5 Things You Need To Know: Blogs & SEO

Everyone wants to rank high in the SERPs. It is crucial for your customers to be able to find you to convert, to make online sales and to continue to scale your brand and business. But what exactly does it take for you to strengthen your SEO and improve your ranking in the SERPs? Below are 5 essential points to keep in mind.

1. Beware of Keyword Cannibalization

Keywords, keywords, keywords. Yes, they are crucial to facilitate a strong SEO strategy, but make sure you keep this next point in mind to prevent yourself from accidentally hurting your standing in the SERPs.  You may think that to rank high for a keyword in the SERPs, you would just create a lot of content around the same topic to promote the same keyword. But this is not a good approach and will likely get your content cannibalized. (Check out our recent article on content cannibalization to learn more). Cannibalizing content confuses Google impeding Google from knowing which page of yours to show in the SERPs for that keyword. A much better strategy? Instead of generating high volumes of content to rank for the same keyword, your content should be related to and support your keywords.

For example, let’s say you are a SaaS company that creates software to connect Quickbooks to Shopify and you want to rank for the keywords, “Shopify,” and “Quickbooks,” so you create a landing page to describe your tool that promotes those keywords. Instead of creating an article to rank for those exact keywords, consider the pain points a customer of yours may have and create content related to those keywords that offers a solution to those challenges. A much stronger SEO strategy that results in no cannibalization, a more effective use of your content and more engaged customers who will be that much more inclined to convert. Therefore, an example of an article you may write is “A Guide to Integrating your Ecommerce to your Accounting Software.”

2. Long-Form vs Short Form

Ah, the question everyone always wants to know the answer to. How long should your articles be to fare the best in the SERPs? Think of it this way. It’s better SEO strategy to write one long article that covers your topic in enough depth and includes the keywords you want to rank for  than writing a bunch of shorter, 300-word articles that will not improve your ranking in the SERPs. The idea here is in order to write an article that substantially covers a topic that Google will favor, your article should be more long-form including around 1000 words or so. But again, keywords and article length are secondary to content. At the end of the day, the primary goal of your content is to serve your customers and their needs first, addressing their pain points and presenting how your services and/ or products offer the solution they need to mitigate those unique challenges.

3. Organic Backlinks

Implementing backlink outreach into your SEO strategy is crucial for improving your brand’s ranking in the SERPs. In fact, high quality backlinks are the #1 needle mover to strengthen your brand’s SEO. Since backlink outreach is time-consuming and difficult, the best way to implement effective backlink strategy is through gaining organic backlinks. How do you achieve this? Remember, strong content comes first. Create engaging, useful content that people can find and want to share. Now, this sort of share is not the same kind as you would see on social media. The share we are referring to is when a website references your article, offering a CTA such as, “check out the following article for more information.” And keep this in mind, the higher the domain authority of the website backlinking to you, the more link juice you will get.

4. Anchor Text

This brings us to a discussion on the importance of anchor tags. When you are linking an article to other pages on your website or when websites are backlinking to your article, remember that you want the keyword to be the anchor text as much as possible. Therefore, avoid using a phrase such as “Learn more here” as your anchor text. This phrase isn’t clear to Google in that it lacks relevant keywords and fails to inform on what kind of content will actually be found at that link. Instead, if you were a cat food company for example, the phrase you may use for a backlink might be “Here’s our recommended healthy cat food,” and you would use the keyword, “healthy cat food,” as the anchor text.

5) Alt-Tag Images

Using visually stimulating images in your article to break up long passages of text that partner with and elevate your content is of course essential to creating an engaging article. But you may not have realized the importance of alt-tagging your images and how proper alt-tagging is vital for strong SEO strategy. Alt-tagging an image refers to tagging an image with text that clearly describes the image using keywords. The key points to stay aware of here is that alt-tagging an image helps Google better understand the image, helping your image show up in Google Image Search, as well as improving the ranking of your article in the SERPs. Second, alt-tagging your image helps ensure that your article offers a strong user experience for visually impaired users, allowing them to use software that clearly describes the image to them.

Need help with SEO for blogs? Need help coming up with blog topics, and then writing them? Reach out to us at Firon Marketing and we can help! We even offer free marketing audits to help you understand where improvements may need to be made.