Blogging is a powerful way to get your brand noticed. Google is the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to drive traffic to your blogs, but there is a lot of competition. If your content consistently ranks below your competitors, it’s hard to get noticed. If you know that your content is well-written, it could be that your pages have weak on-page SEO.
To ensure that you continue getting qualified traffic to your blog, here are six effective strategies to follow.
1. Host your blog on reliable servers.
Never compromise the quality of the servers that your blog is hosted on. Poor hosting services can make your website vulnerable to hackers and identity thieves. If your website is hacked and Google finds out, you’ll lose all of your data and be penalized in the search results. Invest in a secure hosting service that delivers your blog to the highest standards at all hours of the day.
2. Optimize your blog’s content load speed.
People like reading content that is fast and optimized for mobile devices. Google has shared that speed is a ranking factor and that websites can be penalized if their pages take too long to load. Use Google’s Page Speed Tool to determine your blog’s load time. If it turns out that your blog is slow, speed it up by optimizing images, using only essential WordPress plugins and using a content delivery network.
3. Choose a responsive blog theme.
When selecting a theme, make sure that it’s high in quality and responsive for all devices. Don’t be confused by a site that’s accessible and one that’s responsive. Responsive blog themes adapt to the screen and deliver a user-friendly service each and every time. Test your blog theme using the Google Mobile Friendly Test tool.
4. Build crawl-friendly navigation.
Visitors shouldn’t have to visit numerous pages to find what they’re looking for, and neither should Google. Blog content should be reached in less than four clicks. Also adopt an effective internal linking strategy that highlights important content within your site. This tells Google which pages are most relevant.
5. Remove duplicate or thin content.
Your blog should have the highest quality of content possible. Remove duplicate content, including meta descriptions with copied content. Everything should be original and unique. You can find duplicate meta descriptions by using Google Webmaster Tools. A full site audit can be run to identify duplicate content on your site.
6. Remove crawl errors.
Crawl errors make Google’s job harder, so eliminate them where you can. The most common crawl error is Not Found that is caused by broken or incorrect links. You can find these errors listed in your Search Console account. For more information on identifying and correcting all crawl errors, visit this Moz guide.
If you’re confident that your blog is well-written with relevant, engaging content, it’s possible that poor technical SEO is to blame. Continue writing great content, but apply these six strategies to your blogs. With a fast, responsive and easy-to-crawl blog, you can improve rankings and drive more traffic to your posts.
