The last two decades saw the significant evolution of the digital marketing landscape. Between the surge of misinformation floating around the digital marketing world and Google’s continuously changing algorithm, it’s easy to be derailed from the basic optimisation practices that should be employed in SEO and content strategy.
With the regular technological shift in search and every new algorithm update, we end up obsessing SEO’s impact in this new paradigm, and we end up shifting our focus to reflect this.
However, no matter how much a medium may change, its core principles remain the same. So, it’s best to always get back to basics when developing a stronger SEO strategy.
Below are the most common blogging mistakes that you might be making right now.
Ineffective Page Copy
Never sacrifice your site’s credibility and authority with poor page copy.
The digital marketing world often says emphasises write for your readers, not for the search engines. Make sure your content is light, without showing off knowledge or using excessive jargon.
Keep in mind that you need to write at an 8th-grade level.
May fail to understand is that content isn’t about publishing. Rather, it should be creating awareness around consumer needs. So your content should contain actionable tips, hence providing value.
You need to consistently establish your brand and create your voice as the author, thereby establishing your authority in the chosen niche.
Here’s what you need to do: Go over your blog. Then ask yourself—What does the reader experience when he or she comes across your page?
You have to factor in the average attention of each reader is approximately 8 seconds. With that in mind, you need to optimise your meta tags and header structure.
Why?
To encourage easy scanning and clearly communicate your purpose to your reader.
Then pique the reader’s interest by leveraging a powerful headline. Your strong introductory paragraph should nurture this interest. Allow for mental break in between long paragraphs by using images, animated GIFs or videos, and make sure there’s a clear transition in between phrases.
By doing this, you’re increasing the reader’s average user dwell time.
Insert the images every 400 words or so, breaking the information overload provided by massive chunks of content. Also, take advantage of the white space as this will help make your content visually appealing.
Finally, there’s the crucial part—EDITING. The rule of thumb should be 2/3 of writing should be dedicated to editing and reworking. Tools like Grammarly and Hemingway App helps make writing concise, clean, bold and clear.
Unoptimised Videos and Images
You have to admit this—many bloggers ignore optimising their images and videos when in fact these are the most common mistakes deteriorating SEO performance.
Remember this: All images used for your blog or website should be formatted as .jpg while all vector images should be formatted as .png.
Image alt text should also be optimised for it to rank in the targeted keyword image search since this will be displayed when a browser fails to display an image and tells content to search engines.
When you optimised your video files, make sure to host all video files in one single folder. Then create a video site map so search engines can index your videos. The meta description should also be optimised with targeted keywords.
Inconsistent Internal Links
One of the most overlooked aspects of SEO optimisation is perhaps internal linking. So why is this so important?
There are a number of ways proper and effective internal linking can help your website achieve SOE nirvana:
- Distributing authority throughout your site
- Defining site architecture
- Showing search engines your site’s most important pages
- Establishing user-friendly pathways for users across your site for easy navigation
- Indexing linked-to web pages using the keywords that you use in the hyperlink anchor text
- Distributing crawl rate by opening deep-linked web pages
You can amplify the magic of backlinks through strategic internal linking. Ideally, you would need at least 3 to 5 internal link per blog and a navigation menu or a drop-down menu on your homepage to provide deep links to web pages that are inaccessible.
It doesn’t mean that you posted a content on your blog Google and other search engines can automatically access it.
You have to conduct a thorough internal linking audit and note down which web pages have the most authority. Then insert internal links on the high-authority web pages linking them to other high-value internal pages, evenly distributing authority in your domain.
Summary
It’s never too late. Know that the SEO content strategy is, in the right way, imperfect. So there’s always an opportunity to refine and improve whatever strategy you have used previously.
