A little over a year ago, we published a post sharing four tips to optimize blogging for SEO. With 2022 well underway, we want to revisit those tips and determine if and how SEO content development strategies have evolved in just one year.
As a quick refresher, blogging is an important tactic to improve SEO because it can help increase the visibility of a company in organic searches, establish credibility and boost website authority. According to Semrush, “Blog SEO is the process of using technical and on-page SEO techniques to increase your blog’s visibility in organic search.”
Semrush explains two primary goals when developing blog content for SEO: 1) “Make sure search engines can find and understand your blog posts so that they can deliver them to relevant searchers,” and 2) “Make sure you’re writing relevant blog content that aligns with your audience’s needs and interests.” These two goals can help companies ensure that the blog content will attract readers and improve SEO efforts.
In our blog post we shared last year, we highlighted four tips:
- Set editorial guidelines.
- Don’t forget the keywords and phrases.
- Include links to external and internal pages.
- Review traffic and engagement with blog posts.
While aspects of these tips have evolved over the past year, these four best practices will still result in blog content that achieves the two goals noted above. For example, identifying the right keywords and phrases, and using those key phrases throughout a blog post, will help search engines and searchers find your content. When selecting keywords, it is critical to use words and phrases that are relevant and specific to the topic at hand.
Additionally, reviewing traffic and engagement with blog posts will help you create blogs that meet the audience’s needs. If traffic consistently starts to dip, it may be a sign that content is no longer relevant or serving your readers.
So, how have the four tips evolved in the past year? At a macro level, not a ton, as those tips are more guiding factors and general umbrella tips that encompass multiple and more specific SEO blogging tactics such as knowing your audience, having a consistent tone, leveraging topic clusters when researching keywords, etc. Therefore, it is important to revisit those supporting blog tactics to make sure they continue to map back to the two overarching blog SEO goals noted above. You might find that it’s time to change your blog post length or update headers to make sure they are still catchy to your existing or intended audiences.
Another helpful approach to ensure SEO strategies are up to date is to look at reports and data from SEO leaders, especially because SEO as a whole continues to evolve.
Across Communiqué PR, we use different tools to support strategies and track results. We’ve linked them a few times in this post, but we’ve had the opportunity to leverage Semrush to brainstorm and define keywords. Semrush is a great tool and published a report that shares the latest data on content marketing trends from 1,500 marketers and other digital sources. Below are a few key findings and tips from The State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report that can help inform blog SEO strategies.
- Use a consistent tone of voice. Some 78% of high-scoring texts have a consistent tone of voice. Having a unique persona and capturing it in writing will help your readers feel connected.
- “How To” and “Guides” articles are still popular. Nearly three times more traffic comes from “Guide” articles.
- Write clearly and concisely. This could include short authoritative sentences that help your audiences read through the content with ease.
- Remove excessive references to COVID. Of course, there might be some instances where addressing the pandemic is necessary, but readers have pandemic fatigue, and content that continues to address COVID might turn readers away.
- Evolve your visuals. Short-form videos are popular and engaging. If relevant, consider embedding gifs and other company videos in related blog posts.
These are just a few takeaways from the 115-page report. It is a comprehensive guide that shares overarching SEO trends and then specific and actionable best practices to help improve efforts.
At Communiqué PR, we’ve had the opportunity to work closely with our clients to support SEO content development blogging. Check out more SEO-related blog posts from our blog here.