SEO Blog: 7 tips to improve your SEO

It cannot be stressed enough, integrating a blog into your SEO strategy has become almost indispensable. Today, there are numerous reasons why business leaders are adding a blog to their websites.

To boost your visibility or to stand out from the competition, it is crucial to communicate about your company, your products, and/or your services.

In this article, we will explore why the blog is an excellent tool for anyone looking to increase their traffic and generate more leads.

What is a blog?

What is the difference between a blog and a website?

Why create a blog?

How to optimize your blog for SEO?

What is an SEO blog?

The term "Blog" is a shortening of the English compound word "Web log," meaning "Journal." It is used to describe the periodic publication of articles on a digital medium.

The blog quickly became a success due to its innovative and intuitive nature. Used wisely, it allows for effective communication about your company and activities. It offers great editorial freedom and interaction with visitors, thanks to the possibility of posting comments on each article. The blog allows for the immediate publication of articles or scheduling them for later publication.

Now an indispensable ally for marketing and communication managers, the blog continues to thrive and has become an integral part of an effective SEO strategy.

What is the difference between a blog and a website?

Too many companies settle for a website that does not optimize their visibility enough.

Considering that a website is a set of resources accessible via a web address, called a URL, hosted on a web server, and allows for the publication of textual and multimedia content, a blog is a website.

A blog is a type of website where it is possible to publish articles, also called posts, in chronological order.

Initially reserved for professional bloggers, companies now use it to communicate about their activities. Storytelling, news publications, product communication... Everything is possible with a blog.

Naturally, the blog can be integrated into both e-commerce sites and showcase sites.

As you can see, the company blog is an SEO lever not to be overlooked!

Why create an SEO blog?

Creating a blog offers numerous advantages, in my opinion, the main ones being:

• Optimizing natural referencing: indeed, a blog allows working on many keywords
• Generating qualified traffic: in addition to generating traffic, it can attract the visitors you want to target
• Converting traffic into leads: the blog is the perfect place to generate leads, particularly through the implementation of an Inbound Marketing strategy
• Boosting notoriety: where there's traffic, there's notoriety, of course!
• Improving brand image: the blog, if associated with a good content strategy, can improve your brand image
• Attracting new customers
• Retaining customers

I could mention other advantages, but in my opinion, creating a blog for a company is not up for discussion: it's a must!

When creating a blog from scratch, you'll need to quickly produce content to give it some depth. If your blog aims to generate qualified traffic to sell products or services, it might be wise to conduct an SEO semantic audit to create content related to your activity. Redacteur.com offers "SEO Content Strategy" packs to assist you in setting up your content strategy by finding content ideas and writing them after conducting a semantic audit. Don't hesitate any longer and take action to become visible on Google.

Let's now look in detail at the 8 main advantages of creating a blog.

The blog improves your visibility

Creating a company blog is an excellent way to optimize visibility on digital platforms. Ranking high on the list of actions to boost natural referencing; the blog has become an interesting added value and, moreover, easy to implement.

Creating relevant content is the key point number 1 of any self-respecting SEO strategy. Creating a blog will allow you to publish quality content and use keywords related to your sector of activity. Keywords correspond to queries searched by internet users.

Choosing the right keywords is the foundation of natural referencing. Google displays search results based on keywords.

To choose your keywords wisely, several tools are available on the web. The blog allows for qualified and sustainable traffic that, in the long run, will generate more revenue.

Generating backlinks

Having a well-worked and optimized blog ensures increased traffic. Thanks to the creation of new quality pages on one hand, but also thanks to the generation of backlinks.

Backlinks are links from site A pointing to site B and help increase a website's authority, and therefore its visibility.

If your articles are interesting, you will naturally receive inbound links to your site. Backlinks allow Google bots to recognize the relevance of a website.

Added value for the customer

Creating a blog is not only an SEO challenge. It also has real added value for your customers.

A true showcase of your activity, the blog is useful for showing the human side of a company and giving substance to a society. Like social networks, the blog conveys the company's values and allows for a real trust relationship with customers and potential customers.

It also allows answering frequently asked questions, thereby assisting the customer in their navigation journey. Company blog articles are considered high-value brand content.

Thanks to the blog, the company can demonstrate its expertise to its customers and build a solid brand image.

Improving internal linking with your company blog

Internal linking involves creating internal links, i.e., links to strategic pages of your website.

These links should be created as naturally as possible to avoid being penalized by Google. For this, rationalize the number of links per page and vary the anchors as much as possible.

Good internal linking should give juice to the most important pages of your site. On your blog, you can create links pointing to products or product categories you want to promote.

Strengthening your image with relevant and optimized content

The blog is a very interesting source of traffic acquisition. The denser its content, the more pages of the site will be displayed in search results (SERP). However, there's no point in posting just for the sake of posting!

By creating dense, relevant, and optimized content, you significantly increase your chances of generating more traffic and more leads in the long term.

How to optimize your blog for SEO?

As we've just mentioned, the blog is an important vector of traffic. However, to attract many qualified visitors, it's important to follow several SEO rules. So, here are 8 tips to better position your blog articles in search engines!

Have an SEO audit of your blog conducted

While it's possible to properly reference one's site blog by oneself, don't forget that natural referencing requires skills and tools that are sometimes complex to use and expensive.

Having an SEO audit conducted can save you time and prevent mistakes. Use our online price simulator to find out how much an SEO audit costs based on your site's characteristics.

Use thematic clusters

In the past, referencing mainly focused on individually optimizing articles. Although this is important, you can boost your blog's SEO by using "topic clusters" (or thematic clusters).

The principle is simple: you select a pillar topic, related to your main activity, as well as a target keyword. Then, you determine sub-topics (between 7 and 10), related to your main topic, each including a more specific keyword, often long-tail.

Thus, you define several article ideas directly, to link them together via internal linking. This will have 3 advantages:

• Offer your visitors a complete and enlightened view of the topic.
• Keep internet users on your website longer (an important signal for referencing).
• Help search engine robots better crawl and understand your content, strengthening its positioning in the results.To find thematic content around a keyword or topic, you can use tools like Semrush or AnswerThePublic.

Customize Your URLs

Your URL structure is an important ranking factor. Avoid automatically generated URLs that aren't always optimized. Carefully integrate your main keyword so Google's bots index your pages on relevant queries.

You can even create directories by theme, where you compile your 7 to 10 articles on the topic. This allows you to add a common (and main) keyword to all your URLs.

For example, if you have a blog about nutrition and you want to write articles on dietary diversification, add a sub-directory. Your blog posts will have a URL structured like this:

Yourdomainname.com/dietary-diversification/keyword-of-the-article

Write for Featured Snippets

"Featured Snippets" appear at the top of Google's organic results. They often take the form of bullet lists, an excerpt with a definition, a FAQ, or even a comparative table.

Featured snippets provide quick answers to the most common searches, often starting with "who, what, where, why, and how". Here's an example of Featured Snippets when typing the query "the best billing tools":

How to create content optimized to appear as rich snippets?

• Ask questions in titles and subtitles, then answer briefly and concisely.
• Use bullet or numbered lists whenever possible.
• Target search intent to better write titles.
• Opt for long-tail keywords.

Ensure articles are readable

Readability is an important SEO factor for search engines. Articles that are pleasant to read, ergonomic, and properly structured are often better ranked.

How to improve article readability?

• Use short sentences.
• Think of transition words to smooth reading.
• Add subtitles to structure the text.
• Make short paragraphs (3-4 lines maximum).
• Space out the text.
• Prefer active voice over passive voice.
• Proofread to avoid spelling, grammar, and syntax errors.

Write Long and Comprehensive Articles

According to a 2020 Backlinko study, content that ranks in Google's top 10 results contains an average of 1,447 words. According to an infographic by CoSchedule, the most successful blog posts are about 2,500 words long.

These figures are easily explained: longer content is often detailed and illustrated with concrete examples. It contains numerous keywords, aiding search engine bots in indexing.

Additionally, visitors will spend more time on it. The time spent on a page is a ranking factor! If internet users stay for several minutes, Google will judge your article as relevant, thus improving its position in the results.

If you already have many contents on your blog, you can consolidate them into a single article. You'll have fewer pages, but they'll be of higher quality and thus more likely to rank in the first results.

Don't waste time finding topic ideas and writing your articles. Take advantage of Redacteur.com's new service: an SEO expert finds the most relevant content for you following a semantic audit, and professional web writers take care of the optimized writing for SEO.

Add Visuals to Your SEO Blog

Search engines favor visual elements. Moreover, these have potential for your SEO! Images and videos appear on the search engine results page. Google even offers a dedicated section for image search.

In your articles, remember to add visual elements to break up the text and convey additional information.

Photos, graphs, infographics, tables, diagrams… These elements improve the article's readability while offering new SEO opportunities. Indeed, titles, alt tags, alternative text, and descriptions are places to insert your keywords to optimize your natural referencing.

The alt text is an important SEO factor for appearing in the SERPs. The alternative text improves the experience for visually impaired people consuming content on your blog.

Conclusion

As you've understood, creating a blog has become almost indispensable in an SEO strategy and also holds a commercial and marketing dimension.

Improving SEO, strengthening relationships with customers, and conveying a positive brand image are all capabilities of the corporate blog.

Also, natural referencing is a long-term effort. If you are diligent and regularly feed your blog with quality content, you'll see the benefits on your site's traffic in the following months. Patience!

To make your task easier, you can opt for a turnkey content strategy. Redacteur.com offers packages to help you set up your content strategy. From a semantic audit, an SEO expert finds content ideas to generate traffic on your site. Professional writers write the content, optimized for natural referencing and ready to be integrated, formatted in HTML.

Don't wait any longer to become visible on search engines.