Marketers are always talking about SEO, but what is it really? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
Basically, it’s little tweaks you can make to your website to help search engine crawlers know that you deserve a higher place in their search results.
SEO is an essential piece of your blog’s success, but advisors often forget to address it or don’t even know what it is. By taking an extra couple minutes with each post, you can improve your chances of performing well in search results.
SEO concepts can and should be applied to every page of your website, but I want to focus on a few ways you can improve your site’s SEO through your blog.
Download an SEO Plugin
This one applies to advisors running their websites on WordPress. There are several SEO plugins that can help optimize your pages. Personally, we’re big fans of Yoast SEO . It’s easy to use and comes with a built-in SEO grading tool that tells you how well you’re doing.
Use Keywords in Key Places
If you haven’t developed a list of keywords your personas would search for, now is the time to do it. I find a list of keywords to be the best content planning tool available. To get started, you’ll need Google Keyword Planner. There’s a great guide to using that tool over at SERPS .
Once you have your keywords, you’ll want to write your blogs around those ideas. As you’re writing, do your best to include your chosen keyword in the title, headers, first paragraph, meta description, and image alt tags (more on these last two items later). It’s easier to start from a keyword idea and write around it than to force keywords into an article after you’ve already written it.
Include Headers
Headers not only make your content easier to read by breaking it up into digestible sections, they also make it easier for search bots to identify what your posts are about. You’re better off adding headers in after you’ve already written the article so you can clearly label each section.
PRO TIP: It’s not enough to just bold the text you’re using as a header. When you post your blog, make sure to format the headers as “Heading 1,” “Heading 2” or another Heading setting to differentiate them from the rest of your copy. These Heading settings are maintained globally for your site in CSS, which not only helps the search bots, it also ensures that your site is consistent and cohesive.
Get Meta
The meta description is that little description of an article or page that shows up under the link in search results. Describe the basic point of your article in 160 characters or fewer, then insert it as the meta description for your post. Don’t forget to add your keywords.
Add an Alt Tag to Your Images
Adding an image to each blog post drastically improves its chances of catching people’s eyes and garnering clicks on social media, but an alt tag can help your images stand out to search bots. They can’t see your image, but they can read your description. Describe what the image shows and do your best to fit your keyword in there once. Don’t go overboard. Keep it to one sentence.
Link to Other Pages (Both Internally and Externally)
As you write, make sure you link to other sites that you reference, even if they’re your own. Internal and external links will do wonders for your SEO.
INTERNAL
On the new post, link to old posts and other pages on your site. Then go back to old blog posts and link to the new one. That last bit is the part most people fail to do, but it helps quite a bit.
EXTERNAL
Linking people away from your site can feel a little strange, but the more you interact with the outside world, the more likely they are to link back up to you. Reciprocity is the name of the game.
So that’s it. If you incorporate these six tweaks into every one of your blog posts, you’ll have a much better chance of increasing your search ranking, which means more visitors on your site, which means more prospects.