How blogging can help you with SEO 

 

Blogging has been a huge topic recently, but not everyone realizes that blogging can be utilised for SEO improvement and help you rank higher on SERP.

How can blogging help your website rank higher on the search engine results page?

 

Here are some of the reasons:

• Each blog post is a new index page on your website, making your website bigger and stronger. 
• Blog posts can be interlinked to each other and back to your website, creating a network of internal links. Think of it like a spider-web, you are building your web bigger and stronger, connecting pages together via links. 
• Blog posts tend to be the kind of content that people naturally want to share, creating more backlinks and increasing ranking and authority. – read more about Why building links between websites is good for SEO.

 

Below, I will share with you the three main tactics to use in blogging, that can help improve your websites SEO: 

• Topical Relevance
• Optimizing Featured Snippets
• Historical Optimization

 

The topical relevance of a blog post.

Topical Relevance  –  As people ask more complex questions from the search engines, there has been a recent shift from keywords to topics. 

The AI is constantly improving and adjusting itself and it has pushed the search engines to evolve, by using different, new and improved algorithms to find, sort and rank content.

For your website to be displayed in SERP and ranked on a high position – you will need to create content across a broader topic, rather than just focus on one keyword.

 

Determine the topics that relate to your company’s message and make sure to cover all of these topics in your blogs. It may be helpful to really have a think about what your customer is interested in and what they would like to know about.

 

For example – let’s imagine you are a yoga teacher advertising your business. Instead of just writing about your yoga classes, you should consider covering a range of topics within the broader theme of health and wellness.

These could include: 

• Mindfulness – and how yoga is connected to it; 

• How to ease back pain with certain poses; 

• How to build a habit of practicing yoga; 

• How to make time for yoga; 

• Benefits of taking a class versus practicing at home; 

• etc

 

Pillar Pages and Topic Clusters for Structured Blogging

When you build up a little subtopics like this, you can link them together, link them to your *pillar page and link them in social posts – creating *topic clusters – and eventually covering the whole broader topic and at the same time keep building more and more backlinks that are connected to your website. 

This is how you gradually become a thought leader in your industry. Your posts will start appearing more in searches and people will start referring to you for advice.

 

A good idea is to take all the frequently asked questions on that topic, and create a blog post for each of them.

 

• Pillar page is a webpage full of relevant content to cover your main topic broadly, touching briefly on all your subtopics and linking to your blog posts. This is the back-bone for your topic cluster and linking system.
• Topic cluster is a collection of content relating to the same main topic. They are all linked together, for example, all the blog posts linking to one Pillar page and also to each other where suitable.

 

Optimizing Featured Snippets for SEO

Features snippets are something that started appearing in Google searches a few years ago and forced a lot of companies to change some elements of their SEO strategy.

Google result:

A featured snippet is a summary of an answer to a user’s query, which is displayed on top of Google search results. It’s extracted from a webpage, and includes the page’s title and URL. 

 

There are three types of snippets, depending on the query:

 

• Paragraph – should be fewer than 50 words
• List – includes 7 lines
• Table – 

 

Featured snippets are taking over the search results, and are appearing twice as often than a few years ago.

They appear most when using voice search, which is becoming more and more popular.

Basically – Google is pulling little snippets from the highest ranking websites that it finds to be most relevant to the search query.

 

To optimize your content to be featured as snippets, focus on the blog posts that are already ranking higher, to be more successful. 

 

Structure your post, so that it has a clear summary of the topic on top, that could be used as a quick answer to the main question addressed in the post; or start with a list of items, that could easily be displayed as a snippet.

 

Pay attention to clear formatting, as this affects what is pulled into snippets.

 

Proper formatting should be as follows:

• H1 Overall Page Title
• H2 Sub-header
• H3’s List items

 

Be sure to remove any html spam tags from the headers.

 

Historical Optimization as a Blogging Strategy

We are all about recycling nowadays, so why let your old blog post go to waste.

Optimize your old, outdated blog posts! This is one of the most efficient ways to increase your SEO.

This option is obviously best for blogs that have been around for a long time, and may not be suitable for everyone.

This is a great option, as you are optimizing something that already has some authority built up. Export a list of all your posts and sort them by highest organic traffic – these are the ones you want to focus on.

 

You want to make sure your post will be accurate, fresh and comprehensive, start by doing the following:

• Add new sections
• Add more detail
• Include lists if possible
• Update all outdated information
• Optimize for featured snippets

 

Then treat it like a brand new post, and promote it as you would any new post.

 

Creating a Solid Blogging Structure for SEO

 

This may all seem overwhelming at first, but once you break it down to smaller junks, it will seem much more possible to reach your goal. If you would like some more help with planning and goal setting, have a look at our article about smart goals.

The first thing is to break your main topic apart and determine all the sub topics. The main topic will be your Pillar page, then all the blogs that link out to it.

Start creating the content and the linking logistics one step at the time.

Soon you will start to see the web of content come together. The next thing is to prepare Social media posts for each topic, so you can share this on social and link to your blog posts creating some traffic and backlinks.

If you have enough topics, you can create a yearly schedule that can pretty much repeat year to year with some updates where required. Once it’s set up, it can be fully automated.

 

 

MMR is a Melbourne based Creative Agency, focusing on problem-solving in different areas. We specialise in graphic design, digital, marketing, SEO and Data Cleaning.

 

More related articles:

• Introduction to Inbound Marketing Strategy
• Digital Marketing to help you grow your business
• Working with Agencies.

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