If your content marketing is good, you’ll produce content that your subscribers and website visitors will enjoy. If your content marketing is great, you’ll put out high-quality content that people enjoy reading AND is highly relevant to them and where they are in the purchasing funnel. One way to make sure that your content marketing achieves this is to do the necessary keyword research to see what topics are trending and then actually to use those keywords throughout your blog.

For best results when it comes to trying to get your pages to rank, place keywords in these three spots

• First and last paragraph of your blog
• Subheadlines (H1 and H2s)
• A bolded or italicized sentence

When site crawlers are investigating your website for keywords, these are three of the areas that the crawlers concentrate on to decide in a split second whether or not your content is relevant to the person searching Google.

Google likes it when you link internally and appropriately. Repeat that to make sure it sticks, because people tend to make their websites a little too spammy with an overabundance of links. But, Google doesn’t like that and you will likely rank lower. Instead, link appropriately. In other words, only link to other parts of your page that are relevant to the current blog you’re writing. Other tips that go along with this include:

• Clean up any broken links
• Link best pages to pages you want to rank
• Add 2 internal links whenever you add a new blog post

Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly

This one doesn’t need much explaining. In 2018, 52% of global traffic was through smartphones. So, if you’re website is lacking on the mobile side, search engines will not take kindly to that.

• Columns on your website should stack
• Use Hamburger Menu
• 45 pixels by 45 pixels for a button
• Go through Google’s mobile-friendly test and find out what can be improved

Users want websites that load fast. And, what was fast 5 years ago is incredibly slow today. So, if people are clicking on your website and then leaving because it is too slow, then that will harm your SEO. On the other hand, fast, high-quality websites will have a better chance at ranking well. So, to make sure that your website is fast, do the following:

• Use Pingdom’s website speed tool to test
• Look at the suggestions
• Do those suggestions

Another crucial spot you should be placing your keywords is in the alt tags of the images. The alt tag not only describes the image to search images but as well as screen readers for visually impaired users. So, make sure that you’re not leaving these fields blank on WordPress or are going into the code and adding your alt image tag descriptions. For best results, try the following:

• Actually describe the photo
• Use keywords when possible
• Name-Files-Like-This.jpg (descriptive file name can also improve your SEO)

Google really likes it when your site is clear, consistent, and not redundant. The best way to do this is to avoid writing short articles and to make sure that Google isn’t crawling content that you don’t want it to crawl. Also, make sure that you aren’t reposting content into multiple spots on your site. To ensure that your thin content is de-indexed and that there isn’t duplicate content on your site, follow these steps:

• Stop writing short content (less than 350 words)
• Install Yoast SEO if in WordPress and De-index thin content (such as testimonials)
• Remove post types that aren’t necessary to have on your site map