What Does Effective SEO Blog Content Look Like in 2023?
If you’re starting a new blog on your business’s website, you might be wondering what you should be doing to generate the most traffic in the new year. There’s plenty of ways to make the most of your content efforts and here we look at the best practices to employ for your content strategy.
Content is Strategically Planned Out
This is probably the most critical step to take and it occurs before you ever put even one word down on the page. Choosing popular topics may seem like the best way to go, but it’s a sure-fire way to never make it to even the fifth page of Google search results. It’s important to create a content plan that is a mix of popular, often searched for topics that you can give a new approach to and low-competition keywords that can allow you to establish a following.
Articles are Well-Organized
Using H2, H3, and H4 tags as well as bullet points and lists can be beneficial to your SEO. They also make your content much easier to read whether that’s on a desktop computer or mobile device. Your content should be written in a way that is skimmable for how we consume content in 2023. This is why it’s helpful to have a system for creating content that creates a brand consistency. Readers enjoy predictability in your content. Formulating this at the beginning of your content planning provides a structure that can unify your content as a whole.
Blogs are Multimedia
Adding in a variety of types of media can bring your blog to life. Whether it is GIFs or embedded video content from YouTube or Vimeo, there’s plenty of options that don’t even require you to create additional content. However, if you want to expand your content creation, recording interviews and podcasts can provide you with instant video that can then be transcribed into a blog and added at the end of the page. This type of content repurposing is one of our specialties at CAT creative. We try to find the best ways to work smarter rather than harder and squeeze the most out of every bit of content.
Content Utilizes All of the Most Common SEO Practices
Yoast is still our preferred way of double-checking that we are hitting all of the SEO marks necessary to fully optimize content. As a quick review, you should be:
- Placing your keyphrase at the beginning of your title
- Placing your keyphrase at the beginning of your first sentence
- Using keywords in your headers
- Using keywords organically throughout your content
- Placing in at least three internal links
- Placing in at least three external links
- Adding in two images
- Ensuring your content passes readability checks
- Placing alt image tags into your images
- Making sure your meta description is optimized
That’s our quick and dirty list of some of the main actions you’ll want to be taking within each post. Of course there’s more. But these are some of the most often used and the ones we’d urge you to always do in your content.
Content It’s Specific
People ask some pretty random questions on Google. And there’s usually someone out there who has already thought of the question and answered it. We’ve all had that moment when we type a question into Google expecting no one to have ever asked this question before. And low and behold, plenty of people have written whole articles on this obscure subject. Dig into the details, get down to the minutia. Getting more specific is the way to go in 2023.
Content is Consistent
We can’t emphasize this enough. Google loves consistency. It’s important to keep your blog active. Try to avoid allowing it to ever go dormant for more than one or two months max. This is because an active blog looks well cared for and nurtured. Continuously adding new content also provides a way for your brand to stay relevant. It gives you a chance to address new trends and topics as they emerge.
Although it’s important to create a core content structure and content calendar that plans out your blog articles for the year, it’s also beneficial to stay flexible. If there is a timely, trending topic that relates to your brand, it’s extremely important to be able to capitalize on this interest while people are searching for it. Here at CAT creative, we create plans that provide both long-term core content as well as timely, trending topics so that your brand always is relevant.
Blog Content is Voluminous
A few years ago we might have been talking about whether to write one or two articles per month. But those are rookie numbers these days. Today, the more content you can produce the better. In fact, many businesses are abandoning much of their SEM and Google Ads budgets to allocate more resources to producing more content on a regular basis. We’ve seen businesses aim for a target of 100 core articles to start. And these are supplemented with a minimum of between five to ten new articles each month.
Ready to get started making your blog flourish in 2023? We’re here to help! Reach out and we can do all the heavy lifting. That includes research, writing and optimizing. So you can stay focused on your business while leveraging the power of content marketing!