When trying to grow an audience, SEO blog writing is a must. However, trying to stuff in too many keywords can easily push your readers away. So content creators and website managers must strive for the best of both worlds.

Does writing blog posts help with SEO? Yes, absolutely. Stick with us to the end of the article because you won’t need SEO blog services after you read it!

What Is Important to Consider for SEO?

Regardless of whether you are running a blog or your blog is just a part of the website you are managing, content marketing drives people to come visit. Here’s a good structural view of what a page must have in order to be indexed and rank properly:

• To be a part of the XML sitemap. (Or, in the case of blog articles, the parent directory part of the sitemap).
• Quick loading speed. The faster your page loads, the better ranked by Google it will be.
• To target specific keywords.
• To resonate with what a person would look to read after typing in these keywords in a search bar.
• Free value upfront.
• No keyword stuffing.
• Proper Meta tags – Meta title and descriptions relevant to what would make the user inclined to click on your article through Google or Bing.
• Proper H1 and H2 tags, good article structure.

There are practically two things that you must achieve to have a good SEO ranking. First, you must make people click on your articles, and second, they must stay for a longer period on your website. We can sum these two things up with impressions CTR (click-through rate) and average session per user in Google Analytics.

Carefully monitor these metrics, and do tests on how to improve them, and in the long run, you will have tremendous success.

Identify the Right SEO Keywords to Target in 3 Simple Steps

Contrary to popular belief, the right keywords can be found with or without the usage of professional tools. When it comes to blog writing for SEO, identifying the keywords of your competitors is very easy. Let’s be smart here.

1. Step one: Find a good article from a competitor on a similar topic.

2. Step two: Copy the text of the article

3. Step three: Check this cool thing out. Paste the well-performing text from your competitors, and you will instantly see the most commonly used keywords in it, by frequency. For example, if you paste this article, you will get these results:

And if you scroll down a bit, you’ll see the most used bigrams and trigrams, which are complex keywords:

If that doesn’t seem like a whole lot of help, then you are probably not ready to use more complex keyword research tools like Semrush or Ahrefs because they provide you with a ton of features that might just be too overwhelming.

Aside from content SEO optimization, there are two other aspects we should pay a closer look to, as well.

On-page Optimization

As mentioned, load time and proper URL and website structure are essential to your website getting indexed and your pages ranking properly.

There are things that will slow down your website, and despite all the SEO blog writing you do or pay for, you might not rank as high as you want to. One of these things is the usage of gifs and super-heavy images or videos embedded on your website.

Hit “F12” on your browser while opening your website incognito, and pay close attention to the Network tab.

Then check the size of each element, and if there are any elements above 500kb, that’s bad news. Optimize all the images by converting them to .webp format and reuploading them. That will greatly increase the speed of your site, especially for mobile users using 4 or 5-g networks.

Off-page Optimization

Having a few hundred backlinks from high authority websites will undoubtedly help all of your pages rank higher, regardless of whether they are specifically linked or it’s just your domain.

It’s more important, however, to do guest posting on relevant platforms and websites that can allow you to expand your audience in a similar niche. Always prioritize backlinks not only by domain authority but by the core audience that they can provide you access to.

Building a Better Website Ecosystem

Step up your SEO game by following the tips in this article, and eventually, you will start ranking higher and higher. But in the meantime, make sure not to forget other core aspects of your website like Ad optimization, subscriptions, and Adblock recovery. Luckily, there are services like Publir that greatly automate the process for you. Give it a look!

The post The Top 2023 SEO Strategies That Will Drive More Traffic to Your Website first appeared on Publir.

How to carry out SEO Auditing?

Here are two basic truths about SEO  

• It isn’t as complicated as it is made out to be. 

• Your competitors can really be your allies, in a certain way. 

Stealing is wrong. Taking your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses and using them to boost your own performance is a smart business. All companies should keep an eye on their competition, find out what their main rivals are doing. This is especially true in terms of SEO. Trying to upstage your competitors is a healthy business, fostering an innovative environment, preventing complacency, and improving overall productivity. Competitive SEO auditing can help you achieve higher SERP rankings. Instead of diving into a pool of keywords, links and hashing out meaningless content, study your competition, see what works and carry out some efficient SEO. 

Why should you do SEO Auditing?

Suppose you own a candy store. There’s another candy store a couple of blocks away, and people can’t seem to get enough of the new place! Naturally, you’ll be curious as to what makes it click? Is the product better? Decor? Are there better in-store offerings? 

Competitive SEO auditing differs from firm to firm. Your niche, target audience, and business goals, all impact this process. There are some steps which you can take that could help get you an advantage over your rivals. Here they are –

Identify Your Competition

First, find out who you’re up against. Identifying your SEO rivals is important before you try to poach customers. Try to find firms working in and outside your niche. Any site or page that ranks for a keyword that you are interested in, counts as a direct competitor. For instance, if you are manufacturing cycling apparel. Your page might have keywords like “road bike jersey”, “cycling news” or something similar. That means your competition includes other cycling apparel companies, and cycling authority websites like Global Cycling Network, and more. You have to know the keywords you wish to target, before identifying SEO competitors. That requires keyword research. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes, by building a client persona to work out what your customer really wants. Use this to get a list of headers, long-tail keywords, and bodies for those topics. Use a tool like the Google Keyword Planner to check keyword viability and data like search volume, and competitiveness. Decide which keywords are giving you the best ROI, those are the ones you should target. On identifying those target keywords, find pages that rank best according to SERP, i.e those in the top 3 positions or even the hallowed ‘zero position’. 

Competition Keyword Analysis

Once you have zeroed in on your competitors, you can proceed to this step to boost your SEO strategy. Analyze the keywords your competitors rank for, but you don’t. Find out useful keywords you and your competitor might have overlooked. These could be easier to rank for and might give you good organic traffic, great from an ROI perspective. Focus on your rival’s pages wrt to page or domain authority, traffic, and other metrics. Use any SEO competitor analysis tool like Site Explorer which gives you all the data you need about a competitor’s website by simply plugging their URL in. You can refine your list of keywords, omitting the extra-competitive ones. If you want to improve the SERP ranking for any keyword, beat out sites that are already ranking for it by carrying out a Keyword Gap Analysis. 

Backlink Analysis

SEO is not just about keywords. Competitive SEO auditing needs you to explore your rival’s actions in different areas. To achieve good SERP rankings, curate a good backlink profile, by using the Link Explorer tool. This tool gives you a lot of domain-related data and backlink profiles, based on the URL of a root domain, page, or sub-domain. Compare different profiles, find out what your rivals are doing, and tweak your own backlinks strategy. Who knows, you might find domains that link to your rivals but not you. You can reach out to these people and remedy this. Also, your inbound links might be from different types of websites. If you have a lot of links from blogs that in turn get theirs from eCommerce sites and similar sources, you might notice such websites ranking higher than yours. That calls for tweaking your backlinks profile.

Content Analysis 

Glance through your competitor’s web pages, check their content quality. See whether it is relevant to your industry. See whether the content answers basic user questions because search engines always show the best answers to users. The more comprehensive your content, the more your pages will show up whenever users type something into a search bar. 

Dive into your industry, provide expert opinions. Your content needs to be comprehensive but beware of it turning boring. This stage of competitive SEO auditing needs a fair bit of work, you can’t use an SEO analysis tool here. You have to read your competitor’s content and compare the quality with your own, to get an idea of what can be improved. 

User Experience Analysis

For search engines like Google, user experience is a vital ranking factor, and the search engine favors sites that provide a pleasant user experience across devices. When you’re carrying out a competitive SEO audit, consider user experience, checking how mobile-friendly your rival’s sites are. Remember. User experience doesn’t mean a complex website. If highly ranked competitors with relatively simple websites are consistently outperforming you, then it’s cause for concern. In that case, you’ll need to find out what your site lacks in terms of user experience. 

Don’t Forget Social Media

How is social media related to SEO? Well, not directly, but indirectly, the way a company’s pages perform can give you an indication of why their sites are ranked higher by Google. It’s simple. If a company has a large number of followers on Instagram/Facebook, these same users would automatically add on to the number of people searching for the company’s pages on Google. Keep an eye on your rival’s activities on social media platforms to draw a correlation between their performance on those platforms and that on Google’s rankings. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, you have to find your SEO competitors, the keywords they target, the topics covered, and the backlinks used. Such data can help you draw up a plan to beat the said competition. Keyword Gap Analysis, Top Content Analysis, Google SERP, and Link Gap Analysis can help you find data to bolster your SEO efforts and find an edge over competitors. Always analyze and audit your competitor’s SEO because as the old saying goes, ‘keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. 

Read our blog on the best SEO monitoring tools to find a list of nifty ways to conduct fruitful SEO analysis. Also don’t miss our blog on link building, and how it can boost your site ranking. 

The post Competitive SEO Auditing – Here’s What You Should Know first appeared on Publir.

Different Areas Of Seo

On-Page SEO

This is about building content to push your rankings. You need to incorporate keywords into your content and web pages. Your content metatags and titles should be on point, as should your keywords. You shouldn’t stuff your content, and it should be concise and well-written.

Off-Page SEO 

This refers to the optimization processes that happen off the website. For this you need to build and foster online relationships with people, creating content that they love. It lays the groundwork for eventual SEO success. 

What’s The Deal With SEO

SEO is actually quite simple. It needs small changes, based on the bigger ones that the search engines announce. Such changes make a difference to overall site rankings and SEO strategies. Such changes may not come frequently, but when they do it makes sense to be prepared for them. In a broader perspective, SEO insights or best practices, or whatever you’d like to call them, are there to serve as a guideline to tackle problems that occur on the fly. 

SEO Strategies to Follow

Page Title, Meta Description, URL, and Tags – Should Be Thoroughly Formatted

Under 70 characters, and with a maximum of 3 long-tail keywords, the most important keyword should be the first. You should use pipes (|) to separate the keywords. The page’s meta description shouldn’t exceed 150 characters and must include 2 of the keywords that the page title uses. A good meta description gives the reader a reason to visit your website. Stuffing keywords is not good, rather, add them so the content seems conversational. The first keyword should also appear in the webpage’s URL. If you’re using more keywords, separate them by dashes (-). Don’t forget to include at least one or two H1 heading tags, using the first two keywords of the web page title. 

Again, stuffing isn’t recommended. Rather, weave them into the content carefully. H2 heading tags should also be there, to be placed under each H1 tag. 

Know Where Your Traffic Comes From – Social Media, Search, or Direct Visits

Which sources are you getting the most traffic from? Via this metric, you can get website visitors based on metrics like social media, search, and direct visits, individual, tagged marketing campaigns, etc. Search traffic can also be broken down further. A lot of analytics solutions track what part of your SEO-related visits come from Google, Bing, or Yahoo. The data you get can help you make adjustments catering to different requirements and variables, according to the search engine. You have to monitor traffic sources to analyze where your audience is coming from, what they’re interested in, and what kind of content they are clicking on. 

Which Keywords Attract The Most Audience? Find Them And Put Them To Use

The keywords that your audience uses to visit your site are important. You need to track what part of search traffic originates from which of the keywords that you are aiming for. These results can help you formulate your keyword strategy. If a keyword is being repeatedly used to direct traffic to your website, pay attention to it, and build your strategy around it. You can tag and track campaigns using other software tools like SpyFu, so you can get a better idea of where your traffic is originating from if you are looking for organic search traffic sources. 

Are You Using Images Properly

If you are incorporating images into your website, match their file name with one of the page title’s keywords. The alt text in the image should tally with the image’s file name and the page title keyword. Dashes (-) are to be used when separating words in the picture filename, but not between words in the alt text. If you find changing an image file name tough, use a keyword from the page title to change the image’s alt text. 

Mobile Or Desktop? What Are Your Traffic Sources

Today, more people use mobile devices to browse content. There are more mobile searches than desktop searches. If you can track the devices that your visitors use, you can adjust and optimize their experience and make sure they enjoy it. As we look toward the future, mobile devices are going to play a big role in SEO. Tracking traffic by devices can help you create more relevant, user-friendly content.

Always Keep Up With Metrics That Measure Engagement 

If visitors come to your site, that’s just half the battle won. If you want to convert visitors into leads and customers, you need to calculate a few metrics. It is important to measure the engagement of visitors if they land on your page. The first metric, bounce rate, will tell you what percentage of visitors have left your site without navigating to any other page. Another metric, time on page, will tell you the approximate time an average site visitor spends on your page. A third metric, pages per visit, calculates how many individual pages your average visitors end up viewing. 

Internal and Cross Links 

When it comes to internal links, one or two on the page, linking to relevant pages should be used. The keywords to use in the anchor text for each link should be from the list of target keywords. For cross-linking pages, at least 3 internal links should be used, with the anchor text again containing keywords from the page that you are linking to. 

Track Micro and Macro Conversions 

You need conversions, otherwise, engagement makes no difference. You need to know whether search engine traffic is taking the action you want when they visit your website. Web analytics systems can distinguish between micro and macro conversions. The former measures steps on the way to your end goal, like visits to your pricing page, lead conversion, or staying on your site for a fixed period of time. Macro conversions oversee actual wins, like client conversions or sales. Both have to be closely monitored, as they can help you realize what efforts work and what don’t.

Finally, Fix Broken Links and Errors 

A website contains broken links, both internal and external. There may be errors experienced by users if they enter the redirect loop. There might be some 404 errors for users who encounter missing pages, and even Google may run into ‘crawl errors’ while trawling through your site. These small things can directly impact SEO, negatively. Track them constantly, so you can fix them on the fly. 

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, the above SEO strategies and insights can help you, but they aren’t all there is to SEO. There are several tools that can help you monitor your website, and analyze data to craft a successful SEO strategy. Read our blog about it here. SEO needs dedication, and it isn’t a ‘set it and forget it, kind of topic. Keep reading up regularly on new updates to stay abreast of trends, and implement them immediately to ensure your website viewers have a seamless experience.

The post SEO Insights That Are Invaluable If You Want A Good Online Presence first appeared on Publir.