When you optimize your website pages, significantly your blog posts, you make your construction website more visible to your target audience to discover your services and products. However, do your blogs organically help your construction business rank on Search Engines?
With this article, you will find the answer to this particular question and there’s more. Get ready for a detailed exploration into the world of SEO blogging, including the underlying factors that affect it. We also prepare some tips to help you begin optimizing your blog site for the search engines.
Does Blogging Really Work with SEO?
Blogging does help boost SEO quality by simply positioning your construction website as a primary source of answers to your prospective client’s questions. Blog posts that use many on-page SEO strategies can give you more opportunities to rank in search engines, making your site more appealing to your audience.
While it is evident that blog content does contribute something to your SEO, the many algorithm updates of Google can make published content blogs a bit tricky. It’s more complex and tricky, especially if you do not know where to begin.
Some factors in blog ranking have stood the test of time while others are still considered “traditional”. We will outline below some of the top-ranking factors that can, directly and indirectly, affect blog SEO.
Some Factors Affecting Your Blog SEO
Take time to understand what each of the factors below does thoroughly. We suggest you not implement it all at once. Each factor serves a particular purpose and must be used appropriately to meet a specific goal of SEO for your blogs.
1. Dwell Time
While dwell time is labeled as an indirect ranking factor on Google, it is a crucial factor in the user experience, and you must know that user experience is the king in terms of SEO. Dwell time is defined as the length of time a visitor spends on a page on your blogging site. This metric indirectly shares to Google how valuable your content is to the reader.
There is a significant reason why Dwell Time is an indirect indicator of Search Engine Optimization – it is entirely subjective. Dwell time may affect your SEO, but do not try to manipulate your blog content to change this metric if it does not make sense for your content strategy.
2. Page Speed
Overuse of plug-ins and unnecessary code contributes to a slugging blog site. Removing the junk code helps your web pages’ load much faster, improving page speed.
We also recommend taking an inventory of your blog site plug-ins. Ensure to uninstall plug-ins that you think increase your overall site speed.
3. Mobile Responsiveness
Over half of Google’s Search Traffic comes from mobile devices. In the same way, your blog site may follow the same trend. But what exactly does it mean to optimize a website for mobile?
The industry rule-of-the-thumb is to keep all things simple. The majority of websites these days are pre-mad and are already mobile-friendly. Hence, all you need to do is tweak some CTA buttons here and there.
Monitor the performance of your site too while it’s on mobile. Take a closer at Google Analytics dashboard and run a mobile site audit speed test regularly.
4. Index date
Another factor search engine uses upon determining accuracy and relevance is the date a Search engine indexes the blog content. Indexing refers to when a search engine discovers content and eventually adds it to its index.
You may be wondering – Is the date the blog was indexed the same as the date it was being published? The answer is Yes and No. That is why one way to affect this SEO factor is to do a historical optimization strategy. This tactic works well on blog posts and can significantly impact your blog SEO.
5. Recent Data
Another SEO ranking factor is recent data and it should be included in your blog posts. Recent data will give your web visitors accurate and relevant info to boost a positive audience experience. When you intentionally link to a credible site with up-to-date, original data, you tell the search engine that your site is relevant and helpful to your site readers, which is a plus for the other site!
Optimizing Your Blog Content for Search Engines
1. Determine the target audience for your blogs
No matter what market your construction blog targets, it’s crucial to determine and converse with your target audience – the one searching and reading your content—understanding who your target audience helps you with your blogging strategy.
Buyer personas are a great and effective way to target audiences using their demographics, buying behaviors, etc.
2. Conduct Keyword Research
Now that you have figured out your target audience and prepared your buyer persona, it is time to figure out what content your readers want to know and consume. If you do not start with a strategy, Keyword researching can be such a complicated task for you to take on.
Hence, we recommend you begin with the topics your blog will cover, then expand or contract scope from there.
3. Add visuals
Search Engines such as Google focuses and value more visuals for specific keywords. Videos and images are two of the most common visual elements that appear on the Search Engine’s result pages. To achieve a coveted spot, you may want to produce creative graphics, use original videos and photos, and add descriptive alt text to each visual element within your blog post.
4. Craft Catchy Titles
The title of your blogs is the first element your audience will see when they visit your blog site. It significantly influences whether they will keep scrolling and clicking. A catchy title uses data and asks questions to provoke curiosity to pick the interest of your readers.
The elements of a catchy title include emotional, common, and uncommon words, but with power. These types of terms in a blog title grab your reader’s attention, keeping them on the page with the right proportions. For construction blogs, you will choose a more professional tone for your target audience. The purpose could be for educational purposes.
5. Include Call to Actions
What is a blog post without some CTAs, right? The main purpose of a CTA is to lead your audience to the next step on their journey thru your blog. The key to an excellent CTA is that it should be relevant to the topics of your current blog posts and flow naturally with the rest of the content.
CTAS comes in all types of formats. Hence, become more creative and experiment with them. Hyperlinks, widgets, and buttons are some of the most common CTAs these days, and they all have different purposes.
6. Organize by topic cluster
How do you create your blog posts? Do you follow the same pattern? Most blogs nowadays have the same structure. In most cases, it doesn’t help. Your blog visitors may find it challenging to find the exact details they need. In addition, this results in your URLs competing against one another via search engine rankings when you publish multiple blog posts with the same topics.
Make use of the topic cluster model. It is helpful, something we like to recommend for you to try. For this model to effectively work:
- Pick some broader topics for which you wanted to rank.
- Create content based upon the specific keywords related to that particular topic.
- Organize and link URLs together to help more web pages on your site rank.
Create Blog Content Your Audience and Search Engines Will Love!
We do not expect you to integrate each of these SEO best practices into your blogging strategy right away. But as your construction website grows, so should your SEO goals. Once you determine your ideal audience’s goals and purpose, you stay on track in delivering relevant and educational content that climbs the SERP ranking.
Blogging and SEO require a lot of patience, dedication, and creativity. And we know it is not your forte. So, if you are looking for professional help with your marketing campaigns, ConstructionMarketing.io is ever ready.
We create successful, high-ranking, quality blogs only for your business. We have a strong team of content writers who have expertise in blogging and marketing. They showcase your service offerings and promote your construction brand simultaneously.