Sharon Conwell — June 3, 2017 
It is a truth universally acknowledged that blogging can be extremely advantageous for your business. In fact, there are few reasons not to keep a business blog.
A blog can drive traffic to your website by incorporating SEO-friendly keywords and skyrocket your search engine rankings. It also opens up a valuable channel of communication between you and your clients, builds trust, and generates new leads that translate into tangible business gains.
Even better, a blog can help you establish yourself as an expert within your field, and share your knowledge and experience in an engaging manner.
While creating content for a business blog undeniably requires considerable time and effort, there are a number of free or low-cost ways to optimize your site for search engines. Here are 10 effective and economical ways to become an SEO superhero.
1. Outsource the work
Producing a blog isn’t a part-time job – if you really want to optimize your website for search engines, then you’re going to need to post regularly and in depth. As these blogs also need to brilliantly reflect you as a business person, they should be original, high-quality and editorially flawless. And that’s hard work.
Aside from being a huge time commitment, it just may not sit well with your existing talents. For this reason, many businesses choose to delegate their blog writing or content creation to external third parties.
You can easily find a content writer or editor by posting an ad on a site like Upwork or Freelancer. Other websites don’t even require an ad from you – you can simply select the service you’re looking for, and it will be assigned to an expert. Check out UK Writings or Big Assignments for this sort of thing. You can also find a low-cost automated service for writing and proofreading on People Per Hour.
2. Use tools to improve content
Without consistently high-quality content, your SEO rankings will flounder because you will simply lose the interest of readers. To make sure every blog is top-notch before you post it, without the help of an external editor or proofreader, you can use the handy guides available at Australian Help or Academized to ensure your language, tone, and structure are perfect.
It’s also essential to remember that blog posts of around 2000 words are best for SEO. You can keep an eye on this with Easy Word Count.
Furthermore, never forget to reference authoritative outside sources, as Google pays attention to what you link to in an article. Similarly, every article on your site should be accompanied by social share icons to fully optimize the opportunity to earn more inbound links and gain further authority for your site.
3. Don’t forget about keywords
When writing a business blog post, you cannot forget to repeatedly and strategically use keywords. These words should be the cornerstones of your blogs – the glue that holds the writing together.
Make sure the keywords you choose fit seamlessly into your writing, though, and are always used within context. SEO does not improve when you overstuff your content with multiple keywords – concentrate on one or two per blog that are close to your niche and have few competitors.
Google Trends and Google’s Keyword Tool in AdWords are free tools that will give you all the data you need to master keywords.
4. Remember that keyword placement matters
On that note, while keywords are useful on their own, they are at their most effective when properly situated within the text.
There are three main places where your keywords should appear. The first is the title, where you should aim to write something catchy that also incorporates a keyword for SEO purposes. The second is within different sub-headers and the central body text.
The third (and most important) is within the URL itself. Your URLs should have a breadcrumbs trail and feature readable indicators of the content within the blog. Avoid using numbers or random strings of text in your URLs.
5. Make sure your content is mobile-friendly
Increasingly, people access the internet and consume blogs and news while commuting, watching TV or lying in bed. This means they’re generally using their mobile phones. And if your blog isn’t mobile-optimized, that is bad news for your SEO.
The majority of Google search now occurs on mobile devices and Google will not display your website prominently in mobile search results if it isn’t mobile-optimized.
Putting that aside, the internet is the home of short attention spans, and the chances of someone returning to your site on a laptop or computer after being unable to access it properly on their mobile phone are slim.
Use the Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check how Google search sees your pages or read this free guide on building mobile-friendly sites to get started.
6. Don’t write boring essays
While your blog content will ideally be around 2000 words, be wary of making it too long, technical or tedious. Break up your text with images, infographics or videos and format the content in a way that’s proven to be pleasing to online consumers. This means including sub-headers, writing in short paragraphs, bolding certain points and incorporating bullet points/lists.
If your reader can scan through your post quickly to find the information they’re looking for, then they’ll be more likely to revisit it as a resource in the future.
Another advantage of including images, videos, infographics or even graphs and tables that relate to SEO is that you can create alt-text for each inset, which improves your ranking overall if people are searching for picture or video content.
7. Make sure you can be contacted
Your contact details need to be included on every page of your blog – this means a phone number, email address, or contact form at a minimum. After all, this isn’t a personal blog – it’s a business blog, which means you need to be available to potential clients and customers.
Similarly, be specific about who you are and what your blog stands for. Have your business name on every landing page of your website and put it into blog posts in the same way that you would include a keyword.
In summary
It’s very simple to use some simple tricks and online tools to improve your SEO for little to no cost. Time and effort need to be dedicated to running a successful blog; however, the above tips will definitely help you achieve better and faster results.
SEO is simpler to understand and master than many people think – and over time it can be your biggest source of traffic.
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