In the second part of our three-part series on the What, How and Why of SEO and how it relates to your blog, we’ll be exploring why your blog needs SEO (you can find the first post SEO For Bloggers: A Basic Explanation here).
The reasons for writing a blog are varied, from sharing your knowledge to earning income, but they all depend on attracting, maintaining and growing an audience. You can have a blog filled with great writing and information, but if no one reads it, all you have is a diary.
The Importance of SEO
Now for some sobering facts. At any given time there are approximately 164 million blogs in circulation, yet 80% of those stagnate with readership numbers of less than a thousand, and many with, as the industry maxim goes, readerships of one.
A common process with bloggers, especially when starting out, is to pump out content, a “build it and they will come” approach. This is pointless and an approach that will only dishearten your efforts in building a loyal readership. If you weren’t attracting readers with five blog posts, what makes you think writing ten more will change anything?
So how do you increase your readership base? Well, promotion is the key, along with the ability of your blog to be found. That’s where SEO comes in.
Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the process used to write and structure your blog in such a way as to raise your search engine rankings. When done correctly it means more people finding and reading your blog. Here’s why:
SEO Is Cost-Effective Marketing
In the search for more readers, many blog owners resort to advertising on social media or paying for ads on other blogs. This approach will usually cost you money. Typically, not what a blogger wants. Utilise the power of SEO to:
- Accurately pinpoint your audience – achieving better results than ads
- Save money by researching and writing your own campaign
- Customise your SEO campaigns to target exactly the type of reader you want visiting your blog
- Increase Return-On-Investment with custom marketing using SEO techniques and keyword analysis
Be Searched. Be Found.
Readers looking for blogs like yours have a great way to find them, and that is using search engines. Google and the like are this generation’s phone books, handy ways to look up any business or entity to find out where to contact them. Google does its part by sending out its robot (Googlebot) to crawl your site, searching for relevant information. It then uses this information to catalogue the individual pages. The closer your blog posts come to answering reader’s questions, the more likely they are to rank high.
Search engine optimisation is just that: optimising your page to get the best possible rankings for a given search phrase. By following simple SEO principles, traffic from Google and other search engines can grow quickly. Even tweaking small details, such as making filenames descriptive instead of image009.jpg can help posts rank higher.
A Better Reader Experience
Structuring your blog posts with SEO in mind makes for a much better reader experience. Informative, entertaining, and succinct posts will keep readers returning and help build a loyal following. Other points to follow that create a superior reader experience are:
- Focus each post on a single key phrase group, to avoid posts wandering off topic
- Make your site uniform across all pages to appear more professional
- Compress your images to ensure faster load times
- Match all page and image titles to relate to the page content
- Links on your pages should only lead to legitimate, relevant posts and sites
Roll With The Changes
SEO is in a constant state of flux. Every time you think it is perfect, a Google update can upset the balance. The regular updates that Google conducts means your SEO must be a dynamic process to maintain high rankings. Keep abreast of Google and its various updates and tweak your site accordingly. Evolving your SEO will ensure you continue to deliver quality posts to your readers.
Leading The Competition
If you have competition in your niche that you’re eager to overtake, SEO is one of the simplest ways to do it. This works especially well if your competitor has poor quality search engine optimisation. They may have a greater budget or more time to work on their site, but if their pages aren’t optimised as well as yours, you will hold the SEO advantage. That means a greater opportunity for your site to rise in the rankings with a potential drop for the competition.
A simple, successful search can lead a vast amount of readership to your blog. To be searched and found entails you spending some time understanding and implementing an SEO strategy that makes your blog easier to discover. You want your blog to stand out from your competition, increasing your readership base and offering you the chance to monetise your blog. SEO is a powerful tool that can leverage your efforts for great returns.
Jim Stewart, CEO of StewArt Media, is a recognised digital marketing expert. Jim is ProBlogger’s SEO expert and will share his vast SEO knowledge to equip you with the systems and skills to optimise and monetise your blog using tried and tested techniques. What Jim doesn’t know about SEO and blogging isn’t worth knowing.
Hey Jim,
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an area that most bloggers will never get into in any real depth. At the highest level, very technical minded people are testing and tracking things to optimize search rankings for their websites and blogs.
Search engine traffic serves to bring in new visitors to your blog. Eventually, thanks for sharing your best ideology regarding this subject.
With best wishes,
Amar kumar
Great insights.
I’ve been doing SEO for years and I know SEO is an ocean.
You never know when Google changes its game (aka algorithms) to improve or degrade your site rankings. So make sure to always focus on pleasing people instead of worrying too much about the latest updates.
Also focus on your site speed and competitors. Find out what they are ranking for and beat them by creating compelling content.
That’s how you win!
What great insights you have given us–thank you Jim!!
Drafting and publishing new Blog Post doesn’t finish your job – you have to do proper SEO & make it visible to people who are looking for these kind of stuff.
Thank you for your encouragement and help!!
Pumping out content at the start is actually the smartest move you can make. In fact, doing a little seo for 5 interlinked, interconnected posts with roughly the same keyword-domain will lead to soooooooooooooo much better results than doing a loooot of seo and only a couple of posts.
the second smartest move is buying links (from a good vendor). As these sites/links are blocking scrawls by most of the useless research tools most seo guys use (like moz, ahref etc), your competition will keep wondering, how you rank so well.
Thanks. This helped. But is there a good way to reduce bounce rate? I have worked a bit and linked more contents internally. It lowered but is still high.
Hey Shanjei,
Bounce rate depend on your blogs active time if its good then your bounce came down automatically. You have to work on your blog length “Bigger is Better” use some infographics and images.
Putting a video is best for you.
I hope this will help you little bit.
Thanks
Best Regards
Sandeep Sitoke
Hi Shanjei,
I just visited your site to find out what related to bounce rate are.
Some of the things I can suggest are:
1. Use font size that makes readers feel comfortable reading. As an ideal comparisons are problogger and neilpatel.com.
2. Do not use too long paragraphs. People will quickly get bored reading so get away from your blog. Maximum of 3 lines for each paragraph is good.
3. Use a more prominent link color, so people are tempted to open it.
4. Use bullet points for list.
5. Use more appealing and quite prominent images.
6. Provide a more in-depth reviews so readers see you as someone that really good in the topic you write (use google to find more information about your topic). They will believe in you. It will get them interested in looking at your other reviews.
7. You should focus on one niche only.
I wish this helps and success for you.
Hi Jim,
Search engine optimization is essential because, majority of search engines users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the results pages (SERP’s), so to take advantage of this and gain visitors to your web site or customers to your online store you need to in the top positions, Thanks for sharing this article.
The thing about seo is that it’s slow and hard to measure. How many of those views are because the content got better and how many just for seo?
SEO is always important, but is it worth it to spend extra time on it building backlinks and stuff? Or the site would benefit more with greater content and organic backlinks?
Most of the blogs aren’t optimized. Being a newbie, I have been following ProBlogger since past couple months. You guys have helped me a lot. Thanks for everything.
Seo is very necessary to each blogs. After SEO our blogs can reach to a good position. we can do On page and off page SEo. both are very necessary to increase our blog traffic and ranking. We should optimise our sites and optimize images also.
Hello Jim,
SEO is considered as one of the fundamental elements of your blog promotion strategy. SEO helps you to build your online presence. It helps you to rank your site in Search Engines. You have mentioned some good facts and tips about SEO here.
Very true.
We can never learn to much,and as long as the search engines keep updating,we need to stay prepared,so thanks.
Great article Jim, a “must read” for every blogger. One aspect of writing for search engine discoverability is the importance of conducting keyword research before you starting writing. I am constantly amazed at how a simple tweak of a few words can easily be seen to drive 200-300% more organic traffic. One recent example, I was writing for a tax lawyer and even though nearly everyone in his market was optimizing for variations of ‘tax lawyer’, it turns out that the keyword ‘tax attorney’ was driving a whole lot more organic traffic. Now, I didn’t keyword stuff and worked in variations, but you can bet, ‘tax attorney’ was a prominent phrase in my article.
Hey,
You are absolutely right. Keyword variation is a must for blog post as it drives more traffic to your blog and also saves you from keywords stuffing which is a black hat technique according to google.
Yes, SEO and blogging very much go hand in hand. Blogging can help you when targeting keywords while optimizing for SEO will help those posts rank for said keywords. Great post.
It’s amazing how blogging is completely overlooked as an SEO factor by companies who think there is some other magical factor that can double their traffic as blogging can certainly do.
SEO is must for a blog. If your blog is not optimized according to the latest google updates you can easily lost your ranking and even you high quality content would not reach the targeted audience. So, starting a people the first to focus is Content and after that you should focus on SEO to make a great ranking.
I feel like most bloggers do it as a passion project and don’t see it truly as a business. More reason why when they’re told how much a proper SEO agency costs they opt to do it themselves. Time is a virtue that we all don’t have an unlimited amount of, and wasting it on things that you aren’t the best at degrade from utilizing that time to the things that can push you forward.
Great SEO tips and right on the money! I wouldn’t expect anything less from the folks at ProBlogger!
Install the Yoast plugin on your wordpress blog to SEO optimize your blog.
You are so right! SEO and content marketing is the gift that keeps on giving. Thank you for your article.