We’re not going to assume that anyone reading this doesn’t know in 2019 that most websites (with very few exceptions) should have a blog that is populated regularly with new content (and why), but one thing we’ve noticed isn’t discussed too often is the keyword strategy around that blog and how it fits into the overall SEO planning. We’ve spoken very briefly on this here and there but never quite broken it down, so today we’re going to get into it with a few examples and a deeper explanation in SEO terms. However, before we do, we have to recommend that you refer back to our previous blog with regards to keyword planning for blogs as it does provide quite a bit more context to what’s about to be discussed. But if you’ve done that or just want to refer back to it as needed then let’s dive in!
Keyword Selection & Filling In The Gaps
Keeping in mind how keyword selection/assignment works both for content marketing and your static pages (a main and couple of related terms each), when it comes to selecting target terms for your blog, what a lot of people tend to think is that this is an opportunity to increase relevance for the items you already researched for the site itself and the static content there by blogging some more about those same terms. But while there certainly is room for such an activity, one of the most important ways to increase relevance for parent terms that the website targets is to choose longer tail, alternate and related versions of that term. So for instance “Electrical Services” might be the parent term a site is targeting, with “Emergency Electrical Services” being a longer tail version and “Electrician in Brisbane” being a related item. This way you fully flesh the site out with content across the theme, which is far more valuable than spamming the same terms that your static site pages are already targeting over and over again.
Implement the Blog Plan
The best part about the above approach is that you’ve got time to move through these different versions and related terms. And while you’re at it, you can cross pollinate every few weeks like so:
- Week 1: Main Terminology “Emergency Electrical Services, Related Terminology 1 “Electrician in Brisbane”, Related Terminology 2 “Electrical Services”
- Week 2: Main Terminology “Electrician in Brisbane”, Related Terminology 1 “Electrical Services”, Related Terminology 2 “Emergency Electrical Services”
- Week 3: Main Terminology “Electrical Services”, Related Terminology 1 “Electrician in Brisbane”, Related Terminology 2 “Emergency Electrical Services”.
So as per that example, you have three blogs with different topics via the main keyword assigned to each of them, but cross pollinated to all help each other’s relevance with a good chunk of content rolling out consistently over 3-4 weeks. Which brings us to the next point.
Apply Changing Themes
When Grouping related items together into themes like this, it’s important that you don’t overdo it and do actually move on at some point. 3-4 blogs around a particular theme is probably enough for most blogs so that they can have time to take effect before you come back to them. (Remember there are other activities you can do to complement the effects of adding blogs in the meantime as we’ll explain very shortly and as you’re also very likely aware, SEO takes time, so let the blogs gestate).
In this way, do your research as you normally would, but take care to group everything into themes of related terms and decide how to separate them.
To give you an example for this, “Electrical Services” and “Emergency Electrical Services” are related terms, but the former is a great parent term that could also be related to “Electrical Equipment Hire” even though this term would technically count as a separate theme to the “Emergency” one. This means that the “Services” item could appear in blogs with both, but you wouldn’t (usually) put the other two together in a single blog. You would use services as the glue to appear in both and tie them to the parent/overarching theme of the website but gradually move blog-wise from an emergency theme for 3-4 blogs into an equipment hire theme and so on down the line as you plan ahead.
When To Add SEO “Pepper”
Despite the rule of “Main keyword with 1-2 related keywords”, there is another way to piggyback additional relevance in and for lack of a better term, we’ve come to call it “peppering”. It’s pretty self explanatory really in that once you stand back and take a look at the overall content plan you’ve put together and the keywords assigned, it’s entirely plausible that you might realise that there’s another overall theme you didn’t consider earlier that you want to get at. Let’s say for the sake of argument that the business is Melbourne based and you realise that for all of your well researched technical terms you didn’t end up adding a lot of location based terms. Not to worry, simply “pepper” a few blogs over a longer time frame with the term “Melbourne” and it will gradually become very apparent that this individual item is also part of the overarching body of the site.
Another example might be a related version of a service you didn’t consider before, or perhaps it’s not about anything you overlooked, but simply that you are aware of a term that didn’t quite fit in anywhere while you were putting specific blogs together but would fit naturally but only occasionally throughout the course of a longer span of blogs. However failing that you could also turn to the next point.
Knowing When To Compliment
As with anything in SEO, it’s important to make sure that you don’t overdo anything and end up looking spammy. So if you follow all of the above guidelines and find that although you will very likely see positive movement in rankings you aren’t quite getting across the line, this is the time to consider trying to obtain a few links to your site. Not just any old links however, we’re talking about keyword focused links from theme relevant pages to your theme relevant blogs. Keep the content plan and the individual keywords you’re trying to target in mind when engaging in this type of link building. But the detail on that is a blog for another time. In the meantime try this how to guide from Search Engine Land.
Rinse & Repeat – Consistency is Key
And that’s that! Once you’ve done all of the above in sequence over a 6 month period then you can come back and revisit some of those keywords without worrying about seeming to spammy or overdoing anything. You’ll be good to return and try to further beef up the site’s relevant content and to try different approaches as you hopefully learn from previous activity.
Which is where we sign off for the day. As per usual if you’d like to know more about anything around Search Engine Optimisation or blogging in general then please feel free to get in touch or you can leave us a comment below if you’d like to add anything!