Tag: blogs

SEO Content Audit – How To Improve Your Old Blog Posts

Post author By Claire Taylor
Post date 6 March 2023

Do you ever look at your old blog posts and wonder how you could improve them? Maybe they’re not ranking as well as you’d like, or maybe they are a little out of date due to changes in your industry.

In this post, we’ll go over a simple SEO content audit process on your old blog posts. This will help you to improve them so that they rank better, read better and bring in new customers too!

So let’s get started.

Let’s start with the basics!

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and refers to the process of improving your sites visibility on the search engine results pages (SERPS for short), like Google.

Having good SEO will increase your sites performance and attract more organic search traffic. Organic traffic refers to all traffic that is unpaid and is a result of SEO efforts.

What is an SEO Content Audit?

An SEO content Audit is the process of looking at all of the existing content on your website and determining what needs to be improved.

Content audits allow you to go through the individual pages and posts on your site to see what is working and what is not. It also gives you the opportunity to locate any technical issues and identify content that is not valid anymore.

Why is a Content Audit Important?

Conducting a content audit is an important part of improving your content marketing strategy and increasing your SEO performance.

There are a few reasons why you might want to do a content audit on your existing content. Maybe you’ve noticed that your traffic has been declining and you want to figure out why.

Or maybe you want to make sure that your new blog post is off to a good start. Either way, a content audit can help you identify pages that need your attention!

By evaluating your content regularly, you can avoid creating new, unnecessary content and identify opportunities to improve your existing blog posts. This can save you a lot of time in the long run!

When should you do a Content Audit?

It is also important to carry out a content audit on a regular basis due to Google’s Algorithm, say every 6 months or so. Google sets a set of rules that determine what content appears in the search results.

As this is constantly changing and updating, this means that content needs to be updated regularly in order to be effective. The algorithm takes into account a variety of factors, including the quality of the content.

The most recent update is Google’s Helpful Content Update!

Google’s Helpful Content Update

Google’s Helpful Content was rolled out in August and is designed to encourage people to create content that is more helpful and relevant.

So remember: Google is constantly updating its rules so always aim to constantly improve your content marketing strategy in line with new guidelines and adjust your content strategy based on your content audit!

How do I Conduct a Content Audit?

The best way to gather data from your website is to do a content audit. There are a couple of different ways you can do a content audit. You can either hire someone to do it for you or you can do it yourself. If you decide to do a content audit yourself there are few steps that you need to follow.

Let’s take a look at the content audit process!

Step 1 – Content Audit Spreadsheet

Gathering data on a Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets is an easy way to record your site content.

So, what should you be including on your content audit spreadsheet?

Page Title

Page titles help your blog post rank on the Search Engine Results Page. Page titles are written into the HTML code and are located on the search engine results page accompanied by a meta description – this is referred to as a ‘snippet’.

When a user visits the website the page title is seen in the title bar of the browser. Search Engines use the information in the page title to understand what information your website contains to enable the search engine to match your website with the users search query.

Page Title – Best Practices

Page titles must be original to avoid duplicate titles which can have a negative effect on the ranking of your website.
The page title should be approximately 50-60 characters long to avoid the page title being ‘cut off’ on the search engine results page.
Page titles must include the target keywords or phrases the searcher enters into the search engine.
Think about the what the user types in the search engine. – for example, “how to bake a chocolate cake?” The word ‘how’ in this sentence indicates the searchers question will be answered on this page.

URL

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locater.

HEADINGS

Header tags are HTML tags that represent the headings of a web page. They are ranked from <H1> to <H6>.

<H1> being the largest and <H6> being the smallest.

The <H1> is the most important tag and is essential for search engines to identify what the content of a web page is about.

Heading tags 2 to 6 are subheadings to add structure and organisation to a web page. The structure of the content on your webpage is important for SEO and can determine how well your website ranks on the results page.

It is important to record on your content audit spreadsheet how many H2 titles are in your blog post!

Remember: There must only be one <H1> per page!

Headings – Best Practices

Use headings to provide structure
Make sure you break up your content format by using subheadings
Include target keyword in your H1 (Page Title)
Use keywords and phrases in your headings
Headings should match search intent

Word Count

It is important to take note of the word count of your published blog posts. Having a higher word count makes it easier for search engines to determine what your content is about as you will be going into more detail.

You have a much better chance of appearing on the search engine results pages when your blog post word count is 1000 words or more.

Important note: Just remember not to just ad waffle, use only the word count required to get your point over in detail the reader needs.

Word Count – Best Practices

Aim for 1000 words or more
Write high quality content for your website visitors
Use headings appropriately

Images

Images help readers to better understand you’re content, you will see by the images we have used you can more easily understand what we are saying.

Internal Links

Internal links are hyper-links that connect users to other pages of your website.

Internal links allow website visitors to navigate your website and they also help search engines to understand your sites organisation and structure which is beneficial when search engine index the pages on your website.

Internal linking provides search engines with context about a webpage and its relationship to other pages and how important the page is compared to others on your website.

Take Notes

It is a good idea as part of your content audit to include a notes section on your spreadsheet to document any issues with your blog post.

There are a number of things you should be on the look out for:

Is there any duplicate content? Use Copyscape to check.
Are the facts up to date and is it current?
Check your page speed. Does your blog post have slow page load times?
Make note of any images not showing up or videos not working
Check for any broken links (Links that dont go anywhere or show errors)

Focus Keyword

Focus keywords are words or phrases that users search for in search engines. Your content must be based around your target keyword to enable search engines to determine what your website/ web page is about.

You should also use your focus keywords throughout your content, including your title and in the body and make sure that each post is optimised for a target keyword.

Make sure that you make note of your focus keyword in your content audit!

Remember: Always be mindful about search intent and the objective of your page!

If you are at a level where you understand how target keywords work – Great! If not check out What are Keywords and Why Do I Need Them?

Focus keyword – Best Practices

Make sure you focus keyword is at the beginning of your H1/ Page Title or as close as possible.
Ensure that you have a focus keyword per blog post but dont use the same keyword on other posts or pages

Step 2 – Assess

Once you have gathered all this information you will need to take a look at your content audit spreadsheet and determine which blog posts need your attention.

Does your Page title explain what your content is about?
Does Your Page title have a Focus keyword?
Do you have enough headings and subheadings?
Are your blog posts 1000 words or more?
Is the information in your blog posts relevant and up to date?
Does your blog posts have any images?

Website Content Audit Checklist

Page Title
URL
Headings
Word Count
Images
Internal Links
Focus Keyword
Notes

Tips on High Quality Page Content

·Your content must be based around your keyword research to enable search engines to determine what your website/ web page is about to appropriately index and rank your website.
The content of the web page should be clear, structured, and easy to read (use short paragraphs)
Always be mindful about search intent and the objective of your page
Regularly review and update your content so information is up to date to demonstrate to users that your site is active and relevant.
All content must be original
Avoid cluttered content. It is best practice to organise your content in a structured and organised way to create good user experience and enable search engines to index your webpage.

Analytic Tools

If you would like to go more in depth with monitoring your blog posts SEO performance you can check out the following free analytic tools.

Google Search Console

What is google search console?

Google Search Console – measures your site traffic and performance.

Google Analytics

What is google analytics?

Google Analytics – you can track how many users visit and interact with your site.

Is There a WordPress Plugin to Help With Content?

After you have done your website content audit and realised that your blog posts need some attention it could be time to install a WordPress SEO plugin.

WordPress SEO plugins help to monitor your blog posts SEO. Allowing you to see if your post is optimised properly. Such as, letting you know if your page title is too long, making sure you have enough images, ensuring you have enough internal links and much more.

Both SEO Plugins will alert you if your blog post is not SEO friendly and provide you with different ways you can improve.

The two most common WordPress SEO plugins are:

Rank Math
Yoast SEO

See our comparison post – Improving SEO WordPress – Rankmath vs Yoast

If you haven’t had content written by Raspberry Flamingo already, SEO CoPilot highly recommend their SEO copywriting services. If Claire and her team have already written posts for you but they need updating due to the helpful content update then please give her a call and once she has seen your content audit spreadsheet (or Notes) then she will be happy to quote on rewriting them for you.

Written by Guy Tomlinson – SEO CoPilot Ltd

Our customers are not just a statistic to us, we truly take pride in seeing businesses flourish, and do everything possible to encourage increased sales and profit for the businesses we work for.

By taking the time to get to know each business individually, including spending time with you and in your business to find out how it runs, we can tailor the services we offer to your needs and unleash your unique selling points. We take note of what you are looking to achieve when you work with us, and we use our extensive knowledge to advise the best options for you.

This is all part of the personalised service we aim to achieve for every client each and every time.

Tags blog, blog writing, blogs, content audit, seo blog, seo blog writing, why publish blogs, why write blogs

SEO Blog Writing Blog writing Keywords

How to use Keywords in your blog posts

Post author By Claire Taylor
Post date 20 February 2023

How to use Keywords in your blog posts

I thought I’d write about where to put keywords in your blog posts to maximise their effectiveness. If the on-page SEO in a blog post is spot on, they will get returned by search engines when someone searches for that term.

One of our clients contacted us to say that just three days after publishing his blog post, it was ranking third for the primary keyword we’d used in it. Another client tells us that he is still getting multiple enquiries every single week from a blog we wrote for him 18 months previously.

Just extremely briefly, for anyone reading who doesn’t know. Keywords are the phrases your audience search for, and SEO is Search Engine Optimisation, ie what Google looks for when deciding how to rank your website.

Back to blogs.

Why blog?

Google ideally want 2000+ words of fresh content on your website every month. This doesn’t include making changes to existing pages.

One of the great ways of achieving this target is through publishing blog posts.

Blog posts should educate your target audience on your service, product, and industry.

They should establish you as the expert in your field.

They should answer questions.

You can link blog posts back to your web pages. You can also link the copy on your web pages to individual blogs, so that a visitor to your site can find out more in-depth information.

Blog post content can be used to create your social media posts and evergreen emails, with links back to the blog, so sending people to your website for more information… Google loves traffic hitting your site.

You could even use the content of a blog post to create some video reels or stories to boost your social media marketing.

Right on to the real subject of this article – Keywords in your blog posts

Each blog post needs to be original, never ever copy someone else’s words or just tweak them. (Trust me Google knows if you’ve duplicated copy from elsewhere, and they will penalise your SEO for it.)

And, whilst AI tools are fantastic for creating short form content (social media posts) using them to write your long form content is a no no.

The way AI structures its sentences and paragraphs is obvious to Google.

They published their new SEO guidelines in late 2022 to discourage people from using AI to write blogs and articles.

AI tools can be helpful though to come up with headlines and ideas for content to include in a blog – just make sure a human writes it for you. (The other thing is you can never be sure that AI is actually giving you factual information – it’s well known for getting things wrong!)

Every blog needs keywords including within it, which will tell Google and the reader what the blog is about. They also need to form a phrase which you can repeat and vary throughout the blog.

So, for example, I was going to title this blog “Keywords and SEO in Blog Posts” whilst a great heading, wouldn’t be that easy to repeat in different sentences throughout the blog. So, instead I went with “Keywords in your blog post”. It fits in much better.

Now the heading can be longer than the keywords so I actually used “How to use keywords in your blog post” but my SEO title would just be “Keywords in your blog post” and so that is the phrase to repeat throughout.

Where to place keywords in your blog post

Once you have decided on your primary keyword (the one that most people are going to search for) you need to ensure it is

In the main heading
In paragraph one – preferably in sentence one
In one sub-heading
In the final paragraph – preferably in the final sentence
with variations on it elsewhere throughout the text.

Your keyword should never be more than 2-3% of the overall word count.

Secondary keywords are phrases that are related to the primary keyword and blog subject. So, for example, a secondary keyword in this article could be ‘blog writing’.

You can also add “long tail keywords” into your post, but I’m not going to confuse things talking about them today. I hope that’s helped to give a little clarity on how to use keywords in your blog post. Hit me up if you have any questions or visit the main Blog Writing page here on the site.

The author

Claire Taylor Foster is the founder of Raspberry Flamingo Copywriting and Content Marketing.

She started her copywriting and marketing after leaving school way too long ago to mention! Direct Response Copy is her passion. Read more on Claire here.

As far as Claire’s concerned, if copy and content doesn’t contain ‘on-page’ SEO, then it’s pointless publishing it! (Unless of course, paid advertising is going to drive the traffic.)

Tags blog, blog writing, blogs, keyword density, Keywords, primary keyword, seo blog, seo blog writing, why publish blogs, why write blogs

Blog

Why Write Blogs? The benefits explained!

Post author By Claire Taylor
Post date 17 January 2023

Why Write Blogs? The benefits explained.

A good few years ago, blogging was a lifestyle business. Something people into fashion, or food, or travel did. So, if you’re a business owner not in those sectors, why write blogs?

The answer is simple and detailed all in one. I’m going to break it down into straightforward reasons why you SHOULD, absolutely, be writing blogs.

Website SEO

Once you have a sparkly new website published, you can’t just leave it alone to gather digital dust.

Google want you to publish fresh content every month – approximately 2000 words of fresh content.

You see it keeps their ‘bots’ interested as they’re crawling your website.

A static website will be crawled less and less frequently, and that’s really not good for your SEO.

So that’s the first, very good, answer to the question why write blogs?

Your Prospective Customer

According to Google’s stats, a whopping 97% of first time visitors to a website leave without making contact with the company.

In many cases this is because they want to do further research before committing to anything.

So, why write blogs? To answer your prospects questions, educate them, and show your expertise.

Using internal links in your blogs, to other blogs you’ve published on connected subjects, or to a page on your website, will also keep them on your site longer, reduce your bounce-off rate (when someone only visits one page and leaves), and give them a much better overall experience.

Your website copy and all content being person-focussed and giving a great valuable experience is what Google wants.

Blogs Get Returned in Searches

If you do some fairly basic keyword research for your blog and use your primary keyword in the right places and right density within the blog, Google will return it when someone looks up that phrase.

Some of our clients’ report being as high as the third company returned within only a few days of publishing their blog. And one client has told us he still gets more calls per week from a blog we wrote for him 18 months ago than any other part of his website.

If you’re not sure about your keywords, think about the phrase your prospective customer would type into a search bar. That’s your primary keyword (a keyword is a phrase, not a singular word).

(How to do keyword research is a whole other blog, so watch out for it being published or use the category ‘SEO’ to find it.)

Why write blogs? To educate and entertain

Blogs should be valuable content aimed at your target audience. They should provide knowledge and educate.

Not all blogs have to be written in this sort of style. You could write them in the form of a diary, a case study, as a fictitious character watching your daily routine… as long as they are a quick, simple, and easy read, the style is less important. Quirky will often help get traffic to the blog and so to your website. Just ensure it fits your target customer.

On top of giving the reader a great experience and imparting knowledge, writing blogs will establish you as an expert in your field. This is a two-fold win. It’s one of Googles requirements for content, and it means when the prospect, or someone they know, is ready to buy your services or product, you will be the name they think of.

What are people going to be interested in?

One of the major stumbling blocks I hear people talk about when it comes to content creation, and in particular blogs, is the subject matter.

What do you write about? What are people going to want to read about?

If you have done any thinking about your marketing in the past, you are likely to know the ‘pain-points’ (problems) that your product or service solves for your target customers.

Your website pages shouldn’t concentrate on how you solve them – that copy should focus on the benefits once they’re solved – but your blogs can go into the ‘features’ much more.

Think of all the questions you’ve ever been asked by customers, prospective or active. They make great subject for blogs.

And if you get stuck, look at your competitors and see what content they’re putting out and use ‘Answer the Public’ and receive a free report on what questions people are asking when they’re searching for your product or service.

Why Write Blogs? To Repurpose, Repurpose, Repurpose

I get it. Writing blogs is a pain. It takes time. If you don’t enjoy writing it becomes a task you really don’t look forward to or give priority to.

But a blog is not just a blog!

There are lots and lots of ways blogs can be used over and above publishing them on your website – which should always be number one priority.

You can take snippets from the blog and create social media posts to drive traffic back to the blog and your website. Big SEO tick!

You can use part of the blog content to create an email to your list – again driving traffic back to the full blog and your website. Big tick 2!

You could use the blog as a script and record a video.

You could take a number of blog articles, put them together and create a lead magnet for people to download from your website (in exchange for their email, of course, so you can build a relationship with them moving forwards).

You could use a blog for the subject of a webinar or podcast episode.

You could even create a book from a collection of blog articles and become a published author.

Why write blogs? Because you get so much traction out of them, why would you not! Find out more about Raspberry Flamingo’s SEO blog writing service here.

The author

Claire Taylor Foster is the founder of Raspberry Flamingo Copywriting and Content Marketing.

She started her copywriting and marketing after leaving school way too long ago to mention! Direct Response Copy is her passion. Read more on Claire here.

As far as Claire’s concerned, if copy and content doesn’t contain ‘on-page’ SEO, then it’s pointless publishing it! (Unless of course, paid advertising is going to drive the traffic.)

Tags blog, blog writing, blogs, seo blog, seo blog writing, why publish blogs, why write blogs