How to Optimize Your Blog Posts for Search

Blogging is one of those digital marketing practices that is not only considered a “best” practice, but is generally considered the keystone to any content-based digital marketing strategy. However, the majority of company blogs are often squandered opportunities for a number of reasons, the most common of which being that after writing a well-researched, compelling blog post, many bloggers fail to optimize that post for search.

While investing in quality writing and research are both of paramount importance, below is a list of practices and tools you should be using to both accelerate and optimize the blogging process for your company.

• Generating Topics: When choosing a topic, looking at keyword volume is without a doubt one of the most important and overlooked steps of blogging. If you have a topic, put in a number of phrases and keywords associated with that topic into Google AdWords. This powerful tool will then generate up to 800 keywords and phrases with the monthly search volume and PPC bid price listed for each one. Download these ideas into a spreadsheet, sort them by search volume, and pepper your title and content with those relevant words with the highest search volume.
• Doing Research: Of course, no matter how many searches are associated with a certain keyword, if you don’t write a quality, well-researched article that actually appeals to your audience’s interests, your blog posts will quickly fade into the virtual ether. Look at what other competitors have written about your chosen topic and figure out a unique spin that will attract new traffic. Tools such as BuzzSumo and Impactana will help to show you the most shared articles for a given topic.
• The Writing Process: Most people fear the writing part of blogging the most, but by focusing on optimizing the article for both readers and search engines, the process should become easier. Of course, there are still plenty of free tools to help make sure your content reads well, such as Grammarly, which provides extremely in-depth error and grammar checking to ensure that your article is free of grammar errors, something that can prevent others from linking to or sharing your content. Finally, if you are using WordPress, than the WordPress plugin is a no-brainer as it quickly and easily helps you to ensure your article is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase.
• Outreach: Last but not least, be sure to use such tools as Sendible, which is a social media management tool that allows you to quickly share your article across a large number of social networks. One other trick to keep in mind is to use a tool like BuzzBundle or HootSuite, which both allow you to search for related questions about your content topic and identify people talking about it, providing you a chance to show off your expertise and even earn a link in the outreach process.