Like many others enduring the unavoidable boredom that comes with quarantine in the time of Covid-19, you may find yourself more and more often stumbling onto blog pages during your seemingly endless internet browsing. Reading up on something interesting, informative, or just plain silly, can be a wonderful distraction, not to mention it can feel significantly better to your psyche than simply scrolling past an infinite amount of memes and #ThrowbackThursday photos of life before lockdown. What you may not realize, however, is why that particular blog exists in the first place, or why it was the first to show up in your google search. Well, this can largely be explained by a little something called search engine optimization, or SEO.
SEO ultimately has to do with where you show up when someone searches for your business or for keywords associated with your business. It’s all about visibility and accessibility. Let’s say you own a pet store–we’ll call it, Paws for Effect. When someone searches for your oh-so clever name, you naturally want your website to be at the very top of the very first page, as opposed to some different website specializing in pun-tastic quips or other animal innuendos. Or maybe some furry friend fanatic googles something like, “should I get my dog winter boots?” Now, you have a vast collection of fabulous winter boots for dogs, but why would your website pop up for such a specific question when your dog boots likely aren’t part of your ~Should I Get My Dog Winter Boots~ seasonal collection? This is where blog pages come into play.
The Big Blog Page Bonanza
A blog page is basically a creative free space to publish articles pertaining to whatever it is you’re selling. We see blogs all over the place, covering pretty much every topic and question that could possibly exist. Are people just writing these out of the goodness of their heart and desire to help their fellow human? Maybe…but they were probably also hired to writer these blogs for the purpose of driving traffic toward the business’s website. When a business page has tons of blogs with titles and content that relates to their particular industry, this gives them more opportunity to publish keywords on their website. So, if “winter boots for dogs” is your target keyword, and you have twenty-something articles addressing a variety of topics regarding winter boots for dogs, then Paws for Effect’s business page would be way more likely to come up on the first page in a google search. To put it simply, if our hypothetical curious customer googles “should I get my dog winter boots” and your business pops up on the first page of the search, then congratulations! You have great SEO and deserve a treat (and so does your pet who is, of course, the goodest boy/girl). However, if they conduct the search and your website is on the third page or past, then you have some work to do on your SEO.
The Keyword Craze
Writing blogs with keywords and questions related to your business is great, but to take it to the next level, you need analytics. There are many different websites and tools to help businesses monitor their website’s traffic and check for current popular keywords being searched on google at high volumes. Knowing what keywords in particular are getting a lot of hits on google will help you determine what blogs you should be writing in order to get your business to the coveted page one. If we wanted our favorite company, Paws for Effect, to rank higher, there are two general methods of approaching this goal. First, you’re going to want to aim for the low hanging fruit. That is, finding popular keywords related to your exact business’s name. Assuming a large number of those people searching are looking for your business, we obviously want to make sure your business page is the very first to pop up.
Second, you want to monitor the popular keywords for the general industry you’re a part of. That would mean finding out what keywords tend to rank high when it comes to searches related to pets or pet stores. Now, it’s important to remember that keywords are like the tides–they’re always changing. While “winter boots for dogs” may be ranking high in December and January, it may not be so popular come summertime. In other words, analytics are not a one-and-done deal. For optimal SEO, you should conduct regular assessments to keep your spot at the top of searches for keywords currently trending, so that you can also stay current and trending.
If analytics aren’t really your thing and you’re feeling a little lost, reach out to us! We’re something of an SEO-savant, and we love to help.
The Personality Palooza
While words like “search engine optimization” and “analytics” may make SEO blog pages feel a little cut and dry, that is sooo not the case! Just because the ultimate goal is to increase traffic to your business page does not mean your blog page has to be all work and no play. In fact, it’s better to make your blog page representative of who you and your business are. Infusing your articles with your business’s voice and personality will give readers a better idea of what you’re all about. It can turn a passer-byer reader into a paying customer or keep other readers coming back for more, ultimately reinforcing your increasing traffic. People like to feel connected when they read, and they definitely like to know who they’re working with. Putting you and your business’s personality out there through your blogs is a surefire way to get your message across and cultivate a successful SEO-friendly blog page.