The Basics of Blogging SEO in 2020

It’s never too late to start a blog. Blogs are key to a strong content marketing strategy and will support your SEO (search engine optimization) goals. Blog posts and the SEO you can gain from high-quality and informative blog content will support your goal of driving organic and qualified traffic to your website. This qualified traffic will in turn become blog or email subscribers, returning visitors, paying customers and help you build an engaged audience.

It’s 2020, so what SEO tools and information still applies and will support successful content development for your blog? We’ve blogged about the SEO insights for 2020, now let’s dig deeper into the current SEO basics for your blog.

Quality Content is Key

Blogging content basics haven’t changed that much, you should still be focused on writing in-depth, high-quality content that is evergreen. Your blog should be focused. Stay focused on your area of expertise, the industry of your business, or services your product provides. Develop as much evergreen content as you can. The term “evergreen” refers to content that is useful and accurate for a long time. Make sure your content includes exciting visuals that are interesting to look at. If possible, create custom visuals or infographics to help explain content more effectively and don’t recycle the same visuals over and over. Consider how you can repurpose the blog content you create into other format types. These other formats can include social media posts, unique slides and videos too. In fact, check out how Issuu transforms your content into new formats to maximize the reach of your content across the web, social and more.

The Power of Video

Video engagement continues to grow and a report from Zenith media forecasts that the average person will watch 100 minutes of online video a day by 2021, that is up from 67 minutes of online video per day in 2018. Make sure you are creating and including video content into your blog and leveraging this content across all of your social media channels. The video you post within this week’s blog post can also be leveraged for sound bites to share on social media, added to your YouTube channel and embedded into eBooks, publications and long form content you publish. Of course, just like with blog content, it’s quality over quantity. Use video to enhance the blog post with new information, behind-the-scenes content or a personal story that engages your audience.

AMP Up and Mobilize Your Content

One critical element to ranking higher on search engines is making sure your blog content is mobile-optimized. In 2019, the average US adult spent 3 hours 43 minutes a day on mobile.

Your audience is reading and consuming content on mobile, so make sure your content is easily available to consume on their device. Mobile optimization can be accomplished by choosing responsive design when building your website. This means it will detect the visitor’s screen size and adjust the layout accordingly. Issuu automatically mobile-optimizes the PDF content you upload, plus you can turn your most exciting and noteworthy content into Article Stories on Issuu. Article Stories are scrollable, full-screen versions of your content made for reading on mobile.

You should also learn about and start to utilize “Accelerated Mobile Pages” or AMP technology. AMP technology speeds up the mobile web because it is lightweight and has been stripped down and loads much faster than a standard web page. Issuu makes it easy to create AMP Stories from your content which means you will get priority search engine ranking on mobile and reach a wider audience. The Issuu blog is a great resource to learn more about AMP Stories and more benefits of the AMP technology.

Cultivate Your Blog Engagement

Engaging with your audience should go hand in hand with your strategy to build a successful blog. Encourage your blog to be a conversation between yourself and your readers. Write content that you hope will garner reads and feedback. Ask your readers to comment with their input or ideas about the topic you have just written about. You can also start to generate blog ideas based on your audience feedback. Blog engagement will benefit your SEO in a way that social media can’t. Social media is a great way to reach new audiences of course, but it isn’t tied to your blog’s rankings. You will achieve the best results in increasing your place in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) by generating more comments and engagements to your blog content. The SEO benefits of audience engagement won’t be reflected overnight, but when you bring all of these tools together, the increased traffic to your blog will be worth it.

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