SEO-Friendly Practices to Increase Blog Traffic

When writing a blog to promote your business, one of the goals is to get your website into a good position where a large audience can see it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial process for any business to incorporate into its blog. It can significantly affect where your blog is placed in search engine results. We break down several SEO-friendly practices to increase blog traffic.

Choosing Effective Keywords

Choosing effective keywords is one of the most SEO-friendly practices. Excellent keyword choices can improve organic traffic to your business’ website. Here are the steps to selecting the right keywords.

1. Step into your audience’s shoes

Consider what search terms your target demographic is most likely to use if searching for your product or service on a search engine. These terms often use few words and do not necessarily use punctuation. For example, a suitable keyword for an athletic clothing company can be “athletic clothes men” or “women athletic clothes.”

Another way to find out what keywords are commonly searched is to use a search engine’s autocomplete feature. Once you start typing a search term, a list of related words will appear underneath the search bar. These are commonly searched terms that people have used and can give you some ideas of what keywords to use.

In addition, many keyword research tools can show popular search terms and competition levels.

2. Determine search intent

What is your clientele looking to do when they come to your page? Keywords are sorted into several categories based on intent. These are:

• Navigational – user wants to find something
• Informational – researching a topic
• Commercial – buy something

A keyword such as “clinic location hours” will differ from “side effects of a medication.” The former is an example of a navigational keyword, while the latter is an informational keyword. Ideally, you will want to incorporate keywords in all three categories on your blog.

3. Search for low-competition keywords

Choosing highly competitive keywords can make it harder for your blog to get a good position in search results since established websites often use them. One way to get around this dilemma is to choose low-competition keywords. Low-competition keywords are search terms that websites with a small search presence can use to rank relatively quickly. Sometimes these keywords do not have any major or high-quality sites ranking for them, providing you an opportunity to use them for your blog. Incorporating low-competition keywords can help a new blog rapidly increase traffic and hit major milestones quickly.

Use Internal Links When Applicable

One of the most SEO-friendly practices for blogs is using internal linking. Internal linking brings readers to website pages on the same domain by hyperlinking words or terms on your blog that relate to another page.

For instance, a blog about filing taxes may refer to a related aspect in its copy, such as tax credits. Suppose you have another blog post about tax credits. In that case, this presents an excellent opportunity to increase organic traffic to that article while helping Google find, index, and crawl pages on your website. This is referred to as contextual linking, which can help your reader learn more about the topic they are reading.

There are other methods for internal linking, including using authority pages, which are pages that include several backlinks. You can use tools such as Semrush or Google Search Console to determine which are your website’s top pages and link from them to your newest blog posts. Another strategy that can boost your lower-ranking posts is to reduce page depth, which refers to the number of clicks away from the homepage a user must travel to reach the page. Ideally, you want to keep the number of clicks to access your web pages at three or less.

No matter which strategy(s) you use, ensure each link leads to a relevant page and that you are not excessively or arbitrarily including internal links, which may make your blog appear spammy and result in a poor user experience. An effective internal linking campaign can boost engagement rates and improve your blog’s search engine placement.

Blog Regularly

Another way to make your blog SEO-friendly is to post regularly to generate leads and organic traffic for your blog. If your business is new, posting once or twice a week is likely to be a good balance between writing blog posts and other responsibilities. If you have a team of content creators, it is a good idea to post several times per week.

The ideal amount of blog posts per week also depends on your business and whether you have enough ideas to create content. While you want to post content regularly, you don’t want to overdo it to the point that quality content goes down. In addition, blogging too frequently has diminishing returns after around 30 posts per month. It can hurt your SEO rankings through keyword cannibalization, where two posts directly compete in the search engine results.

Posting quality blog posts regularly can help you bring in a loyal audience that is more likely to buy your product or service and subsequently help you save time and money on efforts to bring in new leads.

A blog incorporating SEO-friendly aspects is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing strategies to bring traffic to your website. If you want to write an engaging blog for your business, let us know how we can help.