B2B marketers who create blogs receive 67% more leads than those that do not. If you’re continually updating your blog posts with regular news articles, industry insights and informative content you are more likely to attract high quality leads. However, many bloggers fail to take of advantage of their marketing potential due to irregular blog posting and failing to optimise blog posts to include keywords. Including SEO into your blogs allows you to create content that essentially markets itself for free.
When writing a blog post, you want to keep your readers interested, therefore you need to focus on writing unique and quality content. If people understand and like your text, they are much more inclined to share and engage with the post.
How To Get Started On Your Blog
Plan your keywords
Before you start writing content for search engines, you should invest some time in doing some keyword research to better understand which terms drive the most traffic. In regards to SEO, you should choose a key term that is broad enough to get searched, but specific enough so you’ll have a better chance to start ranking for it. A great tool to use is Google AdWords: Keyword Planner, with which Google will bring up search volumes, competition level and CPC for the key phrases you have entered, to then allow you to easily search and select popular keywords that are best suited to your blog topic.
Once you have targeted a couple of valuable and relevant keywords, search engine crawlers will begin to index your content. When placing your key terms in your blog you should try to distribute them in the following places:
- The title
- Headings & subheadings
- Anchor text
- Title and meta description tags
- In the body of your article
It is also strongly advised to avoid keyword stuffing, as this could irritate your readers, as well as damaging your content’s readability. Keyword stuffing is also highly frowned upon by Google, and could hurt your search visibility.
Include high quality links
A great way to add value to your blog post is by including links to reliable sources. If you mention a blogger or article, including a reference can build content credibility and authority. Quality links are a valuable source for any site looking to rank higher in search engine result. Including a link may even result in a link back, therefore improving your audience reach and content marketing.
You should consider inserting links when:
- They are written by a reliable source or hosted on credited domain.
- They add value to your post
- They are related to your subject title
Use The Yoast SEO plugin
Using the Yoast SEO plugin can help you to write a more SEO-friendly blog post. The plugin is a content analysis tool that streamlines your site to see if keywords are positioned in the right places. The plugin automatically tests the important areas of your content to ensure quality standards are met. It will indicate the strength and performance of your post with a traffic light signal, more green bullets will help you improve the rankings for your website pages.
We hope this blog has helped you to understand more about the basics of SEO for business bloggers. Please get in touch with us to find out how we can help you with your content marketing strategy.
