We all love blogging. What we may love more is knowing our content is being appreciated. These days appreciation is shown in the numbers. As the saying goes, numbers don’t lie. If you think the numbers don’t count you are fooling yourself. The best way to grow your blog is to increase your numbers. That’s the part that may have you struggling. Just how do you increase those numbers? Simple. Make the search engines love your content.
What Do People Want To Read?
Before you start writing you should determine if what you are writing is something people want to know about. Is your topic search worthy? While you may think your visit to Aunt Lucy’s is worth blogging about it may not be what people want to know about. If however you really feel like paying homage to Aunt Lucy find a way to make it click with audiences. Here’s where Google Keyword Planner (previously named Google Keyword Tool) comes in.
You’re just had an amazing visit with Aunt Lucy and now you want to share it with the world. Let’s pen a post “My Visit To Aunt Lucy’s”. How many people want to know about Aunt Lucy?
Google reports that on average 90 people will search Aunt Lucy. However they supply no data about how many will search for My Visit To Aunt Lucy’s. Not good. We can do better. You need to think about how your story will resonate the masses. Perhaps you really like visiting Aunt Lucy because of the good feelings it evokes. For instance, each visit to Aunt Lucy’s may bring up fond childhood memories. Let’s explore this topic.
When you enter your keyword phrase Google Keyword Planner will offer you Ad Group Ideas. Click on the links of ideas that relate to your topic. You can explore the different key word phrases.
Your next option is to sort by Keyword Ideas. This is preferable if you want to know how many people are searching for your exact phrase. It’s also helpful to give you suggestions to optimize that keyword.
As you can see Childhood Memories is a pretty good keyword phrase with over 9,000 monthly searches on average. Early childhood while yielding some good results doesn’t exactly fit the mood of the post.
Opt For Popular But Not Too Popular
Next we will examine a real live case study. A blog post I wrote on Shakeology. When writing on a hugely popular topic the competition can be stiff but that doesn’t mean you can’t compete with the big dogs. You just need to refine your topic. Let’s look at search queries for Shakeology and related topics.
Here you can see the monthly search queries as well as results for competitive keywords. Shakeology has a whopping 200K search queries per month. While it would be great to rank high for that keyword it would also be more difficult. We are aiming for organic results but if you were using adwords it would also be more expensive to bid for placement.
Notice the Competition category. Here you should try to choose the highest search query with the lowest possible competition. (But not always) What I’ve done is opted for two different topics. Shakeology review currently ranking on Google’s page 2 and Shakeology recipes currently ranked on Google page 1 in the number 2 position. Not too shabby for new blog.
If you can get on even page 3 of Google with a highly searched keyword you will see a huge boost in traffic. You should aim to initially get ranked within the first 10 pages of Google and then try to improve your ranking from there. Don’t fear if your blog is new or has no following. This is a new blog and the posts are just a month old. But Google favors fresh new content with high value to readers.
Important tip. When researching your content on Google be sure you are logged out or at least have hide private results checked. Otherwise it may seem like all of your content is 1st page material. That’s because Google wants to show you what it thinks is relevant to you.
Make It Clickable
Finally once you’ve decided on the best keyword terminology for your post combine it with a killer post title. Let’s go back to Aunt Lucy. We’ve decided childhood memories will be our focus. Now pen a few titling options and decide on the one that seems best
- Childhood Memories: A Trip Down Memory Lane
- Reliving Childhood Memories: A Warm And Wonderful Visit
- 10 Fondest Childhood Memories From Aunt Lucy’s
Tweak Your Posts
Once you’ve written your post and found that you have been indexed you can always go back and tweak your post to land higher in the rankings. Make sure that your blog is set to automatically ping and search engines will pick up changes. Sometimes changing the title or changing some text in your post can get you moved up the ladder. Just because a post a written doesn’t necessarily mean it’s finished. So continue to tweak until you get the results you want.
About
Veronica Spriggs is a health and fitness blogger at Me Only Better Fitness. Her creative outlets are her blogs Digiscrap Boutique and Wedding Album Cafe. She is passionate about art, photography, music, life and her new found fitness.
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great suggestions to make your post matter to your readers!
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