Content creation is to this generation what painting was to the renaissance. Everyone’s on it, everyone’s experimenting with it and the vast majority of those involved will never get any credit. For most people, content creation started with a Utopian vision – building a community around a platform, freely expressing themselves and hopefully monetising. Unfortunately, this vision often gets the mother of all wake-up calls the minute a blogger creates a google analytics account and sees the daily view count barely creeping above five.
It’s a sad truth that when you first start, your platform is an island. Particularly if you are a blogger who’s stuck on page five of google and you don’t have a social media following to bump you up the rankings.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that google search volume is increasing year on year, so there are enough clicks for all of us. Also, the majority of that search volume is ‘organic traffic’ – unpaid, ad free traffic, via search engines.
The key to improving organic traffic to your sight is to learn SEO (search engine optimisation). Learn SEO, build your organic traffic, and the rest is history.
Now I’m no SEO bigshot, but it’s fair to say I’ve done my due diligence.
These are my top three tips.
1. Keyword research
State the flipping obvious… Keyword research is a key (pardon the pun) step to getting your SEO campaign off the ground. Keywords are the atomic building blocks of SEO – they are what google will use to rank your site, so if you nail your keywords, you’re halfway there.
First things first, you’re going to need an SEO tool – like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Moz – these are all paid softwares and unfortunately, they can get pretty pricey. The good thing is, you don’t have to worry about it, at least for the first week or so; as you’re better off activating a free trial and working from there.
The dashboards for these tools have different setups, but when you’re doing your keyword search, try and keep your eyes on these three metrics:
1. Search Volume
3. Trend
In short you are going to want a high search volume, a low key word difficulty and an upward trend. That way you’re going to have a lot of interest, low competition and that interest is likely to increase over time.
One crucial point to remember is that the algorithm selects for a key word ‘phrase’ not just the key word itself.
These can exist as ‘short tail’ or ‘long tail’ key words –
e.g., MMA (short tail) vs Greatest MMA fighters of all time (long tail)
Generally speaking, if you’re just starting out, you are going to want to focus your SEO campaign on long tail keywords. These are going to be less competitive on Google, which will give you a better chance to rank.
Whack your keywords on a spreadsheet (the above tools can do it for you) – and use them as the basis for your next blog posts.
2. On-page SEO
On-page SEO is all about optimising what you can see – the blog itself. To do this, it’s a good idea to make your blog as visually appealing as possible. This will improve a key metric used by google to rank pages – ‘dwell time’ (how long people are spending on your site). The longer people spend on your site the better your dwell time (and the better your ranking).
To do this, you should try and break up your blog post with some visual content; there’s nothing worse than a big wall of text. Make it digestible, break it up, add some images or videos and in all likelihood your dwell time will increase.
Yes, that’s my blog post linked above, showing you exactly how not to optimise your on-page SEO. Which shamelessly leads me to another on-page trick – internal links. Link other pages on your blog and keep people on your site. Internal links to other posts will increase your dwell time and will really enable you to show your work (did it again).
3. Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is how the internet gives your blog its stamp of approval. The key variable for this is ‘backlinks’ – links outside of your blog that link back to it. Simple enough right? Wrong! Getting enough backlinks to make an impact is a struggle and isn’t as simple as putting your blog’s link on your Insta bio.
It’s graft and the best strategy that you can do is the most graft – guest posting. In other words, you’re most likely going to have to write for a more successful blog and shamelessly link back to yours. That’s the long and short of it. There are several other strategies to increasing your backlinks but from my research, your best bet is googling “(your niche) + guest posting,” pitching and then backlinking your own blog on the sly.
Bonus tip…
Be patient, be consistent, this a marathon not a sprint. Use this blog post as a skeleton for building your SEO knowledge. Gradually accumulate that knowledge, apply it to a consistent content creation stream and don’t expect fireworks straight away. Slowly slowly catchy monkey.
