How to SEO optimize your blog posts

As the digital society evolves it becomes increasingly more difficult to draw the spotlights in your direction. But there are ways and one of the most effective ones is to SEO optimize your content. Sounds hard? No worries, in this blog post we will go through how and, even more importantly, why this is the way to go.

Let’s start with the basics: What is SEO? SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. The idea behind SEO is to improve your visibility when people search for products or services related to your business area in Google or other search engines. Since the majority of people tend to use Google as their main search engine, that is usually the platform where the SEO-optimization takes place. It’s not rocket science to say that the better visibility your company gets, the bigger the chances are to gain attention and in the end – expand your business. 

What is SEO?

People around the world do trillions of searches every year and more often than not with the intention to find answers about services and products. This means that SEO actually is a central part of digital marketing and implementing it is often a way to success. Despite sounding easy, SEO-optimizing your content takes some thought as the algorithms are becoming increasingly smarter. It is both about understanding what people are searching for online, and about meeting their requests by adding the keywords that they’re using. Do it better than your competitors and it will lead to your company being the top result to the most common searches within your field. 

Reverse engineer your content with keywords

Even though search engines are becoming rapidly smarter and better at evaluating content, using keywords is still a cornerstone in any SEO-strategy. When you’ve chosen a topic to create content around – do a keyword search. The keywords give you an insight to what your audience searches for; in this way you can reverse engineer your content by first finding out what your audience wants to know about and then producing it. Make sure to incorporate the words, preferably highlighted in headlines and table of contents, in order for the search engines to find your content and rank it as valuable. 

Better content – higher SEO-score

All tricks of using keywords, backlinks and metadata to optimize your SEO aside: Keep in mind that the content you create primarily are for the users – not the search engines. It might sound obvious but it’s actually easy to forget when the entire background to SEO is quite digital. SEO will help relevant people find your website, but the quality of the content is what makes them stay, which in turn will make the alorightms favor your content and rank you higher. Well-produced content is getting increasingly important as the alorightms get smarter and use more intelligent ways for evaluating, like semantic searches and Rich results. Since early 2010’s Google has moved away from analysing just keywords towards a more contextual comprehension of the content – partly accelerated by an increasing number of people using their voice and AI-assistants like Apple’s Siri or Google’s Alexa to search the web. 

In other words, algorithms are becoming better at understanding the intent of the queries asked and are no longer just looking at the words – valuing well-produced content more and putting it higher up in their search engines. For you as a marketer it means that you can’t solely rely on keywords to bring the traffic, but must make sure to create content that both clearly answers common queries and engages since a high bounce rate will affect your SEO negatively. Delivering content that holds a high standard basically equals setting a foundation to support all of your SEO efforts. So make sure that you don’t slack with your content production, as that will lead to all of the effort being for nothing. Use the following sites to research what most people wonder about in connection to your chosen topic and lay a foundation for your SEO:

• • AnswerThePublic – AnswerThePublic listens into autocomplete data from search engines like Google then quickly cranks out every useful phrase and question people are asking connected to your keyword. 

 

• • GoogleTrends – Google Trends is a free data exploration tool that lets marketers better understand what audiences are interested in and curious about, in real-time. Many marketers use this data as a way to gain insight into customer behavior.

 

• Rich Results – Rich results are  powered by structured data and can include carousels, images, or other non-textual elements. Over the last couple years we’ve developed the Rich Results Test to help you test your structured data and preview your rich results.

 

Never forget the audience

Alright, so let’s summarize what we’ve gone through. We’ve highlighted the fact that SEO-optimizing and content are linked together. While putting out SEO-friendly content you have to make sure that the content holds a high standard, because the better content you provide the users – the higher SEO score. Bearing this in mind you should also make sure that you spend some good time in searching for the most common keywords, queries and phrases around connected to your topic, as well as making sure that the text is still reader-friendly after adding them. SEO optimizing might seem overwhelming but if you consider these pointers you’re on the right track! 

Want to get started with your SEO strategy? Download our guide with hands-on advice.