Optimizing your blog posts will enable you to attract your ideal clients and turn them into customers. That’s according to a HubSpot survey that showed that 56% of consumers buy from a company after reading its blog posts.
Hence, you have to learn how to optimize your blogs to remain competitive. In the next few steps, I’ll industry strategies that businesses around the world use to make their blogs SEO-friendly.
1: Identify Your Ideal Client
When starting a brick-and-mortar business, you have to ensure there’s demand for your product and service. You do this by identifying who needs that product – is it mothers, women in general, men, or children of a certain age?
The process is the same for an online business.
First, define who needs your product. Describe their age, location, behavior, interests, knowledge of the product, and anything else that makes these people unique.
The description you have is called a buyer persona. Note that you can have more than one type of buyer persona. List all your buyer personas then head to the next step.
2: Find Keywords for Your Blogs
A keyword is a phrase that customers are using to find services or information about your product online. A few minutes ago, you typed a phrase on Google and then came across this blog on the results. That phrase you typed is a keyword.
Now, every blog that you’ll post on your website will have a primary keyword. That’s why you need to find as many keywords as the number of blogs you’ll write. You may start with a hundred keywords. Write SEO-friendly blog posts for these keywords. Then find more after you’ve exhausted that list.
To find keywords, you’ll need tools like:
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Keywords Everywhere (there are many other tools online).
One of the best strategies to find keywords is to find the phrases competitors are ranking for. Then try and outsmart your competitors by writing superior SEO-friendly content.
3: Create an Attractive Blog Title
Remember that time you went to the store and overstayed in the shoe aisle? Then to get yourself out of the store before you were mistaken for a weirdo, you picked that shoe that caught your eye, even though you hadn’t planned to buy it.
You want a blog post title that’s as attractive as that shoe or even more. A title that your ideal clients will click without scrolling further.
Here are some good titles from various sites that made me click on their website:
Hubspot: Do Blog Posts Actually Lead to Purchases [New Data]
The title is attractive because it promises new data that answers the question of whether blog posts lead to purchases.
Semrush: How to Search a Website for Keywords
The title is attractive because it promises to show you the process of searching a website for keywords
This blog: How to Optimize Blog Posts for SEO to Attract Your Ideal Clients
The title is attractive because it promises to show you the process of attracting your ideal clients by optimizing blog posts for SEO.
Create such titles that people will click and you’ll see your click-through rates going up. Then follow the next steps to turn those clicks into conversions to boost your growth.
4: Perform Content Optimization
Now take your time to research and write your first blog post. The first one takes time, especially if you’ve never written a blog before. As you write more, it’ll get easier.
Remember that you’re writing blogs for your readers, not you. Therefore, make these blogs enticing. The secret to enticing blogs is ensuring that your first sentence makes people want to read the next one and so on.
Your goal is to get the reader attentive until they read the last sentence (I’ll tell you why this is important in a moment). For the best results, apply the following content optimization techniques to make your blogs readable and SEO-friendly:
- Divide your blog into headings and subheadings
- Link to your other blog posts
- Optimize your blog URL
- Include images
- Include a meta description
- Include your primary keyword and semantic keywords
Divide Your Blog into Headings and Subheadings
Headings and sub-headings make your ideal clients enjoy reading your blog. Readers scan through your blog post easily without getting bored. Remember they’re not here to read a novel.
If you write one, it’ll put them off and they’ll bounce back to the search results and they may never come back (a big mistake you don’t want to happen).
Link to Your Other Blog Posts
An internal link is a link in your blog that directs users to another blog or page on your website. If you have a blog about a Nike sports shoe and another one about a winter boot, you can link the two blogs with internal links.
It shows Google that your blog topics are related and that you’re knowledgeable on the topic of shoes. Thus, they’ll show your blogs to people searching for boots and sports shoes.
Optimize Your Blog URL
The best way to optimize your blog URL is to copy the main title to the URL. Your title should include the primary keyword that you chose for the blog you’re optimizing.
Add Images
Images break large pieces of content making the blog easy to read. Ensure that your images describe your blog content or illustrate your points in the blog.
Each image must have an alt text (text describing the image).
Include a Meta Description
A meta description refers to the block of text that you see in Google below the title and URL of a search result.
The description tells readers what to expect in the blog. It makes them want to click on your blog and not the one below or above it.
Add Your Primary Keyword and Semantic Keywords
Write in a way that includes your primary keyword in the first sentence of your blog, in the content, and at least in one sub-heading.
Semantic keywords are those related to your keyword. Most of these come naturally, but you may research more online and find a way to marry them into your content.
Avoid forcing words in your blog where they don’t fit. It’s better to leave them out altogether.
5: Include a Call to Action
I promised to tell you why you want your website visitors to read your blog up to the last sentence. It’s because that last sentence serves as your call to action.
A call to action is a statement that tells readers what to do after reading your blog. Some calls to action include directing your readers to your service pages to learn about your offering or pointing your readers to a related SEO-friendly article on your site.
6: Proofread for Grammar Errors
No human is perfect. You and I may write our best pieces yet make honest errors in our work. But, you shouldn’t allow your human errors to put off your ideal clients.
Read through your blog post and correct for errors. It’s best if you install Grammarly on your computer. It’ll help you identify errors that you may have missed.
Once you’re done, hit the publish button and let the search engines do their work.
7: Share Your Blog on Social Media
Today, social media has turned into the television of 1920. It’s the main source of information for 2.96 million people on Facebook, and millions more on Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Take advantage by sharing your blog through an eye-catching social media post. Encourage people to share the blog with their friends and then wait as the search engines return the favor to you in the form of click-through rates and conversions.
Don’t Have Time to Do All That?
As a busy entrepreneur, you have to develop products, respond to your customers, show up on social media, organize meetings, and meet with your suppliers. All these may push your blog posts to next week, or next month.
Before you know it, your blog page will be empty a year from now. Yet in that one year, one blog post could help you reach thousands of customers. Let me help you start posting blogs to your website now so you can reach your ideal customers online.