The benefits of blogging on your speaking business website are well documented. Developing a regular blogging schedule allows you to increase traffic to your website, secure more speaking engagements, and build your authority and credibility. But what you may not know is that a few simple tweaks can take your blog posts from the average to the exceptional in terms of how far and wide they reach.
The best part? They only take a few minutes to implement on each post. So if you want to learn more about how to get your content in front of more eyeballs through improving search engine rankings, then listen up, you might just learn something new!
- Title Tags, Header Tags & Meta Descriptions
Optimizing your blog post starts with the title itself. Make sure that the search term you are trying to rank for is included in the title. If possible, try and add numbers to it too. Research has concluded that titles that include numbers have 73% higher click-through-rates (CTRs) and that those with odd numbers in them have 20% higher CTRs than even numbers. Of course, this isn’t always going to fit with your blog topic, but where’s there is scope to include an odd number, do so!
Next are header tags. You should place a header 1 (H1) tag around your title (WordPress does this automatically), followed by header 2 (H2) tags around your subheadings so Google’s bots can quickly crawl your article and see what it’s all about. Ideally, you should only ever use one H1 tag (it’s by far the most important), and then you can use multiple H2 and H3 tags for the rest of your subheadings.
Finally, while meta descriptions (the bit that appears on the search engine results page) do not count as a ranking factor, they are still crucial as they are your chance to tell potential visitors why they should click on your blog post. If you manage to write an enticing and compelling meta description, you will see your click-through-rate soar, which will boost you up the rankings.
- Make Sure to Include Images
Images are crucial because they grab your reader’s attention. If you present readers with large blocks of text, then it is likely that you will witness high bounce rates (the number of people who leave your website and head back to the search results) and low dwell time.
To perform well in Google and other search engines’ on-page criteria, you need to provide at least one image per 500 words. Make sure to add your focus keyword in the “Alt Text” box when adding them to the site, and for ultra-optimization, you can change the actual filename of your image to the keyword (for example your_keyword.jpeg).
- Optimize your URL Structure
Make sure your URL structure is as simple and to the point as possible. Google will find it difficult to assess the topic if your URL looks something like this:
yourwebsite.com/10/2019/category/page/1/yourkeyword Instead, optimize it so that it’s no more than one or two stems away from your root domain: Yourwebsite.com/yourkeyword Yourwebsite.com/blog/yourkeyword
Structuring your blog URL so that it comes straight off your domain is the most beneficial for increasing rankings because it leaves search engines in no doubt about the topic of your blog post. It also reduces the amount of time it takes for search engine crawler bots to report that back to its main index, getting your article in front of more eyeballs faster.
- Include Internal and External Links
Next, you need to make sure to include two types of links in your blog post. One is internal; the other is external. Internal links should be focused on taking visitors to another page on your website. Including them benefits you in two ways.
Firstly, they keep your potential speaking clients on your website for longer (by sending them to another page), dramatically decreasing bounce rates. Secondly, they allow you to secure another great link to a significant page (such as your booking or contact page) to drive it further up search results.
The second set of links should be out to reputable sources related to the topic your speaking about within your blog. They help those bots mentioned above to gain some more context as to what you’re speaking about. For instance, a blog on speaking via video conferencing software would benefit from an external link to Zoom or Microsoft Teams. A link to a pet website would detrimentally confuse the page crawler.
- Optimize Your On-Page Text
The last step is perhaps the fastest. For this optimization, all you need to do is sprinkle your blog with what is known as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)Keywords. In simple terms, these LSI keywords are nothing more than synonyms for your chosen target keyword.
As Google and other search engines place less emphasis on exact-match keywords and focus more on semantics, you must include some of these keywords in your writing. For example, if your chosen keyword is “Speaking Classes,” make sure to include “Speaking Courses” and other similar synonyms to boost relevance and context.
Speakers Can Optimize Their Posts with Just a Few Minutes’ Work
The great thing about optimizing your blog posts as a speaker is that it only takes a few minutes to do so. You might go back to optimize a post from a few years ago and suddenly witness a noticeable spike in traffic to it. If one of those visitors is a patron who is interested in what you have to say, then those small tweaks could lead to a booking! Why not go through your old posts and improve them for search engines and see what happens? You may be pleasantly surprised by the results.
Extra Tips
- When adding LSI keywords, don’t just think about synonyms, think about researching and adding related search terms too.
- When adding images, try to make them unique. Generic stock photos don’t perform as well because thousands of other websites use them.
- Stay consistent! Google has a ranking factor directly related to “freshness” of content, so set up a blog posting schedule and stick to it.
- Coordinate your internal links across your blogs to your most important page with a range of different hyperlinked phrases (known as anchor text) to build more authority for that page in search results.
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