How to Optimise Your Blog for Search Engines

Having a blog on your website is a great tool to use to get organic traffic to your website from search engines. Blog SEO, is the writing, optimising and publishing of blogs which have been created especially to rank well in search engines. This will include completing keyword research, writing high quality content, using on-page SEO strategies and aiming for backlinks from other websites to your blog posts.

It's important to have a blog page on your website and to update it with new articles regularly. This encourages search engines to revisit and index new content more often. The more good quality content you have on your website, the higher the likelihood of it ranking well in search engine result pages. This then means you attract more website visitors which can increase newsletter sign up and business leads, grow your blog's audience and position yourself as a leader within your industry.

6 SEO Blog Tips to Grow Your Website Traffic

To help get your blog traffic growing, we've made a list of six SEO tips to use when writing a blog post

1. Write about what your audience is searching for and wants to read

To raise your search engine traffic, you will need to write about the topics your target audience is searching for. You can identify these topics through performing keyword research, using Google Trends, checking out popular topics from social media, looking at your website statistics to see what words and topics they used when searching your website and identify your most often visited blogs and think of additional ways you could expand on that topic in another blog. 

There are also many great online tools to use which can help you identify blog topics including Answer the Public, using Google auto-complete, looking through your competitor's websites and using Ubersuggest.

2. Ensure your search intent is correct

Search intent is the goal a user has when they enter a query into a search engine. They are wanting to find out something which is either commercial, information, transactional or navigational. The search engine uses this, its knowledge and past experiences to show the user what it thinks the best web pages are to meet their intent. 

Blogs usually provide the searcher with information, which is often in the form of a how to guide, lists, this vs that or definition article. Do a Google search on your keyword phrase to see what topics come up as well as how the information is presented in a blog.

3. Write high quality content

Search engines will always try to display the best possible content that answers its users search intent best. Google has said that good quality content is interesting and useful. As such, your blog content should be well organised, unique and added to regularly, and easy to read. The use of headings and subheadings, bullet points or numbering, short paragraphs, lists and videos can all provide in-depth and useful content for visitors.

4. Use on-page SEO

On-page SEO are the things you do within your website content to help it rank well in search engine results. There are a lot of things that make up on-page SEO including researching and then using the keyword phrase in your headings, filenames, meta tags and content, plus using alt text for images. 

5. Making the blog pages easy to read

It's not just enough to have the right type of content in a blog article; it also needs to be easy to read. This requires you to use lots of white space, headings, images, bullet points and numbered lists and short sentences. 

6. Update old content regularly

As the amount of content in the form of blogs grows on your website, take some time regularly to go back and check that what is written is still relevant. Does the keyword phrase need updating? Are any links still working correctly? Are there any ways you can improve the readability of the blog post? 

Blog SEO is just one of the things you can do to boost organic traffic from search engines. Take a look through our growing list of SEO resources for additional help.