Blogs can be pursued for various reasons: passion, fame, or income through ads and affiliate links. Some, like BuzzFeed and Neil Patel, have become multi-million-dollar businesses.
The main goal of an SEO strategy for a blog is to boost traffic from Google, which remains the primary source of visitors for most blogs. Effective SEO includes target keywords, a content calendar, category organization, SEO copywriting guidelines, and backlink strategies. Aligning the site with Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) may also be crucial.
The main goal of an SEO for a blog is to boost traffic from Google
Let’s outline the steps to create an SEO strategy for a blog, using as an example a blog dedicated to sustainable living.
Step1: Install SEOPress
If you are serious about doing SEO for a blog, you should install SEOPress. For the purposes of this guide, we will assume that you are using WordPress with the latest version of the SEOPress PRO plugin installed.
Keyword research for article ideas and more
Good practice for blog SEO is to set a target keyword for every post you write. The term keyword is sometimes misleading, because a keyword is often more than one word. A keyword is a query you want to target in Google. In some cases, a keyword may be a complete question like “How to reduce food waste in schools?”
If you are working on an existing blog, go to a published post in the WordPress Admin and check the Content analysis box added by SEOPress. Is the Target keyword set? We often find that this important step has been missed. It is important to complete this field for every post if you want to use the Content Analysis and SEO Site Audit features of SEOPress correctly for your blog.
Luckily, help is at hand from a great feature in SEOPress: Google Suggest integrated into the post editor. Type in a keyword idea and click the Get suggestions! button to get suggestions from Google. Click on a suggestion to add it as a Target keyword. We will look at how the Target keyword is used in content analysis below.
You can use the keyword suggestion tool to find ideas. By following the process detailed in our guide Finding SEO keywords for your WordPress site, you will use Google Suggest but also Google Search Console data, Google Keyword Planner, People Also Ask, your brain and other people’s brains to find keyword ideas.
Organize your keywords by topic so that you finish with a list of target keywords like this:
Content strategy for bloggers
If you have popular search terms as topics, use them as Categories in WordPress. To add a category, go to Posts > Categories to create a category with a title and short description.
Creating a content calendar is central to a blog’s SEO strategy. By organizing your keyword ideas into a calendar, you can ensure consistent SEO-friendly content creation.
There are some varied opinions on how many words you should write for every post. As a general rule, we recommend that you write at least 1000 words per article. You will find tips on how to write 1000 words in our guide 2 Hours to Create SEO Optimized Content. Also make sure that you have at least one unique image for every article you write.
When you are creating the post in WordPress (whether you are writing directly in WordPress or pasting from a Word document), make sure that you add the Target keyword discussed above. Click on Refresh analysis to see if your article is optimized for search engines or whether some things need to be optimized. Try and make sure that the light passes green before publishing the post.
Most keywords should give you more than one blog post idea. Some may even inspire a series of articles that can be linked together with a pillar page and subtopic pages. By linking these pages between themselves and always linking to the pillar page, you can enhance user experience and boost the ranking of the pillar page article.
Identify authors to show EEAT
It is important to understand E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). Through this quality rating framework, we understand that Google needs to identify the author of a blog post, especially for sensitive topics like health, finance, and legal advice. Without clear author information, your SEO efforts may not succeed.
Ensure your blog has legally required pages (e.g., Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy) and an About Me/About Us page. Sign each article with your real name, not “Admin,” and include an author bio in WordPress (Users > Profiles), making sure that this bio is published on the blog posts.
Adding the Article (Web page) structured data schema to your posts may help Google identify the author. Do this in WordPress via the automatic schema feature of WordPress SEO > Schema.
Google Discover as an extra source of traffic
Google Discover is a personalized content feed available through the Google App on mobile. It presents users with AI curated articles, news stories, and blog posts before they search. A 2024 study by NewDash showed that 55.6% of traffic from Google to news sites came from Google Discover, followed by Web search and then Google News.
Blogs can feature in the Google Discover feed as long as they meet its content policies including the need to identify site owner and blog post author. We also recommend ensuring that the main blog image is at least 1200 pixels wide. This has been shown as a factor for ranking in Discover.
Backlinks for bloggers
Links are important for SEO since Google analyzes them to measure PageRank, which is a signal for ranking. While internal links help, backlinks from other sites are more influential. Attracting these naturally is the ideal, but proactive efforts are often necessary to get links from other sites. This process, called “link building” or “netlinking”, is vital.
Read our guide on How to Run Link Building Campaigns to learn more about how you can do this successfully.
Content distribution as a way to attract links is essential for SEO strategy when working on a blog. Promote posts on social networks and consider sending a regular newsletter to readers and influencers.
Although links from posts within social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn or X do not count towards PageRank, they can give other signals to Google about your blog’s popularity. A top tip is to make sure you optimize the way your content is shared on social media by using Open Graph and X Card meta support included in SEOPress.
Also search out specialist forums and other sites that deal with the same subject matter as your blog. Become a regular contributor to those sites. You may be able to add links to posts or include a link in your profile. Use a username that reflects the name of the blog.
Validating Your SEO strategy and getting started
As well as regularly producing content, you will need to work on on-page and off-page strategies to improve traffic to your sites. Making sure that the owner of the blog and individual authors are correctly identified will also be important especially for YMYL subjects and featuring in Google Discover.
The SEO strategy for a blog should be materialized as a list of keywords, a content calendar and ideas of who will be interested in receiving updates from your blog. If you are setting up a blog for a client, it will be interesting to show them these elements and have them validate them before putting the strategy into practice.
