Is Your Blog Set Up Wrong? How to Optimize your Blog for Maximum SEO Impact

Creating content and marketing it correctly is more important now than ever before. As much of advertising goes online, blogging is becoming a more popular outlet to spread information and gain new clients and followers.

However, the marketing of your blog is just as, if not more, important than its actual content. If you’re blogging but no one sees it, your blog isn’t performing as well as it should and can be. The issue here comes down to SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization.

There are many mistakes that bloggers make when designing their blog and content that don’t help with their SEO. Not to fear, as these are common and easy to fix. Read on for what you can change about your website and content to get more clicks and views, and end up higher on the list in Google searches and the like.

First- What is Search Engine Optimization?

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, here’s a quick rundown

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. When you type a word into a search engine like Google, the results are ordered according to a range of values. With SEO in mind, you can increase your company’s web traffic by driving your brand name and content higher up on Google’s algorithm. Using keywords, pictures, and selectively mentioning certain words can boost an article or webpage higher up on the algorithm.

Keeping SEO in mind when blogging is so important. You want to have good SEO practices, as these practices drive more traffic to your blog and website. More traffic means your website will be considered more essential or useful, and thus your website will show up higher in internet searches. You’ll set yourself apart from competitors by being the first or second site to show up when customers are searching for a business or service.

You want your blog to be as high value as possible. In order to do so, you must keep SEO practices in mind. Let’s go on to what you can do right now to improve your SEO.

SEO Tip 1: Link to a Shopping Experience

If you blog to ultimately gain brand awareness for a product or service, make sure it’s easy for clients to find that product or service

Your navigation bar should link to whatever it is you are trying to sell, whether it be jewelry or lifestyle goods or your work for hire. You want potential clients to have the easiest possible time finding whatever it is you’re trying to sell- you want to make it enticing and noticeable from the start.

By tying in your blog with what it is that you sell, you’re connecting the two experiences and platforms in your clients’ minds. They’ll come to think of your products when they read your blog, and vice versa, driving traffic to both your web clicks and sales. This is a fundamental SEO practice- the more you can get site visitors to click on other links related to you and your brand, the higher up your brand will appear in search results.

Content experience can go beyond just your blog. You want your blog to usher clients into the “real world” of your products, i.e., your actual shopping links and pages. Your blog and your brand thus become tangible to them, a product or service they can buy.

Make finding those important shopping links as easy as you can. Check often to make sure that all of your icons and links redirect to the correct sites, so that your customers don’t get angry when it doesn’t work the first time and stop trying. Logos are great places to link to shops, as are any pictures. Linking to shops inside your blog posts works too as a good reminder to readers, but also make sure these links are clearly present in your navigation bar or front page.

Finding a balance here is important, as you don’t want users to find your approach to selling aggressive or annoying alongside your more regular blog content. Integrating links to shops must be done naturally. Don’t be a push-over. Only link when it directly relates to what you’re blogging about, and don’t hit customers over the head with all of your products and services. It’s all about balance.

SEO Tip 2: Organize Content in the Right Way

Organizing your content from newest to oldest is old school- get your consumers right where they need to be at the right time

No one wants to scroll endlessly down your blog page to find the article or information they’re looking for. Simply no one has the time. You can fix this by priming your navigation bar and overall blog organization for success.

Try grouping your blogs based on big ideas or concepts, rather than simply posting everything from newest to oldest. Say you’re a fashion blogger who covers style tips and runway looks. If your users come to your site solely for the style tips and not the runway look coverage, you want a section or page devoted only to those style tips. Instead of organizing blog posts by date, perhaps you’d put a page that directs you to only the style tip blogs in the navigation bar. This way your customers won’t have to waste time going through information they aren’t looking for.

If people find what they need from you right away, they’re more likely to bookmark your page and revisit it in the future. This drives your clicks and views, and ergo your Search Engine Optimization.

How you organize your content is of utmost importance to the look, layout, and overall success of your blog. You wouldn’t organize a library by randomly placing books next to each other, so don’t do it with your blog either.

SEO Tip 3: Address your Users’ Problems

People read your blog to gain insight and information- don’t make that hard for them with bad website structure

Having a focus with your blog is important, as you likely know. No one wants to wade through muddy waters to find one or two pieces of information pertinent to them. You want to think about your audience when you post, and when you design your interface. Having a demographic in mind allows you to better speak to that demographic, and better help them.

People will stay on a site for a longer amount of time if that site is addressing something they want or need potential help with. Thus, addressing the problems of your core demographic will increase your SEO by driving further time and clicks to your site through even just one person.

Lean in to having specific sections on your blog and organizing everything under those sections. If someone comes to your site and likes one of your blog posts, they’ll likely want to look at another. If you’re organizing your blog right, they’ll be able to find related articles that address their same issue either in your navigation bar or linked at the bottom of your posts.

This is how you build consumer trust in your brand and product. Make sure they find all the information that will help them as quickly as possible. Organization does this, as it will group together your posts for easier access by users. When people find information relevant to them and their experience, they will stick around on your site to read it. Connecting with your audience does indeed, thus, increase your SEO efforts and payoff.

Go with an Independent Consultant

Still not sure about this SEO stuff? Don't sweat it. Aiken House works with a lot of “indy” growth hackers and SEO specialists, and we are more than happy to link you up with one - just contact us here.

Setting up your blog the right way is super important. You aren’t blogging just to blog- you want to get yourself and your product noticed, and a great way to do that is through harnessing the power of SEO. Link to your shopping experiences, organize your content for easy access and flow, and keep your demographic’s experiences and problems in mind. All of this will lead to more clicks and traffic to your site, as well as more time spent there. In no time, your Search Engine Optimization skills will get you where you want to be.