Today, you notice that many sites have a blog or editorial space and regularly share articles on their own themes. So you are wondering, if you too should get started… or not?
Let’s start by reviewing together what blogging is before understanding why this lever is effective for your SEO strategy and how to develop it.
What is Blogging?
In basic terms, a blog is a space on a site where you can post content like articles or videos, about your business or around a particular topic.
Originally, a blog had a personal orientation and was perceived more as a diary with publication of articles in the form of mood posts. Today, the blog is a great communication tool that companies have adopted in turn. Indeed, it can be very useful to you in several ways: you will be able to develop content on your company to be able to demonstrate your expertise, generate traffic, improve your notoriety, create a link with your readers or a community . ,…
But what is the link between blogging and SEO?
SEO or search engine optimization , also called natural referencing, is the set of techniques that aim to promote positioning in search results on engines like Google.
Google is the most used search engine in France with a market share of over 90% according to a study conducted by Statcounter . Moving up to the top positions in a Google search for your specific keywords is therefore essential for your digital strategy. And to be well positioned on the Google search network, it is important to know how it works.
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Google’s goal is to provide the most relevant response possible for a given query in order to provide the best user experience .
To achieve this goal, Google uses robots that visit the web constantly and scan different site pages to update its index and take into account the latest updates. Be careful to take into consideration that Google’s robots scan pages and not sites, so we can see each page as a potential gateway to the site.
To determine an order of relevance in the results of the SERP , Google is interested in the content of the scanned page to identify the pages that best correspond to the needs expressed by Internet users via their queries . That is to say, it will analyze the source code of the page and explore the semantic field to understand the subject matter and decide whether or not it responds to the user’s request.
It is also strongly recommended to maintain a regularity in the publication of articles, so that the Google robots which scan your site can feed on new content each time they pass and thus favor your site during the ranking phase . The more frequently you publish content, the more Google engines will pass on your pages, it is really the fuel of Google!
How your blog will influence your natural referencing
The importance of creating SEO optimized content
Today, very little content generates SEO traffic , for the simple reason that it has not been optimized. Now that you have reviewed the basics of blogging and the link with SEO, we will explain why it is important to integrate this lever into your strategy and why you absolutely must optimize it.
Indeed, perhaps you have already thought of and set up a blog space on your site with editorial content but you do not see any change in your traffic. It’s simply because if your articles have not been written following SEO recommendations , they will have little or no impact on your natural referencing.
Creating optimized content will allow you by addressing your target to acquire qualified traffic . If your site pages go up in good position on requests from Internet users, it is then people with intention who will visit your site and who will have more chance of becoming a prospect , then a customer . We generally observe that the session duration of an Internet user coming from the organic source is longer than that coming from other sources of traffic, precisely because the Internet user finds it of interest and is in a search context.
The checklist of SEO optimized content for your blog
Define your personas and the themes that will respond to their issues. Take care to address a particular target per article, and to vary the subjects
Structure your articles , and use the title tags , meta-title, H1, H2, H3 tags,… respecting the maximum number of characters. These structural elements allow Google to quickly understand the subject of the page, the points addressed and their hierarchy… By following these SEO criteria, you will not be penalized by the Google crawl
Define one or two main keyword(s) for each article subject while remaining vigilant on the search volume of this (these) word(s), it would be a shame to choose expressions with a too low search volume
Define a set of keywords related to your theme and quote them in your article. Be careful not to be too repetitive and to adopt the richest and most coherent semantic field possible!
Add internal and external links. The internal mesh will give importance to your article and have more weight when Google will crawl your site
Write articles with a minimum of 400 words , to allow you to express an idea, to arouse the interest of your reader and to have an impact in your SEO referencing
Optimize your visuals and name them with predefined keywords that describe the content.
Create content regularly : 3 to 5 articles per month are required for your strategy to be effective with regular publication. There is no question of publishing all the articles at the same time and then… nothing! That would be counterproductive!
And to finish …
Arm yourself with patience… Because the effects of an SEO strategy take between 3 to 6 months before reaching optimal performance. But don’t lose the the rhythm, you will be rewarded!
Remember to regularly analyze your competitors! Observe who is coming up on the top 3 positions of your strategic keywords to determine the existing content you need to optimize or new content to develop.
Finally, do not forget to set up a follow-up of your KPIs to measure the impact of your actions. In particular, you will be able to analyze the traffic coming from the organic source , the new keywords on which your site is positioned and the potential position gains on keywords already referenced to then make the comparison with your competitors.
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