An idea for an article that you could post on your blog came to your mind? It is supposed to be a quality article that you believe would be very interesting for your audience to read. You may have already written it. You are just one button away from posting it. However, if you want to make the most of your article, there are a few things to consider:
Keyword and Competition Analysis
If you haven’t already done the keyword research, it is important that you do it. What you want to achieve is to find out which phrases are searched for. At best, you will cover the whole topic with a whole set of phrases that people search for.
In relation to keyword difficulty (difficulty to rank for a specific keyword) and the number of searches, you will be able to determine which is the main phrase you want to rank for.
For me personally, the best tool for this job is Ahrefs. Besides offering the ability to display a number of searches for specific phrases by country, it also shows which pages for the given phrases are ranked, as well as for which all the phrases of the given pages appear in the searches, giving you even more ideas for keywords. Ahrefs also offers a keyword difficulty rating, and a number of SERP features (“people also ask for”, featured snippets, ads…), so it can be rightly considered as “all in one” SEO tool for this job.
Determining the purpose of your blog post
Of course, the goal of a blog post is to get as many visitors to your site (and convert them to your clients if it is a business blog). However, this job does not always go as we had imagined. Sometimes blog posts get initial visits (from sharing on social networks or because a newly published article was briefly on our site in the foreground), but later it falls into oblivion, and no longer brings any visits.
In order to avoid this, we need to first know what the purpose of the blog post is, and we will determine this precisely through the analysis of keywords.
If the article has a good chance of being ranked, and there are also a large number of searches, of course, we will publish that article on our blog.
If we think that there are not enough searches or the competition is too strong and we are not able to cope with it at the moment, we can think of the following: Is there any chance that this article will attract backlinks (what we call link bait)?
If this is the case, then this article should certainly be published on our blog. If this is not the case, then we can use such an article for our content marketing and publish it with one of the most authoritative sites in our industry with the help of quality outreach.
What if we publish the article on our site?
If we publish the article on our site, we want to create as much chance as possible to rank the article as best as possible, which means that we will look to follow all the usual rules on the page optimization:
• The target phrase we target should be used in the title tag, headline H1 and meta description. Not only does this phrase help the ranking, but it also increases the chances that someone will click on our result in a Google search.
• Speaking of which, an interesting title tag and meta description should be created to maximize the chances of as many Google searches as possible (Higher CTR)
• Content structure with one H1 tag and H2 subtitles (their H3 subtitles and so on). Use subtitles to target long tail phrases.
• Add images and videos to the article if that makes sense, but optimize the images so that they have less impact on the page load speed and use keywords in alt tags
• Add links to any high authority sites that make sense, but it’s especially important, to add internal links if possible, in a natural way, especially to the pages on your site that you want to empower. We do this for two reasons: If someone copies our article and publishes it on another site, we have a chance that by copying the links, we get a backlink that strengthens the authority of our site; And also, we are transferring more page rank from our new page to some old page that we want to rank better.
• For this very last reason, when we publish our article, we will find some old articles in which it makes sense to link to our new page and we will do the same. This will give our new page better chances of being ranked faster.
• Consider whether we can optimize the article for a featured snippet
What should we do if we want to publish the article on another site?
If we publish the article on another site, of course, one of the main things is to insert a link to our site and thus strengthen the authority of our site.
We do not have to optimize the article to the smallest detail, but if we do and mention it in our outreach email, the chance that the article is published might slightly increase.
Since we only publish the article on one site, it would be wise to provide a reason more to persuade the editor of that site to publish our article. This particular article (which you are currently reading) mentions the Ahrefs tool as well as its capabilities. That fact gives my article a better chance of actually being published on the Ahrefs blog (if I wanted to publish this article there).
What to do when an article is published?
After the article has been published, as I said before, if it was published on our site, we will take the opportunity to link to it from some previously published articles/pages. Of course, to the best of our ability, we will use it to promote this article as much as possible, and after a while (with the help of Google Search Console) we will check how our article is ranked (and for which phrases) and whether we can somehow strengthen the ranking for those phrases. We would iterate this process from time to time.
Do you have a different article publishing process? Maybe you have another idea to add? We would love to hear it in the comments.
