Promote Your Blog Posts with Ethical SEO Guide

A blog is a traffic magnet. Social media traffic, referral traffic and, yes, organic traffic.

On average, marketers and content writers spend more than three hours on a single blog post.

Organic traffic is also the source of most of our customers.

All this happens because we took the time to optimize our blog posts.

If you don’t want to miss out on organic traffic and potential customers coming through this channel, read on.

Optimize your blog posts for SERPs in a few simple steps:

1. Find the right keywords

Great SEO isn’t just a matter of ranking. It’s a matter of ranking for the right (read: profitable for your business) keywords.
How do you find these keywords, though?
Always focus on these three rules of thumb

• They’re long-tail keywords
• They match user intent
• They match your business goals

Here’s why you need all three. Long-tail keywords aren’t just easier to rank for. They are also easier to match with user intent (as they are more specific) and with business goals. 

My process is this simple: if a keyword doesn’t pass all three questions it’s booted. We move on. 

2. Use those keywords

Now that you’ve found the perfect keywords, let’s put them to good use. 
Very important: good use doesn’t mean stuffing your content with them. This won’t get you ranking but it will get you penalized. 
Here’s an example of what keyword stuffing looks like:

Image via Quora

How often is too often? Well, the ‘law’ is unclear on that.
The rule I follow is keeping the keyword density below 3% and ideally below 2%.
However, you don’t have to abuse those keywords in order to rank for them. You just have to stick them in the right places:

• Title
• URL
• First paragraph (or first 100 words)
• Last paragraph (or last 100 words)
• At least one subtitle
• Alt image tags
• Meta description
• Sprinkled reasonably throughout your content

Rule of thumb here: just write naturally. Don’t force it. If your human readers like it, so will Google bots.
Additionally:

• Use plenty of synonyms to your main keyword(s)
• Use LSI keywords – a quick guide here

3. Optimize every asset

Don’t just optimize your written content or text body. Use your keyword (and its variations) in:

• Image tags
• Meta description
• Video tags
• Social media captions

4. Promote your optimized content

Submitting it to Google isn’t enough. We already know the biggest Catch-22 of organic traffic: the most popular websites/posts, get ranked higher and, thus, get even more organic traffic.
One other thing that’s relevant to your ranking is the number of traffic sources. So help your content become the most popular kid on the block. Here’s how:

• Share it on social media. Not just once. Organic reach isn’t your friend, so make sure you share it multiple times at different times of day to reach a bigger chunk of your audience.
• Tag media outlets/influencers you mentioned. Did you link to anyone’s website in your post (you should! See below)? Email them or tag them on social media. They are likely to share your post.
• Turn it into an ad. Even a smidge of a budget on Facebook ads can boost your posts popularity immensely. Try it out.
• Email it to your list

5. Use best linking practices

There are two major categories of links that help your blog posts grow (except for the backlinks you earn, of course)

• Outbound links – links to other (preferably high-authority) websites. This proves that you’ve done your research and checked out trustworthy sources to back up your claims.
• Inbound links – links to other blog posts or web pages of yours. This helps Google better understand your content. It also helps your pages/posts rank higher. An inbound link from one of your top-performing posts to other posts helps the latter gain more traction in SERPs.

6. Be useful

I’ve said this countless times: don’t write for search engines. You’re not in business with them. Write for humans, for their pain points and needs. They are the ones you want to be in business with.
Make sure your content is neatly organized, easy to read (bullet points and headlines help a lot!) and, above all, useful.

If humans, find your content useful, they will read it, share it and come back to your blog for more. This is earned traffic aka the best kind of traffic. The kind that Google rewards with better rankings.

Wrapping things up

The most important thing about blog SEO is to never forget about its purpose. No, that’s not traffic. Traffic doesn’t pay the bills.
It’s getting customers.

Write for them. Choose keywords that match their needs and pains and write in a way that is compelling and truly helpful to them. Not to you, not to search engines.

Not sure how to achieve all that? We are! Take a look at our copy writing and content writing services. We create content that BOTH human readers and Google love. And we’d be happy to create some for your business, too.