If you want to make your blog SEO friendly in 2024 (and who doesn’t?), the old techniques aren’t going to work. Instead, you need to think holistically about how humans are using research and blogs today. This means thinking about everything from page load speed to content design, quality and more.
We’ll get into the nitty-gritty details in this section so you know what your next steps are.
1. Set a good foundation
For your blog posts to show up in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), you do need to follow some basic SEO principles. You can think of this as building a great foundation for your actual content. Even if your content is the best in the world, if you put it on the web on a site that isn’t optimized for search engines and crawlers, it won’t get discovered.
For a great foundation, follow key best practices such as:
- Always use title tags and meta descriptions. Setting a title tag (60 characters or less) and a meta description (160 characters or less) allows you to choose what displays for your page’s search result. This helps search engines and readers understand your page’s content better.
- Choose appropriate keywords. Rather than going after every keyword can you can think of, create a manageable keyword strategy. Keyword volume matters, but so does keyword relevance, difficulty, and more. Finding the right keywords for your article will be more effective than trying to cover the most keywords you can.
- Choose an effective title. There’s so many great resources available for writing better titles (we use CoSchedule’s Headline Tool ourselves!) but the key things to know are that your headline should be catchy, include the target keyword, and accurate. Make the title descriptive while helping readers understand why it matters for them.
- Optimize on-page SEO. On-page SEO includes things like page load time, alt text, sitemaps and so on. While these aren’t necessarily noticed by the reader, optimizing on-page SEO makes it easier for search engines to crawl and categorize your site.
If you’re not familiar with SEO basics like these, a fractional content or SEO team can help you get the basics right first and build on a solid foundation!
2. Use keywords effectively
Once upon a time, many people thought that using as many keywords as possible within a single blog post was the best way to rank highly in search. After all, a blog post that mentions “best cat food” 50 times must be better than one that only mentions it 10 times, right?
Nope.
Today, that practice is known as “keyword stuffing” and is actively penalized by Google as spam.
Not only does this practice not help you rank, it doesn’t help create valuable content for your readers, either. Rather than just inserting your keywords as many times as possible, strive to create genuinely useful content around your keyword topics and insert them naturally.
There’s several tools available that can help you find great keywords for your topic or business. For example, Ahrefs and SEMRush both have advanced tools that can help you find and use keywords effectively. A fractional content team can also manage keyword generation and content writing for your team to ensure that you’re creating on-brand, accurate and effective content—both for search engines and your readers!
3. Understand search intent for your keywords
It’s not just keywords you need to understand. You also need to understand the search intent of your keywords and topic.
What is search intent, you ask?
Search intent goes beyond the question of what the keyword is to understand why the user is searching for it.
There are many different kinds of search intent, but the main three are informational, transactional or navigational.
- Informational are situations where the user is looking for help solving a problem or answering a question (i.e “how many cups in a pint” or “how to write better emails”). They may also be exploring a topic more broadly.
- Transactional intent means that the user is looking to make a purchase or find a specific solution (i.e. “best warm hats” or “best tools to manage team productivity”).
- Navigational intent is where users are looking for a specific webpage or brand. Keywords mentioning your brand are generally navigational.
When you understand the user’s search intent, you can make better content that more effectively answers that reader’s questions. As you create more helpful content, you’ll gain increased brand authority and trust, which will also help you score higher rankings in SERPs.
Sometimes search intent is obvious (i.e. “what time is it in melbourne”) but other times it’s not so clear. Is someone searching for “how to be more productive” looking for a helpful article with tips (informational) or a list of tools that can provide a solution (transactional)? A good keyword tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush can help. You can also take a look at similar keywords and high-ranking content for your keywords to determine what highly-ranked content has in common.
4. Follow EEAT principles
At the end of December 2022, Google introduced new algorithm ranking principles known as their EEAT principles.
Although we also love eating (yum!), this EEAT-ing is a bit more complicated.
Google’s algorithms, including their EEAT algorithm, change frequently and impact how your content ranks and shows up in search engines. Google’s EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. When these elements stand out on your blog, your articles will rank more quickly. Here’s how to incorporate them:
Experience: Google wants top articles to demonstrate experience in the given topic. The easiest way to incorporate this is to include first-hand experience and first-person stories in your content. For example, you could:
- interview SMEs for your content
- talk to your users and clients to get quotes or experiences for your articles
- include guest posts from experts in your field with their experiences
- write about real experiences and learnings from yourself or others on your team
Expertise: For this, you want to show that your brand or company is an expert on the topic at hand. There’s lots of ways to do this, including:
- publishing content regularly around this topic
- using first-hand experience (see point #1!)
- form and share unique opinions based on your experiences
- publish content from known leaders in your field who are recognized experts
Authoritativeness: To demonstrate authority, you should make it easy for both searchers and search engines to verify that your brand is real and trustworthy. Creating an easy-to-navigate site that clearly showcases your brand, your employees, and your certifications will help demonstrate this. Earning backlinks can also help increase your domain authority, which also influences authoritativeness.
Trustworthiness: All of the above helps Google ensure your site is trustworthy. In addition, some good rules of thumb include:
- Stick to what you know. If you’re selling SaaS software, don’t write articles about the breakfast cereals (unless your software is about breakfast cereal in some way).
- Be active on other places on the internet. By creating an ecosystem of authority under your brand, you can make your own website more trustworthy for Google.
- Never publish inaccurate or outdated content. This is a big reason why using AI for content can be harmful. Since AI generators have the tendency to invent facts (called “hallucinations”), they can tank your trustworthiness score.
5. Write great content
Now we know what you might be thinking: “Sure, but easier said than done!”
And you’re right—creating great content is not easy. However, doing so increases trust among your readers and audience. This in turn helps establish higher rankings through growing trust and authority.
When you create great content, it also helps you stand out from the sea of other content online and establishes your brand authority. Working with a content marketing agency or fractional content team can make it exponentially easier to create great content. A content agency helps you figure out the right strategy for your content and helps you create quality content at scale.
Now, many companies are trying to use generative AI tools to scale their content production. However, doing so can create a lot of mediocre content—which isn’t good for your brand or your search rankings. While there are plenty of ways to use AI to help your content production, having it write your content for you start-to-finish is likely to cause more harm than good.
6. Implement an effective backlinking strategy
Backlinking is another key aspect of SEO that’s essential in 2024.
Essentially, backlinks are any time another site or page links to your existing blog article or page. Backlinks tell Google, “hey, this page has useful information, that’s why I’m linking out to it on my own site.” They demonstrate authority and trustworthiness (key factors for EEAT) and they also contribute to higher domain authority scores, which can help your future posts rank higher in SERPs.
But how do you get backlinks? There’s no one right backlink strategy—yours should depend on your content strategy, the types of content you create, your industry, and more. However, one of the best ways to get backlinks includes simply creating great content. When you publish original research, case studies and first-hand experience, this creates excellent, unique content that other people will naturally want to link to.
If you create content like this, backlinks will happen naturally. Don’t overlook making “hard” content that other companies won’t do. This will give you a leg up among both your audience and in the search results.
7. Don’t neglect content design and experience
Finally, when it comes to content and search in 2024, design and UX matters more than ever. We live in an increasingly visual-first world. For example, just think of the rise of short-form video and platforms like Instagram and Tiktok which are primarily visual.
As a result, your content will be digested visually as well as mentally, and you should consider this as you plan and publish content. People don’t just want to read a block of plain text online—they want to interact with your content. Some good ways to create better content experiences include:
- making interactive, engaging content pages
- designing quizzes or checklists
- using dynamic images, gifs and embedded videos to demonstrate key concepts
- offering podcast or video options to consume your content
- using visual features in written content, such as drop quotes, images, callout boxes and so on
How will you improve SEO in 2024?
SEO, like many aspects of marketing, have gotten more complicated as our digital world grows. More noise and more content means you have to work harder to reach and engage your audience.
But that doesn’t mean that “SEO is dead,” as many claim, or that it can’t help your business grow and succeed.
If you want to grow your content reach and effectiveness, but don’t have the internal resources or expertise to do so, a content marketing agency like Red Basket can help relieve the pressure while getting results for your team. A content marketing agency can:
- create high-quality content that stands out and ranks in search
- ensure you stay on top of SEO trends and algorithm changes to see continued success
- update older content to make sure you get the most value out of everything you’ve created
- design an SEO strategy that works
Our team at Red Basket knows SEO like the back of our hands. We can create and deliver content that works for your audience and for the search engines. Want to see how our team can lend a hand with your goals? Reach out today and we’ll show you how we can help.
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