Blogging for SEO: 3 Top Tips for Powering your Google visibility

By | May 3, 2013

photo (3) - Version 2Blogging for SEO: 3 Top Tips for Powering your Google visibility

By Jeremy Nelson-Smith, Internet Marketing Expert

Your blog (you have got one haven’t you?) can be very effective in raising your Google visibility via higher and more numerous natural / organic / unpaid rankings. But just any old blog simply will not do! Google wants to see loads of interesting, authoritative, ‘of-value-to-the-reader’ content, not meaningless waffle.

Here are 3 top tips for making your blogs effective in raising your Google rankings:

1.      Choose blog topics that your target audience is genuinely interested in and want to read!

Duh! Well, that’s obvious I hear you say, but just look at the number of blogs pushed out onto the internet by businesses that are of no interest whatsoever to their audience. Old favourites like the Christmas Party, the staff trip to Thorpe Park, the health of the office dog etc. etc. belong in the News section of a website, not the Blog.

So, when thinking about your next blog topic, ask yourself:

If I was one of my target customers would I really want to read this?

Will this really be of value to the person who reads it?

If the answer is ‘yes’, write it, if it’s ‘no’ then choose another topic.

2.      Choose blog topics that match what people are searching for on Google right now.

As well providing your audience with valuable, interesting stuff to read, what you are trying to do with your blogs is get search results for your blog post on Google – that’s the ‘holy grail’ here. The more of your posts that appear as individual search results in their own right, the more people you will get visiting your web pages.

So, it stands to reason that your blog content will only get decent results on Google if the topic closely matches what people are already looking for.

Here’s a real-life example: one of my clients is a law firm specialising in employment law. When deciding what topic to focus on for their next blog one of the first questions they ask is ‘what are the ‘hot topics’ in employment law right now?’. If the answer is, for example, ‘changes to redundancy law’ then that’s the topic for the blog. An authoritative, interesting piece, that’s really helpful and informative and is in tune with what people want to read about right now is much more likely to score in the search results.

3.      Use the right keywords, in the right places in your blog

Your blog may be the most interesting, relevant, ‘valuable-to-the-audience’ piece ever written about the topic but if Google can’t read the right keyword ‘signposts’, then chances are it won’t get indexed correctly, meaning it won’t get found.

So, find the search keywords people are using about the topic via the Google AdWords keyword tool (search for it on Google) and use them:

  1. In the title of your blog post
  2. In the main heading
  3. In the text, early on in the first or second sentence if possible.

N.B. Be very careful not to overuse your chosen keywords in your blog. Google just wants ‘signposts’ so it can match search queries with content – it does not need to be ‘beaten over the head’ with keywords – if you use them to often Google may penalise you with lower rankings. Just be sensible and work keywords into your text so they appear naturally and not too often – a few times only is usually fine.

Follow these tips and you’ll go a long way to improving your chances of improving your visibility on Google.

Happy blogging!