Google is the largest platform, home to tons of content by different distributors. As far as the conversational, informative (blogs and articles) content is concerned, the competition is high.
Content publishing on google is currently used for several commercial reasons including content marketing, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, and SEO practices.
Since the writers/ bloggers and companies reckon the potential of content in generating revenue, the competition has gotten tough with additional limitations and certain guidelines from google.
If you want your blog to rank and beat your competition you have to be friends with the google algorithm by practicing some of the tactics. While writing in flair is an art, certain practical steps are required for Google to recognize your work.
If your mind is circling around “how can I rank my blog post on Google?” Keep reading!
SEO Writing Tips on How To Rank Your Blog Post On Google
- Create Long-Form Blog Post:
There are a variety of blog and article types depending on their purpose. A regular onsite blog ranges between 350-500 words at least. Whereas a simple SEO-driven article is at least 800 words.
According to a SEMrush ranking factor study, long content tends to rank higher. A long-form blog consists of at least 1200 words and can go up to 2400 words per post. For a good long-form blog, you must avoid spamming it with keywords and jarred content. A high-quality long-form blog is scannable with headers and bullet points. You can also include infographics, videos, and other forms of charts to make it interesting and captivating.
- Focus on User Persona While Writing:
A google blog is when you resonate with your audience and the article is read as smoothly as if a conversation is happening. The audience wants to read exactly what they were looking for and google also ranks your content based on the quality intent. You could write the most interesting masterpiece of literature or tactics but is there an audience searching for such content?
A user persona is a fictional marketing tactic and refers to the characteristics and goals of the targeted audience. Focusing on the user persona while writing helps you establish intent and target the pain points of the audience.
- Build Different Linking Strategies:
There are two types of links that you will need to work on. Internal linking and link building.
Linking your blog post to other websites is known as the practice of link building. The purpose of linking building is to gain google trust and credibility by linking your website to reportable or high-quality content. Link building helps google recognize your content worth and indicates good research efforts
Internal linking is when you link your previous content to the new content with relevancy. Internal linking is crucial if you want to reduce that bounce rate on your website. The practice helps create a better following as they get a chance to explore your creativity better.
Link building strategies are also an integral part of SEO companies in Dubai to rank their clients on the first page.
- Use Competition Intelligence Tool:
Keyword research and analytics are an important part of producing high-quality SEO blog posts. Oftentimes you will come across a situation where your keyword would stop or reduce the ranking of your blog. This indicates that your keyword is not correct in the first place.
Competition intelligence tools refer to overviewing the keywords on which your competition is ranking, addressing the relevancy,, and then if required incorporating them into your content as well. Competition intelligence tools are a great way to learn about keyword optimization. You can also use tools that provide analytical data on the popularity of the keywords segregated among regions, age groups, genders,, and preferences.
- Optimize Titles:
The title is the first thing that attracts the attention of your audience and while you want them to be as unique as possible, you shouldn’t go that path. The difference between a unique and captivating title is that a unique title is presenting something different compared to your audience. Whereas captivating titles offered the same thing as your competitors but are delivered in a better manner. Titles are also crawled by Google to rank the relevant content for the researcher.
The title of the blog is referred to as H1 where it is suggested to include a keyword for Google to understand the core of your content. The content is further optimized with H2s, H3s, and H4s used for sub-topics. The headings make content more organized and scannable, helping the audience get a gist of what you are talking about.
- Optimize Meta Titles:
The website title/ catchphrase is known as the meta title and can only exceed 30 characters. Meta titles are more about your intent and a call to your content. The lines that appear under the web title are known as meta descriptions which should be short and have at least two keywords based on 180 characters only While meta titles and descriptions help google crawl your content intent, it also sums up your content even further for the audience.
The intent of meta title and meta description shouldn’t be always promotional and selling as your audience merely looking for information will skip it.
- Optimize Images:
Images add good value to your blog post appearance and hold significance for Google as well. You can also add images for fun and humor. Images help you add context to your content, especially if it’s related to guidance or tutorials. The alt text describes the scenario of the image and helps google pinpoint the inquiry or the relevance.
The second trick to optimizing your images is to compress your images to aid the speed. One Of the major factors of de-ranking is low speed and google despises it when the audience has to wait longer for the pages to load. Compressed images help increase the speed without compromising the quality.
- Write For Feature Snippets:
Featured snippets are the answers box that appears before the web results in google when you research a question. Featured snippets are one of the best google features for ranking without being the first link on the SERPs. It is a good opportunity for aspiring and growing bloggers.
For a snippet, your content must resemble an answer asked by the user. The snippet features content in list, ranking, and definitions. For example, a user googles 5 sustainable ways to use water. In return for this query, Google will scan the blogs with similar meta titles and distributed the heading of 5 sustainable ways to use waters. The user after reading the headings is likely to click on your content.
The content you prepare to feature on the snippet should stay within the limit of 58 words that you specifically optimize.
- Connect With Others:
Connecting with others and establishing a social network is a good thing as it promotes engagement and can even help you with link building. Connecting with others includes a bunch of practices, such as collaboration, affiliation, interviewing, reviewing, talking about a company that connects with your niche.
If you are mentioning an external entity on your blog without any monetary gains, you can reach out to them and ask them to read and share on their social accounts. Often accounts based on their mention are more than happy to share your content.
- Avoid Refreshing the Content:
We all get inspiration from one content to another and that’s completely alright. Google doesn’t appreciate plagiarism and your content can be reported resulting in penalties on your google business profile or the website. However, Google bots are smart enough to differentiate between rephrasing content and high-quality original thought. Between your paraphrased content and the high-quality content, the former would definitely rank while you are likely to experience bounces.
For your content to rank, it should be based on an original thought on a topic that resonates with the audience, you can add the reference for credibility and link building.
End Word:
Original thought, impeccable grammar structure, content flair are a few important aspects that concern the art of writing. Whereas for your content to be reachable to the audience you must optimize it according to SEO practices.
