Blogging has become a reliable way to generate organic traffic for your website. From more visitors to qualified leads, publishing high-quality blog posts can help you achieve great results. Learn how to effectively use keywords to further enhance your blog’s visibility and attract your target audience.
Not convinced yet?
Orbit Media surveyed 1,000 bloggers in 2019 to collate data about blogging trends and practices. 81% of the respondents said they found blogs to be an effective marketing channel. Only 9% of them were unsure about the results of blogging.
Image via Orbit Media
That explains why most marketers and brands are jumping onto the blogging bandwagon.
In fact, 89% of B2B marketers published blog posts as a part of their content marketing strategies in 2019. Even startups and small businesses with limited marketing budgets prioritized blogging due to the benefits it offers.
As a result, the blogging domain has become ultra-competitive. As of now, nearly 5 million blog posts are published every day. On top of that, 108 million+ Tumblr posts (mostly micro-blog posts) are also published every day, competing for viewers’ attention.
With so much competition out there, it’s quite obvious that driving traffic to your blog posts is not going to be easy. That’s where targeting the right keywords comes into the picture.
How can optimizing your content for keywords help you generate more organic traffic?
If you include the right keywords in your blog’s HTML structure and content, Google crawlers will be able to find your blog easily. They will be able to index your blog posts for relevant search requests and rank them higher in the SERPs. This can help increase the search visibility of your blog so that you can get more traction for your posts.
But randomly adding keywords to your blog posts will not get you anywhere. You need to strategically plan the quantity and the placement of the target keywords in your posts.
In this post, I’ll explain how to strategically use keywords in your blog posts to rank higher in the SERPs and generate more traffic.
Shall we begin?
How Can You Effectively Use Keywords in Your Blog Posts?
Writing a powerful blog post is of little use if you can’t get enough people to read it. If you carefully integrate the right keywords into your posts, it can help you attract high-quality traffic.
Here are a few ways to plan and implement keyword optimization the right way:
1. Find the Right Keywords
There may be many keywords that are relevant to your domain. But if your target audience is not searching for them, it’s pointless to include them in your blog posts. It’s a good practice to choose keywords that matter to your audience.
How well do you know your audience?
Not sure?
You should start by creating a detailed persona of the audience groups you want to target. This should include information about their ages, locations, preferred channels, pain points, and interests.
If you are not sure about these aspects, there are tools that can provide analytics about your website traffic. You can leverage them to analyze who your existing blog visitors are, where they come from, and which keywords brought them to your blog.
You can also use other SEO tools to get a list of keywords that your blog is currently ranking well for. Similarly, you can find keywords that your competitors are targeting.
Once you have the list of potential keywords, you should filter this list to narrow down on keywords that have low difficulty scores and high search volumes.
Why should you target keywords with low difficulty scores?
Keywords with high difficulty scores have high competition. If you’re new to blogging or your site has a low domain authority, it’s best to avoid targeting such keywords.
Targeting keywords with high search volumes is a good choice. However, you should remember that quantity can never outperform quality.
You should use keywords that can help you attract visitors who are likely to subscribe to your blog, engage with your content, and, eventually, convert into buying customers.
You can sort your visitors’ data by page sessions in Google Analytics to identify your most engaged audience groups and their preferred content categories. This can help you get engaging content ideas for your upcoming blog posts.
Image via Google Support
2. Target Long-Tail Keywords
Generic keywords are often difficult to rank for, especially if your site has a low domain authority. Moreover, most people use long-tail keywords to search for information on Google.
The greater the purchase intent, the longer their search phrase will be.
For instance, there is no denying that generic keywords like “shoes” have high search volumes. But if a person is actually looking for shoes to buy, they are more likely to search for terms like “shoe stores near me” and “best shoes under $50.”
These are long-tail keywords.
If you integrate long-tail keywords into your blog posts, you can attract and engage people who are already in the middle or bottom stages of the sales funnel. These people can bring in more value than random visitors who are just browsing content.
Want to know the best part?
Using long-tail keywords can help you achieve better CPC (cost per click) and results.
Image via Instapage
If you also invest in pay-per-click (PPC) promotions, targeting long-tail keywords can be quite cost-effective for you.
But the question is…
How can you find long-tail keywords?
You can use Google’s search predictions to find long-tail keywords relevant to your generic keywords.
For example, if you want to create content related to “blogging tips,” search for it on Google. It will give you a list of relevant long-tail keywords that people search for.
Image via Google
If you don’t find suitable long-tail keywords here, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page to get more keyword suggestions in the related searches section.
Image via Google
3. Create Keyword-Rich Content
To help Google find and categorize your blog posts easily, you should optimize their HTML schemas for keywords.
You should insert your target keyword in the heading tag of each post. At the same time, you should ensure that you don’t stuff irrelevant keywords into your content unless you want Google to penalize your blog.
You can also add keywords to post titles, subheadings, alt text, and the file names of all images, meta descriptions, and body content.
Let’s start with the post titles.
The title of your post should be keyword-rich. You should try to frame your post title in the form of a question. Why? Because titles that contain a question have a 14.1% higher click-through rate (CTR) than titles without a question.
Instead of having a cryptic file name and alt text for images, you should use the target keyword in them.
Including key terms in the URLs of your blog posts can also help you improve their CTR by 45%. It makes it easier for readers to predict the context of your post’s content by seeing its URL.
Image via TechBii
You should write a keyword-rich meta description for each of your blog posts. In fact, you should try to add the main keyword in the first few words as search crawlers read from left to right.
Here’s is an example:
What about adding keywords to the body of your post?
You must write high-quality content so that your audience perceives you as an authority in your niche. Such content is more likely to strike a chord with the audience even if it doesn’t have an optimal keyword density. And user engagement is important.
You should evenly distribute keywords in the content of your post in a way that they fit in naturally. Along with the main keyword, you should also add its variations and synonyms.
Remember, keyword placement should align with the flow of your content. You should focus on addressing user intent when you write a blog post instead of focusing on meeting the required keyword density.
If you find it challenging to write quality content, you can always engage the services of online writing agencies or hire writers.
Are You Ready to Rank Higher in Search Results?
There are a lot of ways to incorporate keywords into your blog posts to generate more organic traffic and leads. However, the tactics I’ve shared above are very effective.
You should optimize your content for the right keywords to attract and engage audiences that really matter to your business.
Do you have any questions about SEO and blogging? Share them in the comments below. I’ll be glad to answer them.
Author Bio
Renu Sharma is Inbound Marketing Manager at Attrock . With expertise in content marketing, she helps companies attract qualified leads, grow their revenue, and brand reputations. She also works closely with influencers to help brands get more exposure in their niches. When not working, she loves to polish her marketing knowledge and skills, and watch interesting web series.
