A blog is a great tool for business marketing. It offers numerous benefits to businesses who can maintain their blogs. For instance, a blog:
- Increases your authority as a knowledgeable provider of whatever goods or services are your primary focus
- Introduces your business to your readers, allowing them to get to know your brand’s personality
- Helps acquire customers less expensively than other forms of marketing like direct mail or TV ads
Even with these (and many more) benefits, most businesses do not maintain blogs. Are you one of them? If yes, what is stopping you?
If you’re like most business owners, you don’t blog because you don’t think anyone will see what you write. The adage, “If you build it, they will come,” simply isn’t ringing true for you.
Luckily, there are ways for you to increase your blog traffic and build a reliable readership.
9 Simple SEO Steps for Bringing More Readers to Your Blog
If you can write great content that connects with readers and provides valuable information, you’re most of the way to getting great blog traffic. Be sure to take advantage of these search engine optimization (SEO) tips to bring your blog the rest of the way.
- Keep your title tags and meta descriptions short. The search engines scan only about 65 characters so a lengthy title tag does not improve blog performance. Meta descriptions should be kept to 155 or shorter.
- Make sure the meta description tag describes the content of your blog post. This is important for getting searchers to click through to your site after seeing the description tag in the search results.
- Optimize your content for synonyms. If you are writing about shoes, also use the term “footwear.” If you are operating a tutoring service, use words such as “teaching,” “instruction,” and “coaching.” Pull out your trusty thesaurus and read customer reviews to learn what words they use.
- Remember to link. Include at least one link in your blog content and ensure that the link contains a relevant keyword.
- Keep important phrases readable. If you want search engines to index a certain word or phrase, such as your company name, don’t hide it inside an image.
- Include alt text for all images. Alt text is the phrase used to describe the image. This provides the search engines a searchable description of the image.
- Include transcripts. If you have audio and video on your blog, provide a transcript that search engines can index.
- Sprinkle in keywords and phrases. Don’t stuff keywords into the content or links. Not only does it make the content hard to read, but it also can result in a lower ranking in the search engines.
- Use your keyword phrase and its variations strategically. A good rule of thumb is to use it in the title tag, near the top of the page, at least twice in the rest of the content, in the URL, in any alt text, and in the meta description.
This Is Just the Tip of the SEO Iceberg
After you tackle these nine steps, we guarantee you’ll see some improvement in traffic. Even still, there are many other ways to use SEO to improve the visibility of your blog. But if you would rather focus on your business than write and optimize blog posts, help is available.
