Your blog should be amazing. You finally found a freelance writer who understands your business, and you’re turning out quality articles every 2 weeks. But you’re still not seeing any return on the investment.
If this sounds painfully familiar, you’re far from alone. Most businesses have a blog, but very few see any sort of return. This leads them to wonder why they’re doing it in the first place, and wonder if blogging is a dead medium.
It’s not.
If your blog is underperforming, the odds are very good that you don’t have to fire your writer or abandon your blog completely. You simply may be committing these very common SEO-killing mistakes.
Only Focusing on Keywords
Google does not simply look at your keyword usage when crawling your content, but it’s clearly very important. There are also other terms that Google may be looking for.
Let’s say you’re writing a blog about Marvel superheroes. You talk about Iron Man, The Hulk, Captain America and Wolverine. However, Google crawls your content and notices something: You didn’t talk about Spider-Man. Google sees that all of the current top-ranking pages for this topic all talk about Spiderman. They may wonder why yours does not, and they may see it as lesser content.
That’s an oversimplified example, but it’s important to know that your blog will be judged by more than just your keywords. And conducting some TF-IDF research could show you the other words you need to work into your blog.
“In simple terms, your keyword research gives you the words you need to optimize in order to rank,” said Paul Teitelman, owner of SEOToronto.ca and a 10-year veteran of the SEO industry.
“But TF-IDF research can uncover the other words that you need to leapfrog what is already ranking. You don’t need to optimize them, but it’s best to include them.”
You can use a tool like Surfer SEO to conduct this research.
Using Keywords, But Not Optimizing Them
You have the keywords, but you may not be using them the right way.
Of course, you need to add them (strategically) to the actual blogs. But, you also need to ensure you include them in your:
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- H2 headings, when possible
- Image file names and descriptions
Too many people will work the keywords into the page/blog copy and fail to use them anywhere else. This is basically leaving SEO money on the table.
No Internal Links
You need to give Google a clear path to crawl deeper into your site.
Every piece of content should have a couple of internal links that encourage the bots to take a look around and see what you’re all about. Link words to related blogs or service pages.
Don’t go overboard. Keep it to 2-3 per 1000 words. But having zero is a wasted opportunity. You have amazing content. Help Google discover it.
Of course, these are only a few of the things that can make or break your blog’s SEO performance.
However, addressing these potential issues can definitely help your rankings and your traffic. And the good news is that they are free or very cheap solutions.
Try them today and thank us later.