It is common practice to advise small business owners to include a blog on their website. Browse any SEO advice column and you will find blogging listed as one of the critical components of a successful search engine optimization strategy.
Yet, how many small business owners are really finding outstanding success with their blog? If this advice is so ubiquitous online, why is it that many small business owners are frustrated that their blog is not bringing in traffic from search engines?
There are five ways you can turn your blog into an SEO Superstar.
Blog Length
It is important to recognize that Google analyzes over 200 different data points when deciding which website to rank in their search engine. Because there is such strong economic value associated with a page one ranking on Google, search engine optimization professionals track the search results very closely in an attempt to reverse-engineer the factors that Google uses to rank the website.
Up until a few years ago, it was widely believed that a blog post of 300 words was adequate to be considered “in-depth content.” In fact, Google had a specific algorithm update called the Panda release, which targeted thin content and short web pages that had been generated by programs rather than humans. They particularly took aim at database-driven websites that are common in e-commerce.
New trends are emerging around what defines in-depth content in Google’s eyes. Over the last few years, many organizations have done correlational studies to see just how long blog posts need to be to rank on page one. It turns out that the average position one ranking has a length of 1,700 words.
As you move down the page to positions seven, eight, and nine, you see the average number of words dropping to 600. Based on this data, it is easy to understand the importance of including very long blog posts on your website. The competition is writing 1,700 words, and you need to also. If you find this task daunting, consider outsourcing to a white label SEO content provider.
Searcher Intent
Just as important as length, it is critical that the content you put on your blog is actually helpful for the users being sent from the search engines. A new term has entered the lexicon in the last few years: “searcher intent.” This is a popular phrase that search engine optimization professionals use to talk about how effectively the blog content actually answers the questions the user was asking.
Remember that the business model for Google is to serve up useful information scraped from other people’s websites for free in return for showing ads to those users. Many people forget that Google is fundamentally an advertising platform and does not generate any unique content of their own.
The viability of Google’s search capabilities rests in the ability to quickly and efficiently give users what they are looking for. Many of the searches executed on Google’s platform are informational in nature. Google’s purpose is to provide in-depth (often lengthy) content that actually answers the specific query presented by the searcher.
So what does this mean for your blog post? It means that the days of writing blog posts filled with keywords in the hopes of being the most useful content online are probably over. Modern blogs have to do deeper research to really understand what the user is looking for and then develop excellent content that will satisfy those needs.
User Experience
The need for a positive user experience has also undergone a massive change in the last few years. If you are using a free template or default WordPress theme, you are in trouble. Websites need to stand out among the competition and be memorable.
More importantly, you want your users to stay on your website for a long time because they are both finding the answers to their questions and having an excellent experience on your interface. Many search engine optimization specialists believe that Google has started testing dwell time, or bounce rate, as a factor in their algorithm.
Whether or not Google really can track dwell time, and if they have included it in their mathematics, it is common sense that you want a strong user experience so that the people who do make it to your website stay on your website.
Look at modern blogs and pay attention to the presentation styles that they are using. If you examine closely, you’ll notice that the font size has gotten bigger over the last few years. Furthermore, there’s much less clutter on the page as many websites have moved to a cleaner design. In many cases the blog is center-justified and there are no side navigation bars on the left or right.
Modern webmasters are using A/B testing to see which presentation of their content encourages users to stay on-site longer. The data points to very long pages with very little clutter.
Backlinking Matters
The fourth reason your blog is not currently performing as strong as you’d like to in search engines is that you do not have adequate backlinks to each and every post on your website.
Many people found great success blogging in the past on highly authoritative websites and did not need to do specific backlink building to every blog post they published. This is changing.
If you examine the typical page one result on Google, you will find that it is a blog post of great length with a great user experience, and it has many backlinks to that specific page.
If you dive deeper and use a tool like ahrefs, you will see that the backlinks have anchor text that is highly sculpted but never too repetitive. The anchor text leading to the blog post will be relevant to the searcher intent, and great care will be taken to make sure there’s not too much repetition or an excessive use of money terms.
In many ways, backlink building to a specific blog post mirrors that which SEOs used to do to the homepage of a website when competition was lower. It is helpful to think of each blog post as a mini launch of a webpage, complete with backlinks to that specific location on the website.
For these reasons you will probably find that your ratio of content production needs to shift. You’re probably over-producing content and under-promoting that content. Many recommend an 80/20 approach to content production: 20% of the time allotted to blog marketing is spent on content generation while 80% is spent on promotion.
Email Is Part of the Magic
Finally, very successful bloggers use email marketing as part of their SEO strategy. While email may seem to be a very old, unsexy, technology, it is still pervasive in the daily lives of most professionals.
Smart marketers use this knowledge to their advantage and build a strong list of people who are interested in their content. This helps extend their audience and re-engage users who had been to the website but had long-forgotten the URL.
Use an email blast to let your users know that you have generated excellent content that they might be interested in. This will bring users back to the website, sending all sorts of strong social and time-on-site signals to Google. It may also be integral in landing organic links from that audience who was predisposed to like your content.
Conclusions
Making your blog an SEO Superstar is a vastly different exercise than it was a few years ago. Blogs are getting much longer as Google prefers in-depth content. Search engine technology has evolved to predict what content will answer a search user’s query, and bloggers are capitalizing on this knowledge to position their website as an authority on a topic. User experience needs to be excellent, presenting a clutter-free blog with easy-to-read, larger fonts. Backlinks are needed to each and every post on the website, meaning that you will probably need to change your content production schedule to ensure adequate resources are funneled into promotion. Finally, smart marketers use their email list to generate repeat visitors and link opportunities.
If you use the five tips in this article consistently over the next six months, you will see drastically different results from your blog than you have seen before.