6 Steps for an Optimized WordPress Blog Strategy to Enhance SEO

There are many forms of content being circulated, and the number of content production methods will only continue to increase as technology evolves; Text, or better yet blogging, will be here to stay. This post will discuss how to ensure that you have an optimized WordPress blog strategy in place to enhance Search Engine Optimization (SEO). 

While optimizing your WordPress blog to enhance SEO, there’s an algorithm to keep in mind as you go through each step. 

Over the last few years, E-A-T has gained traction amongst marketers. Here’s what it means:

E: Expertise within your field

A: Authority on your website

T: Trust amongst your website audience. 

E-A-T is especially popular among SEO professionals as search engine algorithms are known to rely on it for ranking factors. An optimized WordPress blog strategy can help you rank better, and drive more traffic that converts to leads; Strive to show expertise, build authority, and develop trust among your audience. 

Assumptions

For an optimized WordPress blog strategy to work effectively, we’ll assume that:

• You continually learn and grow your skills within your field
• You write about what you know
• You have tested what you’re writing about to validate its success

Working under those assumptions, here’s how to get started.

Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is a critical first step to take while deciding what topic you’d like to write about. If you’re just getting started, you’ll want to start with long-tail keywords (3 or 4 word phrases) that have higher average monthly search volume. This enables you to target words that your audience is actually searching for, and aren’t completely inundated with competition (yet). 

Great tools to get started include:

• Google Keyword Planner (Within a Google Ads account)
• SEMrush
• Ahrefs
• Mangools (more budget friendly) 

Let’s show a high level example on what striving for higher search and less competition might look like. 

Within Google Ads, the keyword planner shows the results above for the four chosen keywords. Here’s how we’d interpret the results:

Blogging Strategy: Low search volume, but low competition so may be able to rank faster

Blog Marketing Company: Extremely low search volume, but low competition 

Blogging: High search, low competition, BUT very broad and might not drive quality traffic

Starting a blog: Medium search volume, very high competition so will be difficult to rank

The Takeaway

For a company just getting started, we’d recommend going after a lower search volume phrase such as ‘blogging strategy’ as we still might receive up to 1k impressions each month if we can effectively optimize the post. 

For a company with a greater budget and higher discount rate, we’d recommend going after the ‘starting a blog’ due to the increased traffic it receives; Although, it will take a bit longer and be difficult to rank for. 

These tools allow you to conduct competitor research and determine which keywords make the most sense for your website. The route you choose will vary depending on your business and goals. 

Leverage Tags & Categories

Tags and categories tie into the metadata that search engines will crawl. In other words, it makes it easier for the search engines to find your article and know exactly what its about to better serve it to the appropriate audience. It’s important to distinguish the difference between the two:

Categories: Refer to the overall topic that you’re discussing within your blog post. Some examples could include:

• Marketing
• Shopping
• Blogging

Tags: Are much more specific to what is being discussed within your blog post. Examples include:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Department Stores
• Blog optimization

The best way to think of grouping this data is that categories are much more high level, while tags are much more specific and dive further into the topic. 

If you were writing a post about studying audience behavior in Google Analytics, this is how your categories and tags might look.

Categories                                                    Tags

To reiterate, the category is much more high level and represents an overall topic, while the tags dive into further detail, specifically within the discussion that you’re posting. 

Deploy Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions display when a user is either previewing your blog, or first comes across your page within a search engine. It looks like this:

WPBeginner is a resource that you might land on when looking at how to start a WordPress blog strategy to enhance SEO. The meta description here would tell you that this post is moreso about starting a blog than it is about enhancing SEO. 

This is valuable because it should immediately tell the audience whether or not the topic is something that they’re interested in.

To further add value, the meta-description should be compelling vs. selling. By stating how the blog post will add value rather than how buying your product will help the user, you’re much more likely to increase your click through rates (CTR). 

You’ll also notice that the Title and Slug of the post are optimized as well. 

By optimizing the slug and title in addition to the meta description, you’re doing two things:

1. Enabling search engines to better find your post and deliver it to an audience
2. Clearly explaining to the audience what they’re getting when they land on that post

Focusing on the metadata is a crucial aspect to optimizing your WordPress blog to enhance SEO. 

Because this is solely focusing on a WordPress blog, Yoast SEO is a great plugin tool to help get you started with ensuring that you’re appropriately tagging all of the metadata to enhance SEO. Here is a preview of the plugin and what it will look like within your blog post:

Whether you’re a beginner or just getting started, leveraging this tool can serve as a foundation for driving your SEO goals forward. 

Quality Content

Google’s core algorithms are continuing to push for enhancing the user experience while your audience is on your website. There used to be a time where tactics such as keyword stuffing (excessive use of a word to rank higher) would beat the algorithm and rank well; Those days are gone. 

The focus going forward will be on providing a better user experience to your audience with high quality content (remember the E-A-T algorithm discussed earlier). 

With high quality content, you’ll:

• Provide the customer with value
• Increase click-through-rates and engagement
• Users will spend more time on your website
• Other websites will link to your website (drives more traffic and authority)

Read more about content creation strategies and ideas on creating quality content. Note that this is not specific to just blogs, but all forms of content; your audience wants value regardless of the platform. 

Who Wrote the Post?

Sticking with the theme of E-A-T, we can enhance the expertise and authority portion of this ‘formula’ by clearly showing who the author of the post is. 

This enables your audience to:

• Easily find more of your archives if they like your style
• Reach out directly for further information
• Look you up on social platforms for further due diligence

Within the marketing industry, Search Engine Journal is an industry leading news outlet where their bloggers and contributors are producing articles daily. You’ll notice that regardless of who is producing the content, the contributors are always visible with a short bio, how to get in touch, and their social platforms. 

By providing this information to the reader, you’re establishing trust that it’s a real person on the other end of the post. As the author puts out more quality content, they’re well on their way to establishing not just trust, but authority. 

Consistency 

There are so many factors that go into enhancing SEO which makes it hard to give you an exact timeframe for when you’ll begin to see results. A recent article by Search Engine Journal highlights that point by stating that it can take anywhere from 4 months up to a year before you start to see results.  

With a significant range in timeframe in mind, an optimized WordPress blog strategy to enhance SEO will need consistency. You can’t compromise quality to churn out quantity, nor should you compromise quantity to produce more quality; You’ll have to focus on both.

We talk about this often, but businesses often opt for prioritizing paid spend because it can show results much faster than SEO will. Those that focus on SEO with a long term outlook will drive much more quality traffic to their website in the years to come, but it will take some work.

Whether you decide to do this in-house or outsource to a marketing consultant depends on your business goals, but be sure to let us know how it’s working for you.