Regularly adding relevant, engaging blog content to your website is an essential part of building a successful SEO campaign. Fresh, informative SEO content adds value to your website, builds brand awareness and allows you to target valuable keywords. But this content needs to be effectively optimised if it’s going to help improve the performance of your site in the search results.

Let’s explore why optimising blog content matters.

It helps you target relevant keywords

Blog posts offer a great opportunity to target more specific, long-tail keywords that are often easier to rank for. This will help you reach the right audience with your SEO content and drive high quality, relevant traffic to your website. Optimising for long-tail keywords also makes it easier to target potential customers at different points of the sales and marketing funnel.

It provides an opportunity for backlinks

When another website links to your website, this shows the search engines that another site rates your content, suggesting it is reliable and accurate. Backlinks can have a big impact on how well your website ranks by boosting its credibility. And sharing relevant, well-optimised blog content is one of the best ways to secure high quality backlinks.

It helps your content to rank

Optimising your blog content will only be successful if you’re starting with well-written, relevant content. High quality content that answers the reader’s query performs best in the search results, so always keep the user in mind when writing and optimising content. Remember that you are creating blog posts for humans, not search engines. If humans love your content, so will the search engines.

How to optimise blog content

If you want to begin optimising the blog posts that you are writing, the following points should help you enhance the SEO content you produce. Include these elements in each piece of content to effectively target those long-tail keywords and improve your website’s performance in the search results.

Keywords

Keywords should be carefully chosen for each individual piece of content to ensure they are relevant to your target audience and what they are searching for. Avoid keyword stuffing, or the over-use of keywords, and instead focus on creating well-written content which incorporates keywords in a natural way.

Research and incorporate synonyms for your target keyword too as these can help make your content more relevant.

SEO title

The SEO title appears beneath your website URL in the search results and is the first thing that a user will see. It should provide insight into what your content is about and should include your target keyword.

Think about common search queries when choosing an SEO title, for example questions that your target audience might type into the search bar and the language they use. This can help align your content to their search.

Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions provide a brief overview of your content and appear in the search results beneath your website URL and SEO title. Crafting engaging meta descriptions can increase the click-through rate to your website and should include your target keyword to improve optimisation.

Try starting your meta descriptions with an imperative verb to encourage action from the reader – for example Explore, Discover, Learn, Find, etc.

Internal links

Where relevant, include links to other content on your website in your blog posts. This might be a link to a product page, landing page or another blog post, but most importantly it should be relevant, add value to the reader and help them navigate to useful content.

When used correctly, internal linking can extend the time a user spends on your website and help encourage them through the sales funnel.

Call to action (CTA)

Where do you want your audience to go once they have read your content? A call to action, or CTA, is a short statement that concludes your SEO content and shows the reader where to go or what to do next. The CTA will vary depending on the content but could link to a contact form, more in-depth information or a product category.

A CTA could be in text format or might be more visual, like a button. You can also use CTAs throughout your SEO content if relevant, not just at the end.

This checklist should be a good guide for optimising your SEO content and make it easier to create content that ranks. For further support from our SEO and content marketing specialists, get in touch with Unity Online.