Easy-to-Follow Tips to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

If you wish for blogs to gain visitors from Google, you must optimize them to be SEO-friendly.

However, it doesn’t mean you have to shoehorn the most keywords you can into your list. Keyword stuffing is no longer effective.

How do you improve your content to make it index-friendly? Learn how to do it in this article.

1. Find a subject that has potential for traffic from search engines.

If nobody is looking for your keyword, You’ll likely not get the search engine traffic you need.

Before optimizing your content, you must focus on the topics users are looking for.

Here’s how you can find these subjects:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
2. You can enter one or two relevant terms
3. Visit the Terms that Match report.
4. Set the tab to Questions.

Check out the list of options and select the ones pertinent to your site.

FURTHER READING

• Keyword Research: The Beginner’s Guide by Ahrefs

1. Your blog post should be aligned with the intent of the search

Google intends to provide its users with the most relevant information. It achieves this by knowing why the user is searching for a specific subject. This is referred to as the search intent.

If you want higher rankings on Google, you must meet the searcher’s intent.

To understand the search intent, You’ll need to look at all three Cs by taking a look at the most popular pages for the keyword you want to rank:

• Type of content are they blog posts or pages for products, pages on landing, or some other thing?
• The format for the content is tutorials, lists, guidebooks, how-to recipes or free tools, or some other thing.
• Is there one central selling point, such as low prices, or how simple is it to use?

As an example, let’s say we’re looking for the term “how to become a wedding planner”:

The three C’s are off

• Type of content – These are typically blog posts.
• Format for content – These are primarily tutorials.
• Content angle – There are a couple of tips in this (“according expert opinion,” “number of steps,” and “without any experience”).

If you’re looking to be considered a top-ranked site for this subject, you’ll likely need to write a guide on how to do it (with one of these above angles, if you’re able to create something better or even a unique guide when you have something new to provide).

FURTHER READING

• What Is Search Intent? A Complete Guide for Beginners
• How to Do a SERP Analysis

1. Searchers are looking for essential subtopics to read about

If the pages that rank highest cover similar subtopics, they’re most likely significant and are what people are hoping to see.

These subtopics can be identified by examining the popular terms for which the pages with the highest rankings are ranked.

Here’s how you can find these:

1. Enter your search term (e.g., “how to become a wedding planner”) into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
2. Scroll down until you reach the SERP overview.
3. Choose from three to five high-ranking articles (make sure they’re comparable)
4. Click to open in and then choose to fill in the Content Gap

Below, you’ll find the terms these pages are ranked for. Click the Intersection dropdown and select the top two goals (4 5). Look through the results for possible subtopics.

In this case, people would like to know:

• The prerequisites you must meet to fulfill to be a wedding organizer.
• Do you require a qualification to be a wedding planner?
• If you need a permit to become an event planner.
• How long will it take to become a wedding coordinator?
• How do I become an event planner without prior experience?

If you’re focusing on this subject, subtopics will likely be covered.

1. Optimize your site for featured snippets.

The featured snippets of content are quick responses to search queries and are displayed in the upper part of SERPs. Here’s an example

The ranking for a featured snippet is a “shortcut” to the top of the SERPs. Additionally, driving more people to your site is often a bonus.

To maximize featured snippets of content, search for the keyword you want to target and check if an ad-hoc snippet is featured. If so, you’ll need to note the information Google is showing.

In the previous example, Google defines the search term ” skyscraper technique.” This is the reason we’ve included a purpose in our article:

At times, Google shows a listing:

If you do, you’ll need to format your content in the format of a listicle (with appropriate subheadings).

1. Please give them a reason to connect to your site

Links are a crucial Google indexing factor. In general, the greater the number of people you attract to share your content, the more likely it is to be successful.

How can you increase the number of hyperlinks to your blog? It is essential to provide people with reasons to link to your post.

Most often, people share their links due to the uniqueness of your website’s content. It could be a unique perspective or distinctive elements of information.

Here are some suggestions on how to make your content distinctive:

• Create original research. For instance, we surveyed to inform this blog post about SEO price and an analysis of data to this one that focuses on hidden Google Search Console terms.
• Please make use of your own experiences. For instance, we spent more than $200K on ads on Quora in addition to doing a post about it.
• Take topics from an un-observed angle. For instance, we provided an alternative view of assessing the effectiveness of content marketing KPIs.
• Experts in an interview, For instance, we spoke with four experts in link-building and collected their insights in our article regarding international link-building.
• Offer a different approach, for example, when zero-volume keywords were the trend in SEO. We discussed why it shouldn’t be exaggerated. We also provided an alternative to Google’s AI guidelines for content.