Half the battle of making sure your dealership’s blog is correctly optimized for SEO is properly planning and organizing your article’s content. Here are five effective tips to get you started:
1. Include one long-tail keyword in your blog post’s title.
Your blog post topic should solve one specific problem or answer one question. This will make the content of your blog post clear to your readers and search engines. Make sure you choose a long-tail keyword that appears in the title and which fits the description of what the blog post is all about.
2. Run your title through a search engine results page (SERP) preview tool.
This will help you see how the title and meta descriptions will look on a SERP. Remember, Google typically displays between 50 and 60 characters for titles and no more than 160 characters for meta descriptions.
By keeping your title under 60 characters, you can expect 90 percent of your titles to display correctly. For this reason, we advise placing your blog title’s long-tail keyword near the beginning of the title to avoid the keyword being cut off.
Concerning meta descriptions, though they don’t directly affect SEO, meta descriptions do affect clickthrough rate, which directly affects page ranking. If a reader can’t read the full title or description, they may choose to click on another page’s link. Don’t let that happen!
3. Match the search intent of the reader.
In 2019, search engines like Google and Bing have become incredibly effective at answering questions and providing relevant content that searchers searched for. That’s why it’s so important to write content that matches a searcher’s intent.
What does that mean for you? It means you’ll have to know your audience and anticipate what they search for. Blog writing that best solves a searcher’s task will rank better, longer. Keep that in mind when optimizing your blog post for SEO.
4. Optimize your header tags engine results page (SERP) preview tool.
Header tags are usually the title of a post or other emphasized text on a page that adds structure and context to an article. They act as a table of contents for the reader. Using this article as an example (imagine it posted as a blog), the H1 tag (in HTML language) introduces the page’s topic via the title. H2 tags cover the five main topics of this article with the H3 tags being the sub points supporting the H2 subheadings.
One way to optimize your header tags is by optimizing for a long-tail keyword, and then below the keyword, answer its question or solve its problem query.
Another optimization method involves using H3 headings to outline different list items in an article that answers questions searchers are searching for. Google uses these headers to create its own bulleted or numbered lists. Google then includes these in its featured snippet results.
A good way to boost the SEO of your blog posts is to search for the topic you plan to cover and incorporate the “People also ask” questions posed by Google as featured snippets into the title of your blog post.
This is an easy way to ensure your content/keyword phrasing aligns with topics that people are interested in and searching for. This can also raise your page’s search ranking on the search results page.
5. Write your blog post to maximize link building and social sharing.
Google often trusts websites that have other websites linking back to them. Though link-building is a slow process with less ranking clout than in the past, link-building is still an effective SEO optimization technique that Google considers in its page rankings.
To best optimize your blog post, make sure your blog title and article hook are catchy, and your article content is relevant. This will increase your chances of a site with authority using your blog post on their website, thus establishing an authoritative link, which will help your SEO efforts.
Social media sharing is growing increasingly important in 2019. Google uses social sharing as an important factor in its search rankings. Maximize your blog’s social shares by writing high quality content that matches the searcher’s intent, questions and problems.
Incorporating these five tips into your dealership’s blog posts will put you well on your way to effectively optimizing your blog for SEO and becoming an SEO rockstar.
