One of the main reasons most organizations maintain a regular blog is to improve their organic search engine optimization (SEO.)

Blogging helps improve SEO in many ways.

It helps create more pages linked to your website, making your website's "web" larger and therefore more likely for people to be found in search engine results.
It means content related to specific subject matter will be tethered to your website in search engine results. (Ex. Shoe company writes about sneaker trends.)
It improves your Google quality score, which is part of how it decides which pages rank higher than others in search results.

And these are just a few examples.

But for many people who are spending hours developing copy for their blog, they still feel like they're spinning their wheels. They don't know the ins and outs of SEO, and don't have hours to spend getting trained on it.

That's why today, we've got one helpful strategy that will help increase your SEO performance. It only adds a few minutes onto the process, and makes a big difference.

Here's how it works.

Step 1: Sign in to Google AdWords (create an account if you don't have one. It's free.)

Step 2: Go to the Keyword Planner tool.

Step 3: Click 'Search for a new keyword and ad group idea.'

Step 4: Type the subject of your blog post into the first box, and then click 'Get Ideas.'

Step 5: Click on the 'Keyword Ideas' tab and look at the results of different keyword phrases.

You want to find a phrase that's 2-5 words long, has 1,000 or more average monthly searches, and has low or medium competition.

Step 6: Once you've found your perfect keyword phrase, try to work it into your blog post naturally 3-5 times throughout the post. Don't force it or overload on the keyword, as that will actually harm your SEO (Google sees that as "keyword stuffing.")

Now, will this strategy make you the #1 result when you Google a certain keyword phrase? Probably not. But if you use this strategy over time and regularly produce quality posts, your SEO will improve.

Think about what phrases your audience might be searching if they were looking for a product or service you offer, and then see how you can create blog content around those topics, pain points, and questions.

Still don't have time to write SEO optimized blog content? We can help.