priority. So, it’s obvious then, that creating informative, valuable content for users is of the upmost importance.

By creating content that is relevant to your user’s questions, blogging boosts your SEO quality, specifically blog posts that use a variety of on-page SEO methods that give you more opportunities to rank in search engines and drive users to your website.

It all starts with the right keywords

The foundation of any successful SEO campaign is routed in the keyword research. When writing a blog post, it’s extremely useful to look into what kind of keywords you want to rank for before you start the writing process.

The easiest and most cost-effective way of researching your keywords is by using Google Keyword Planner. This gives you valuable insight into what kinds of keywords and phrases people are searching for and their search volume.

While the numbers aren’t necessarily 100% accurate as Google might have us believe, they are the closest indication we have of how much traffic could potentially come from various keywords. All you need to do is input some of the keywords you think will be relevant and Google will even show you some other keyword suggestions.

Is content still king?

Content marketing and SEO are by no means the same thing, though they do complement each other very well. You will have heard all over the internet the phrase “content is king”. And since Bill Gates said that phrase, it’s still not as simple as that. Most people would interpret this idea to mean one or more of the following:

·         Write more content

·         Write more often

·         Write popular content

·         Just write something…

·         Or ask it this from your Digital Marketing Agency Leeds!

While regular, longer and meaningful content is looked upon favourably by Google and other search engines, you need to produce content that matters, or rather, content that people are likely to bookmark, link to and share.

Focusing on quality content is one of the best ways to get your content ahead of the competition.

Content quality impresses Google

From an SEO perspective, quality is important because Google measures it. While this might seem fairly difficult to believe, it is true. Google can measure content quality in many ways. Infact, one of the most recent Google updates; Panda, is specifically focused on content quality.

These are some of the best SEO tips to help you rank your content:

·         Content length – longer, much more informative and detailed content has a much better chance of ranking higher.

·         Multimedia – add images and video, particularly YouTube videos. Google owns YouTube.

·         References and citations – the best content is well researched.

·         Low bounce rate – It’s important that people don’t just visit your content, but they also stay there.

While Google can’t exactly read your content as such, it can measure the quality of it. So it’s worth keeping these quality factors in mind when creating content – the extra details can often make all the difference.

Sites that have poorer quality content have slowly disappeared from the Google rankings and unless you have a good SEO strategy in place, it’s likely that you’ll disappear from the Google rankings too.

On page SEO tactics you should do every time

The following is a simple breakdown of the areas in you your content you should be paying attention to every time you publish:

·         URL – Your URL should be relatively short, include your keywords and not be sentence.

·         Title – This plays more than one role within your SEO strategy because it is your post title – it appears on Google results pages. Make sure that it includes your keywords (providing it makes sense) and keep it between 55-60 characters.

·         Meta Description – Users won’t be able to see this on the actual blog post, but your meta description are the blurb people will read in a Google search result. Include your keywords if you can and keep it less than 155 characters.

·         Ask your SEO agency Leeds to create a SEO strategy.

There are other factors that can affect the performance of your on-page SEO that we can’t cover in sufficient depth here, though it is recommended that you do further research into on-page SEO and getting your content to rank.