5 ways to improve the SEO value of your blog

The craft of SEO is changing. Google is changing, and with it so is the market and practice. For one, search engine optimization can not be the act of winning for a single perfect keyword. The art and craft of SEO is not dying--it's transforming and search engines are doing a better job of showing more relevant content to users.

Marketing teams need to focus on producing useful, interesting and relevant content that engages users.  It's simple. Keep users engaged, and do not trick them--do not try to "game the system." You will just undermine your efforts in the long run.

This article focuses on 5 simple ways to improve the SEO value of your blog. By no means is this an exhaustive list. It's a simple check-list of items for business bloggers. The reasons for businesses to blog are numerous, but improving the results of your business blogging effort is important. These simple blogging basics can improve the results of our effort.

1. Install Webmaster Tools for your website & get an SEO "health" report frequently. Webmaster Tools can help you monitor crawl activity, as well as ensure that your website does not contain malware. Additionally the tool gives you all kinds of useful stats on the SEO condition of your website--from search bot crawl activity, keywords sending traffic, links to your website and structured data found on your website.
2. Write content for your buyer personas. We recommend doing a small exercise before you embark on your business blogging journey. Create buyer personas to truly understand who you are writing for. Spend time to investigate why leads reach out to you, what they are looking for, what they may be going through professionally during their search, their stresses and pain-points. Try to think about their journey from their perspective. Spend time to better understand your prospects and buyers.  Make the personas have enough detail to paint a picture of your audience--burn an impression in your mind to help you create content that is specific, relevant and speaks to them. Although this may not sound like an SEO task, it is. Writing for personas will increase the results of your lead-generation marketing efforts through organic search. It will tune you into the specific pain-points and challenges of your target audience. They in turn will share, connect, save, like, remember and connect with your content more readily. This is vital for SEO.... engagement.
3. Track your SEO baseline data. Many marketing teams begin working on improving their numbers, before getting an actual picture of their numbers. An eager desire to improve is a good thing, but understanding where you are coming from is important too. Begin your SEO campaign by measuring these stats using Google Analytics, MOZ, Hubspot, MySEOTool, etc:
   • Top traffic referring organic keywords
   • Top brand keywords that are more than just your brand name... that may involve questions like "BRAND NAME + SERVICE NAME" or "BRAND NAME + NEWS TITLE". Do you have content in your website that supports these investigative searches?
   • High-quality keywords that do not serve much traffic because your brand ranks poorly for them
   • Overall organic search traffic for the last month, 3 months, 6 months, year, couple years. What does the trendline look like?
   • Compare traffic Y-O-Y and M-O-M
   • Top landing pages for organic traffic
   • Highest bounce rates for organic SEO traffic
4. Improve the layout, format and visual qualities of your business blog content. Make the content pages more attractive upon first glance. Yes, users do judge a book by it's cover. Ensure your blog articles are attractive and well-structured basically. No need to go overboard here.
5. Set goals. For business bloggers, the act of setting goals is a form of commitment. Strive for new heights. But, do not make your goals unrealistic. Try to measure the outcomes of your blogging efforts. How much traffic do you get? How many leads come from your blogging efforts? Make sure your goals are measurable and relevant to your business. For example, if your blog generates 500 visitors a month, try to increase the number of visitors to 550 next month, by increasing the quality of your content and your social interactions surrounding that content.