Optimizing your website is a great way to get more traffic, improve SEO, and boost overall sales. A blog post is one of the essential elements of your website, and can often be ignored.
But to get more traffic from Google, Facebook, and Twitter (and any platform), you must optimize your existing blog posts and create new ones!
Today, we’ll cover how to optimize your small business blog posts to perform better and bring in more traffic, and how a virtual assistant can help drive traffic to your website.
Optimizing Existing Blog Posts
There are many different ways you can optimize your existing blog posts.
Before we begin, let’s make sure that the content of your blog post is as optimized as it can be by looking at some of the following things:
Fix broken links
“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.”— Wendy Piersall. Link maintenance is key. This one is a no-brainer; if a reader clicks on a link in your post and finds themselves on a 404 page (or anything other than what they were searching for), you lose their trust immediately. Fix any broken links on your site (especially ones that come up frequently in search results) immediately!
Add internal and external links.
Add internal and external links throughout each article where appropriate so readers have further options when it comes to reading more from you or finding related information they might like later on down the road. As Luisito Batongbakal once mentioned when referring to the importance of strategic linking, “For people to discover your website, you need to build pathways and big, flashing signs that lead them there. In digital marketing terms, this means you need links, links, and more links.”
Add affiliate links
Add affiliate links—if applicable—to products/services mentioned within articles whenever possible; this will help generate revenue and provide additional context for those looking for more information about said product or service online elsewhere.)
Fixing broken links
Broken links are a common problem on the web. They can plague your site and make it hard for visitors to find what they want. Fixing broken links is an easy way to boost your SEO (search engine optimization). Search engines like Google penalize sites with a high percentage of broken links, so addressing this issue will help you get higher rankings in search results.
And if you don’t know how to fix broken links, don’t worry, some tools make it easy! But remember, SEO is an ongoing concern. As Danny Sullivan mentions, “SEO is a journey, not a destination.”
Here are some ways you can repair broken links:
You can also optimize your blog posts by adding internal or external links. Lee Odden reminds that you should focus on user-focused content: “Content is the reason search began in the first place.” Internal links are links to other pages on your site. External links are references to information from other sites, either in-text (in the body of a blog post) or reference links (in the bibliography or reference list).
Adding affiliate links
- Affiliate links are a great way to monetize your blog. If you have a business or want to try out new products, affiliate links are a great way to make money from your blog. For example, let’s say you write about fashion and think everyone should wear these fantastic boots. You can get the affiliate link for those boots and include them in your blog post on why people should buy them. When someone clicks on that link and buys the shoes using it, they will give you some of their purchase price as part of the agreement with that company (the same goes if they buy anything else through this company’s website).
- Make sure that any information provided is accurate and up-to-date. Any time you include affiliate links within your content, ensure they accurately represent what you’re talking about so readers can trust what they’re reading!
- Just remember, as Neville Medhora once stressed, the importance of helpful and honest content: “If you’re going to do some SEO copywriting, make sure you put lots of effort into making your articles THE BEST on the internet.”
Eliminating or adding tags
Tags are keywords that help people find your content. The more popular tags you use, the easier it is for people to see your blog posts. For example, if you run a small business and want to attract customers who live in Texas, then using the keyword “Texas” as a tag will help people find your blog post when they search for “small businesses in Texas” or related terms such as “local business owner” or “small business owner.”
You can also use tags to help people find other content that is similar to yours. If someone searches for “small businesses in Houston,” then adding tags like “Houston-based businesses” could be helpful because it will show up alongside similar results on Google when users search for these related topics, which means more traffic coming into your site!
Reassigning posts to categories
- Editing category descriptions
- Adding tags to posts
- Adding social sharing buttons
Optimizing images, both in terms of size and placement in the post
- Make sure the image is relevant to your post. If it’s not suitable, you will lose credibility with your readers, who will wonder why you are posting something other than what they were expecting.
- Also, ensure all images are the correct size for their location on your page. They may look out of place or unprofessional on your site if they are too large or too small.
- Place images in appropriate areas of posts so that they add value without distracting from text content or making readers scroll down before getting to important information like calls-to-action (CTAs).
- Therefore, remember “It’s important to look beyond rankings and rather ensure a website is usable for everyone” (Ruth Everett). In other words, you should always prioritize user experience.
Adding social sharing buttons
Adding social sharing buttons to your blog posts can help you drive traffic and build relationships with readers. As Simon Penson underlines, meaningful marketing, “Marketing has never been about keywords, it’s about people.” The following are some of the more popular social media-sharing plugins for WordPress sites:
- ShareThis
- AddToAny
- Social Media Widget Pro
You’ll also find several SEO-focused plugins with social sharing features, including Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, and SEOPressor.
Adding or refreshing content upgrades
Content upgrades are a great way to increase engagement and conversions. Content upgrades can be added to blog posts or landing pages, but they’re most effective if they have dedicated pages where the user must opt in before seeing the content.
Content upgrades can take many forms, including ebooks, checklists, cheat sheets, and videos. When creating your content, upgrade design elements, make sure they look professional, and complement your brand’s aesthetic as much as possible so that people will want to share them with others. “Create content that teaches. You can’t give up. You need to be consistently awesome” (Neil Patel).
We are fact-checking the information to see if it’s still accurate.
It’s essential to ensure the information you’re writing about is up-to-date and relevant, especially if you have a large blog readership. Is there a new version of your product that needs to be included? Does some content need updating because its accuracy is no longer valid?
These things should be fact-checked every time before publishing a post on your site. You might also be interested in other must-have technologies, and we’ll continue adding them to our site. “You can’t optimize what you don’t measure” (Moz).
The bottom line: Optimize Your Small Business Blog Posts
“The only way to differentiate is to put out even higher quality content than the rest” (Noah Kagan). There are a few different ways to optimize your blog content, but the most important thing is to do it consistently.
If you can make sure that your blog posts are being updated and optimized regularly, then you’ll be able to get more traffic from search engines. This will help bring visitors into your business and increase sales as well!