SEO template to optimize your website and get found on the search engines. Using this template, you’ll be driving more traffic to your website.
Before you start your profitable blog, you need to know what you should be writing about. By doing keyword research you know what content to create for your ideal reader.
3 Step Template To Optimize Your Website For SEO
Create Helpful Content
Write For The Reader Not For Google
Someone who has landed on your website and just found a load of content that’s filled with fluff and keywords. They’re unhappy and not going to be hanging around.
Leading to a bounce and negatively affecting your SEO.
The higher your bounce rate is the more Google will see your blog as being of low value and not deserve high rankings.
Completely missing the point of why you’re creating content. This is why you need to optimize your website for SEO.
Although of course, you can’t make all readers not bounce, you need to expect some to bounce. In fact, you can expect to see on average 26% – 40% bounce rate.
Anything over and above 70% is worrying. You need to look at your blog to see how you can improve it.
Start making improvements by looking at your copy and headlines.
Are you giving information that the reader wants throughout? Or do you sound like a robot that’s keyword stuffing wherever possible?
Keyword stuffing without thinking about your reader’s needs.
Always put the readers first and not Google. When you have happy readers who stay on your website for longer and share it online, you make Google happy.
This is why you need to create helpful content.
What Is Helpful Content According To Google?
On August 25 and September 12 2022, Google rolled out core updates.
Yes, more updates to help keep website owners on their toes
This update is known as the ‘Helpful Content Updates’.
Purpose behind this update is to weed out websites that are just creating content for good rankings.
Meaning that if someone creates content that is just selling a product and not providing useful information to the reader, their rankings will drop.
Whereas, if a website has content that provides helpful information and answers everything the reader will want to know, then they’re rewarded. Rewarded with higher rankings.
Now you know the importance of creating helpful content, you need to start creating content for your website.
To do this, first things first, you need to some keyword research.
Finding The Best Keywords For Your Website Using These Tactics
Neil Patel says don’t do keyword research but then WordStream says the absolute opposite.
Although they both seem to say that you should be doing keyword research to find out the topics that your audience cares about right now.
Find out what they care about to create awesome content. Content that is evergreen and helps the reader solve their problem.
Research the topics that your readers are caring about right now with keyword research. Start finding the keywords to target for your blog with the variety of tools out there on the Internet.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is there to understand your target market and how they’re searching for your content, services, or products.
What Are The 5 Types Of Keywords?
These are the five main keyword match types:
1. Broad Match
Broad match keywords enable you to reach the widest audience possible. Using these keywords, you’re driving a large volume of traffic to your website.
Broad match type keywords have the most drawbacks. Traffic your website will receive won’t be targeted but generalised.
For example, a broad match keyword is digital marketing.
2. Modified Broad Match
Modified broad match allows you to narrow down even more what your keyword should be.
For example, your broad keyword is digital marketing. To narrow it down further press the space bar afterwards and you’ll get autofill suggestions of an extra word to add.
3. Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords are narrowing down your keywords further.
For example, you choose the modified broad match ‘digital marketing course’. Now you can refine the keyword further.
Press the space bar after course and you’ll get more results that tell you exactl;y what people are searching for in your niche.
4. Informational Keywords
Informational keywords and searches are used when an online searcher is looking for more information about something.
An informational search query often includes keywords like
- How
- What
- Why
Informational keywords are designed to answer a question or provide information.
It’s important to be aware of when your audience does and doesn’t want to be shown your products or services. Informational keywords are not the time, but transactional keywords are.
5. Transactional Keywords
Transactional searches often have keywords that are easy to spot. Searches usually contain words such as
- Buy
- Purchase
- Cheap
- Best
User intent for transactional keywords is finding products they can purchase. Therefore if you sell products or products you’re an affiliate of, you want to be targeting transactional keywords.
How Do You Do Keyword Research?
Follow these steps to identify the keywords you should be targeting to attract the audience that you want.
- List broad topics relevant to your niche and modify them
- Expand each keyword with long tail keywords
- Find related searches
- Verify the search intent
Analyze With These The Best Keyword Research Tools?
Top tools on the Internet for keyword research are
- Google Trends
- Google keyword planner
- Keywords Everywhere
- Ubersuggest
- Answer the public
Each of these tools will help you to optimize your website for SEO. Learn more about each of these keyword tools in this comparison of the keyword research tools for SEO.
Now that you’ve done your keyword research, you’re filled with ideas of what the readers are actually looking for.
Write Headings And Meta Descriptions That Get Clicks
2 out of 10 people (according to CoSchedule) will click through to your website after reading your heading and meta description. Demonstrating that you really do need to put some time and effort into your heading and meta description.
Time and effort so that you optimize website for SEO and increase your chances of getting a click-through instead of your competitor.
Plus when you’re getting more clicks than those competitors, you rank higher as it’s another ranking signal to Google.
Just make sure that they’re clicking through to quality content. Quality content so they don’t bounce which ends up as a negative factor in Google’s eyes.
Writing a heading for your content can be rather tricky. Firstly it needs to be SEO-friendly, but it also needs to be enticing and click-worthy.
Ensure sure that you get a good mix of these 2 factors that need to go into your heading, follow this easy framework.
Framework To Write Headings
Your first port of call is choosing a number. This number is the number of tips in a blog. The best numbers for this tends to be odd numbers.
I don’t know why, but it works.
Year numbers are great too. Year numbers work great for ultimate guides. You know those long-form blog posts that have the heading Ultimate guide to X in Year.
Give your reader a strong reason to click-through. These strong reasons can be to achieve a goal or risk-averse. Examples of this are
- 15 email personalization techniques
- Everything that you’ve been taught about content promotion is wrong
You could even create a heading that can be seen as click-bait. Though the key to doing this is to create a heading that actually does deliver on its promise in the heading.
Now that you’ve written a better heading for your blog, use this in your other content and headings throughout your blog. You know those H2 headings.
Write H2 headings that are SEO-friendly but enticing for the reader to stay interested and not bounce.
Create The Right Meta Description
Your meta description is the short piece of text underneath your blog title in the search results. Meta descriptions are 160 characters in length and can be easily created with an SEO WordPress plugin.
Meta descriptions give a bit more information relating to the blog title. But you don’t want to give any old information in your meta description.
What you want to give a hook. A hook that grabs the person’s attention to you on the search results. Then the meta description reels them in and they’re left clicking through to your website.
Your blog title is essentially setting the stage with a hook. The meta description then reels in the reader with a compelling reason why they should click through to your website.
How Do You Optimize Your Meta Description For SEO?
Optimize your meta description for SEO by adding your keyword.
That may seem obvious but the most important thing is to sound human and not keyword stuffing. What I mean by this is to not write your keyword repeatedly. Instead, think about your hook.
That hook is telling someone why they should click through to your site. Then you add that keyword into your hook so it sounds natural and still has command of the English language.
Your meta description is not the only thing that needs to sound natural and that you’re actually talking to a human. Your blog post needs to sound the same too.
How Links Work and Best Practices
Linking in your website not only optimize’s your website for SEO but also keeps readers on your blog for longer. According to Backlinko, a site’s overall link authority strongly correlates with higher search engine rankings.
There are 3 different ways in which you can use link-building tactics
- External links
- Internal links
- Backlinks
To begin looking at how each of these strategies can work for your website, we’ll take a look at external links, what they are, and how they are used.
External Links
External links are links you put on your website but links to another. These types of links are used to back any ideas you give and increases your trustworthiness.
To start adding external links, list authority websites in your niches. Then link to one of their blogs when you need to back up any of your ideas.
There will be times when you can’t link to their website. In this case, you mention the site’s name in your blog when you’re referencing them.
It’s important to reference the website you got information from either as an external link or by naming the source so you don’t ever get accused of plagiarism.
If you’ve ever been to University you’re probably already used to this idea. Whenever you write a paper you have to list your sources. In blogging it’s similar.
Instead of writing a large list of sources at the end of your paper, you just name or link to sources during the blog.
Internal Links
Boost your organic traffic by 40% when using internal links. Plus, decrease your bounce rate with internal links. So what are internal links and how do they work?
Internal links are links on your website that links to another blog or page on your site. Therefore the reader ends up just consuming more information from you before ever leaving your site.
This is why you need to create a content strategy for your website so that you can create those internal links and reduce your bounce rate.
To create a content strategy for your blog where you can make multiple internal links, do keyword research for your website. Create a list on a spreadsheet of all the keywords related to your topic.
For example, if you’re doing a blog on personal finance and the topic you’re targeting is savings. Do keyword research with the keyword research tools and make a list of all the associated keywords.
Answer the public along with keywords everywhere are 2 great tools for this.
Backlinks
Backlinks are the final part of the link-building strategy to optimize your blog for SEO.
If you’re unaware of what backlinks are. Backlinks are links on other websites that are linking to your blog. This is typically done with guest posts, research you’ve done, quotes you’ve given, or interviews.
To help you start getting backlinks, start building relationships with indirect competitors in your niche. You don’t want to start by getting a guest post on the top authority site in your niche but rather a smaller blog that has an audience.
From there you can start to build some momentum and as your authority increase, your website traffic increases, and so does your confidence plus earnings.
In A Nutshell,
Optimize your website for SEO using the template and watch as your blog grows along with your earnings. These are just the SEO basics covered in this blog, but it’s a great place to start and get your juices flowing. If you’ve got a knack for SEO, check out these Fiverr gigs that are paying experts $1000 per gig.
