Are you frustrated because you’ve written great content, but you aren’t seeing a payoff in search traffic? Check out this guide to learn how to improve the SEO friendliness of your blogs.

You know that SEO friendliness is a key component of your website.

After all, if you can’t create a website that Google is able to crawl and index, then you might as well not even exist on the Internet.

But the truth is that SEO optimization doesn’t begin and end with your website alone.

You also need to know how to write blog posts for SEO. Blogging not only tells Google that you update your website often (which boosts your rankings). It also helps you establish yourself as an authority to your customer base.

In this post, we’re sharing with you some of the top SEO blog tips that will help you to outrank your competitors, get more conversions, and give you a better chance at making a lasting connection with your target market.

Take a look!

1. You Can No Longer Ignore Voice Search

Thanks to the continued rise of voice search, the way in which people look for things online and in mobile searches has completely changed.

Now, instead of typing in choppy keyword phrases, searchers are speaking in complete sentences. They’re also asking questions, referencing their locations, and having information from top blog posts read out to them by their voice apps.

You need to adapt your blog content to match.

Make sure that you include longtail question phrases in your keywords, and that you mimic the way people speak, not the way they type, in your overall blogging style.

Remember to keep explanations as short and sweet as possible, and aim to explain complex concepts as simply as possible. This will increase your chances of being featured by Google Snippets.

2. Add Internal and External Links

Of course, no list of SEO blog tips would be complete without a mention of the all-important internal and external linking strategy.

In order to ensure that you get as many clicks as possible out of one post, we suggest that you include relevant links to your own past blog posts and product pages in your content.

For example, if you’re writing a blog post on the biggest flower trends of the year, make sure that you include a link to your arrangements featuring those flowers.

You also need to think about your overall external linking strategy.

While you certainly don’t want to link out to your competitors, you do want to link out to authoritative, fact-based sources. Things like statistics or even personal essays are always a smart bet.

Plus, the chances are that the website you linked to will take notice of the fact that you linked to them, and return the favor by linking to one of your posts!

3. Focus on Location-Based Keywords

The importance of local SEO can’t be overstated when it comes to blog search engine optimization.

But, in addition to including a Google Map on your website, claiming your third-party listings, and writing about local topics, you also need to be sure that you’re using keywords that reference your location in order to dominate the competition local SEO.

This means that your blog posts should embrace hyper-localization.

Instead of just mentioning your city or state in a keyword phrase, you should also include your county, your neighborhood, or even the name of the street that your business is located on.

4. Don’t Forget to Optimize the Small Stuff

So many people get caught up in the larger parts of SEO friendliness, that they forget just how important the little details can be.

For example, if you want to find a sneaky way to boost your SEO score, make sure that you include keywords in the name of your image files.

You should also include keywords in your blog title posts, your tags, and even in your headers.

For best results, we suggest that you limit your headers to about 10 words or less. This is the optimal length for SEO–and it keeps your readers’ attention.

5. Organize Your Post Categories

This might not seem like it belongs on a list of the most important SEO blog posts, but give us a moment to explain why an overall ease of navigation is so important.

Have you ever visited a website that was so disorganized, that you felt like you were never going to be able to find what you needed on it?

We’re willing to bet that, instead of combing through several pages of posts, products, and more, you just clicked away from that website, right?

Your readers will do the same if they can’t find what they’re looking for on your blog.

This doesn’t just lower your blog’s conversion ratio. It also decreases your site’s “dwell time,” or the amount of time the average user spends on your blog. Sites with a lower dwell time are penalized by Google, and fall in the search engine rankings as a result.

Since nearly 1/4 of users don’t bother to look past the first page of Google.

We’d say great and intuitive website design matters just as much as more technical SEO tips and tricks.

Need Professional Help Mastering SEO Friendliness?

We hope that this post has helped you to better understand not only why SEO friendliness matters to your business blog, but also how you can make it happen.

Of course, sometimes, we know that you need the help of a digital marketing professional.  Take a look at our Digital Marketing page to see just how we may be of service.

If you have any questions, simply hit the Chat button!