Blogging is one of the most convenient ways to express your creativity in the digital era. It is also one of the most productive content marketing strategies. Blogging allows you to address the global audience and the only thing that stands in your way toward reaching millions of followers is Google search ranking.
According to several studies, bloggers publish more than 2 million posts each day. Companies use it to generate more leads; people write posts to express their opinions, professionals in all fields grow authority in a given niche through blogs, etc. But in the abundance of blog topics, it is everything but easy to stand out from the crowd and deserve your place on top of the search results.
A notorious ranking algorithm created by Google doesn’t make the situation any more comfortable because nobody knows how it works. Okay, we are all aware of the essential aspects of this methodology, but we can never tell for sure if one feature is more important than other.
For this reason, you have to do everything in your power to make blog posts adequately optimized. In this article, we will show you 20 tips for bloggers to rank in Google’s top 3 search results, so keep your eyes open wide. Let’s check it out!
On-Page SEO
Optimization is the fundamental precondition of a successful Google ranking. It’s a starting point for each website, so you have to understand the SEO secrets for organic traffic. These are the most critical factors in that regard:
- Headline: It must contain a keyword and no more than 60 characters. Subheadings should also be keyword-rich (just like the rest of the text, for that matter).
- Meta description: It’s a brief but appealing topic description up to 160 characters long.
- Images: Don’t put random alt tags but choose options that fit the theme of your post.
On-page optimization is mandatory. Making a good start, the rest of the work will be less demanding. But if you neglect on-page SEO, you will lose the opportunity to earn top ranking positions.
Mind the Technical Aspect
Technical issues strongly affect the overall search engine credibility, so you need to handle them on time. First of all, you have to remove broken links from your blog. Users expect page loading to be super-efficient and there is no room for mistakes here. At the same time, you should make the content mobile friendly. Most people will read posts on smartphones, meaning that you need to test how your articles look like on each type of device.
Enhance Keyword Strategy
We can never overestimate the importance of a keyword strategy. It’s merely an anchor of SEO, and you must go beyond standard solutions in this field. Besides primary options, you also want to find and use all synonyms, similar phrases, and long-tailed keywords that match your topics. The average word count of the top-ranked searches surpassed 2 thousand and no way that you can reserve one of those positions if you exploit only a few simple keyword options.
Use SEO Tools
The Internet is full of various tools that you can use to improve the SEO potential of your posts. For instance, you can find the best keyword choices for your topics using the Keyword Planner. On the other hand, CoSchedule Headline Analyzer will help you to figure out the most attractive titles. Readable reveals the quality of textual content, highlighting elements that need replacements and evaluating the readability of your posts in general. Combining these and many other digital tools, you can create perfectly optimized blog posts.
Write About Hot Topics
Whenever you see the opportunity, you should seize it and write about hot topics that grab the attention of your target group. Stay up to date and follow the latest industry developments. Google Trends will assist you in this quest. With this app, you can find relevant topics in all areas of interest, in any given location. Once you see favorite themes, the only thing left is to write a great article. How simple, right?
Solve Problems
There are different ways to write an excellent blog post. You can say a lot with a minimum number of words or provide readers with in-depth analysis of a phenomenon. But regardless of the style, each blogger has one goal in mind – and that is to solve the problems of his followers.
Edward Huntley, a Senior SEO Manager at Resumes Planet, recently noted: “When you finish writing an article, you should read it once again and then ask yourself one question – Did I give users the answer they were looking for? If yes, you are free to publish this post. But if not, you better go back and rewrite the whole article“.
Answer Questions
Speaking of questions, you should know that most users read blogs because they want you to explain something to them. More than 90% of people share blog content because they think it might be useful to other people.
From the perspective of the author, you should always answer the fundamental 5W+H questions: Who did what, where, when, why, and how? The more precise the answers, the higher the odds of reaching Google’s top 3 spots or even a featured snippet. And if you are wondering about the questions you have to answer, go and do the homework at Quora or Answer the Public.
Analyze Competitors
Even if you conduct thorough research before writing, it doesn’t mean that you will get it right on your own. That’s why we suggest you always analyze successful competitors and determine what makes them so popular. Is it a different viewpoint? Perhaps they often come up with recent statistics about your field of work?
Whatever it might be, you should be able to notice it and maybe even embrace it as part of your content creation strategy. It will increase your search engine ranking in the long run and potentially undermine the reputation of the most prominent challengers.
Include Multimedia Content
Blogging is still one of the most productive content types, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not evolving. Namely, a lot of bloggers add multimedia content to support their posts because visual and audio formats are flooding the Internet these days. Making a mixture of textual content, images, and videos, you will design high-quality articles. Since Google puts quality in front of quantity, you should embrace the multimedia strategy and make content more appealing to the new generation of Internet users.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is an incredibly valuable tool for bloggers who are eager enough to analyze all features of website traffic. The most significant possibility provided by Google Search Console is that it allows you to take a glimpse at your ranking relative to the keyword you choose. Of course, the tool is not 100% accurate (in reality, you would probably deserve a different position than the one you saw here) but it still gives you a good insight into the status of your blog. Measuring your ranking, you could find potential shortcomings and make corrections along the way.
Use Google Maps Widget
Google Maps Widget is a WordPress widget that creates Google Maps and enables clustering, directions, street view, custom information bubbles, customizable lightbox, and many other features on every position on your site.
More importantly, it helps website owners to add Google maps snippets to their pages in not more than a few easy steps. This is crucial because more than 30% of featured snippets rank at the very top of search results, while the vast majority of them rank in the top 5 quite consistently.
Don’t Forget Backlinks
Backlinks increase the value of your website and improve its position in engine searches. However, some bloggers believe that the number of backlinks is essential. They are wrong.
One backlink alone could do miracles for your ranking if you get it from a highly authoritative webpage. It has to a credible address with strong online reputation. Sites like .edu or .gov will probably make the most significant impact in that regard, but you have to be a very proficient writer to deserve a backlink there.
Internal Linking
Internal linking uses the same mechanism as backlinks, but it is much simpler to do get it done. You just need to add links to your posts to one of your new topics. This can help you to reuse old but evergreen posts in case you link it to the related issues. Anything else would only chase the followers away and destroy your efforts to climb to one of the top 3 positions.
Exploit Social Media
It feels like today everybody owns at least one social media profile. From business professionals, over high school kids, all the way to the granny next door, it seems like you can reach any person anywhere in the world using nothing but social networks. It is the main reason why two-thirds of marketers reported using blogs in their social media content.
Posts you write could gain much more attention and exposure if you promote it on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Nobody can claim that Google takes it into account while evaluating the importance of a blog. However, blogs that inspire people to engage on social media usually have the best search engine ranking. In our opinion, you should not consider it a coincidence.
Write Comments about Other Blogs
This is the old but probably not obsolete mechanism to improve the status of your blog. Writing comments about other authors’ posts, you will start earning new followers gradually. It’s a slow process but one of the rare few that work in 100% of cases.
Fix Permalink Structure
It’s easy to change the permalink structure, but it’s surprising to learn that only a handful of bloggers do it. If you are using WordPress, you can adjust permalink directly by going to Settings – Permalinks and choosing the option you need. Permalinks should also contain a keyword to fit the SEO demand. Fix everything you can but stay away from old posts because changes will turn all backlinks into broken links.
Repurpose Old Content
Only a handful of bloggers can generate great ideas 365 days a year. Almost all authors are facing occasional creative blocks, so they repurpose old content to make fresh content. This tactic is legit, and you should use it from time to time to revive old but good posts.
All it takes is a blog post reconstruction. Namely, you should consider key points from your article to design an infographic. Or you could turn it into podcast or video. The choice is up to you, but you have to make sure that the quality of a new post is still high enough.
Content Syndication
Content syndication networks support smaller blogs and give them exposure to the broader audience. It can help you to increase page views and improve search ranking in general. You can write guest posts to increase blog awareness and attract a bunch of new followers. Of course, don’t forget to add backlinks to your posts to maximize the effect of content syndication.
AIDA Model
You’ve seen a lot of tactical SEO tips so far, but you could also simplify things and follow the AIDA model. The logic behind it is clear – posts need to be Attractive and Interesting, ignite a spark of Desire among readers, and convince them to take Action. It means that blog posts have to be appealing and resonate with the interest of average users. You want them to read the article entirely and make a decision actually to do something concrete according to your instructions.
Get Your Domain
Perhaps we should have added this tip to the beginning of this list but it sounded way too obvious – you have to get your website domain if you want Google to take you seriously. Free platforms are okay, but they will never make you look credible in the eyes of search engines.
Website Audit
Now that you’ve learned almost everything there is to know about how to improve Google search ranking; you have to remember to conduct a regular website audit. Go step by step and analyze both the content quality and optimization. This is the only way to keep your blog fresh and relevant in the long run.
Conclusion
Being a blogger gives you the possibility to write about all sorts of topics and influence opinions of hundreds or thousands of followers. However, such power comes only to the authors who can distinguish themselves from the competition and deserve one of the best search engine positions.
In this article, we showed you 20 tips for bloggers to rank in Google’s top 3 search results. Keep our tips in mind and feel free to leave a comment if you have other thoughts to share with our readers – we would be glad to hear it!
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