The world of blogging has changed in the 10 or so years since I started. “Back in the day” bloggers were out to help each other grow, particularly travel bloggers, mom bloggers, and food bloggers.
But those days are sadly gone. These days the world of blogging is increasingly saturated and competitive. But it really doesn’t have to be!
I’ve always stuck to my roots of being “an old school blogger” in this blogging game. I remember when I was first starting out, I reached out to the top bloggers of the time and they helped me to grow. They were generous, not competitive.
In that spirit, I’ve continued to to my best to share everything I know, as I learn it. Despite so many bloggers out there refusing to give up their secrets, I’m here to share what I know and to help you grow as a blogger.
That’s why in this post I’m going to share with you 5 simple SEO wins that pro bloggers simply aren’t revealing. Even the bloggers who blog about blogging seem to keep these quick success powerhouses a secret.
Let’s get started.
1. The Targeted Refinement Method
This is a big one bloggers! Pay close attention because this single SEO hack could help your site go from page 100 to the first page if you implement it properly. The great thing about this method is that it can be scaled out onto many posts on your site.
The reason the TRM method works so well is because Google treats every site differently. Just because your biggest competitor writes 10,000 word blog posts and ranks above you all of the time, doesn’t mean that Google will also reward you for having longer content.
Similarly, just because your competitors have Table Of Contents, high keyword density and few photos, doesn’t mean that you’ll get high rankings by copying their formatting.
Once you understand the kind of content that Google expects from your site, you can rank much higher.
The first thing you want to do is go into Google Search Console and filter all of your posts to the worst posts. That’s right, you want to get the posts with the least amount of clicks in the past 6 months.
Pretty strange way to start an SEO post right?
Usually when you start auditing your SEO work on your blog, you start with the best posts, but not this time. This is the secret sauce of this method.
To see your worst posts, sign into your Google Search Console dashboard and navigate to Performance.
Then change the date at the top to be for the last 6 months.
Now it’s time to add some filters. To do this, click the three little lines above the list of posts which appear below the traffic graph. Then click the box that says “Clicks”.
Now click the “Pages” tab and then create a filter to set the clicks of the pages to below 180.
If your dates are set to 6 months in this view, then that means these are all posts getting fewer than 1 click per day if they were published more than 6 months ago. Those are considered bad posts.
Now look at these posts and make a mental note of which ones were published in the past month or two.
For this test, we will ignore those posts because if they are only a month old for example, and still show 179 clicks, then that’s actually 6 clicks per day which isn’t that bad (for this test).
Go through the list of posts and open in any that you know are not new posts. There’s a button to open them in a new tab right next to the post title in Search Console.
Now look at the post and evaluate it. Look for the following few factors:
- Does it have a table of contents?
- Does the keyword show up in the title of the post?
- What paragraph does the first, second, and third instances of your target keyword appear?
- What is the keyword density overall in the post?
- How many of the alt texts contain the target keyword?
- How many words is the post?
- How many internal links are pointing to other pages from this post?
- How many external links are there in this post?
- Does it have a catchy meta description?
- Does the target keyword actually get any search volume?
Make notes for 5-10 of your poorly performing posts.
Now we want to do the same for the best performing posts. To do this, all you have to do is remove the filter and then arrange the entire list by clicks in descending order. To do this, just click the word “Clicks” in the tabs above the list of posts.
Now open up 5-10 of those posts and look for the same key factors as above.
What you’re looking for here is what is working and what’s not on your blog. You might be surprised at how many times you find some pretty glaring similarities between what is working and what isn’t working on your site.
With the data you accumulate from this quick test, you may find that most of your high ranking posts don’t have a table of contents in them, they have a low keyword density, but the keyword shows up in 40% of the alt tags.
Use this data and test it on 5 of your lower ranking posts. Try to match the keyword density and the placement of the keywords through the post, as well as the wordcount and the other factors listed above.
Then make an annotation in your Google Analytics and wait a couple of weeks to see if your changes helped the posts’ position or click through rates.
2. CTR Audit
The CTR Audit is actually a very simple SEO hack that so many people fail to take advantage of it. I have used this on our main site Goats On The Road, as well as two of our other websites to boost individual blog post traffic by as much as 300%.
All you have to do is go into Search Console again and set some filters in your posts to find posts that are getting a lot of impressions, but very few clicks.
First, set the date to 6 months again in Search Console, then make sure that “Impressions”, “Clicks”, and “CTR” is clicked at the top of the screen above the traffic graph.
Now click the “Queries” tab and organize the list by impressions from the most to the fewest by clicking the title on the “Impressions” column.
Now filter the list to only include queries that are ranking higher than position 5 (if your site is brand new, you may not be ranking for anything yet, so you can skip this filter).
Now long for very low percentages in the CTR column.
Anything ranking in the top 5 with less than 15% CTR should be edited and fixed.
To edit and fix this posts, you can click to open them in a new tab and the main thing you should be looking at is the target keyword, the meta description and the title.
Think about what the user might want to see when they search this query in Google and why only 15% or less are actually clicking on your article.
Then think about what they see when they get there. Does your post answer their query in the first few sentences and is there an sufficient amount of information for them to read on the topic within your blog post? If not, you have some work to do.
The first thing I like to do is to make sure that the query that I’m ranking for is well represented in the post. Make sure it’s represented in the title and in the first paragraph of the post, and then make sure it’s answered throughout the post as well.
Now it’s time to fix up that Meta description. The meta is the small bit of description that appears below the title in Google search results.
Pretty much any WordPress SEO Plugin will allow you to edit the meta description. For the purpose of this tutorial, I’m using Yoast.
Make sure the query is in your meta description and try to make it catchy. If it’s a competitive key term, authority works well in meta descriptions. Tell the reader that you (or your writer) are an expert in the field. Let them know that the post is a complete guide that will surely answer their query.
Once you’re done editing the post to better match the keyword and the searchers intent, it’s time to update it. But before you do, set it to a more recent date. Oftentimes, the newer the date appears in the search results, the more people will click it.
It’s just human nature to want the most up-to-date information.
In the above screenshot of the meta description, I know that great post by Ahrefs is older than September 1st 2020 because I first read it in 2019. They have likely updated the post and it’s date to increase CTR, just like I’m telling you now.
If the biggest players in the game are doing it then you know it works (Ahrefs builds the leading SEO software available today).
3. Build an Internal Support Network
Google ranks posts on your own site based on the popularity of links pointing to them from other places on your blog. This is why a winning internal link structure is extremely important.
You can quickly do an internal link audit of your site by doing the following.
Go into your WordPress Dashboard and hover on “All Posts” then click “All Posts”. Then choose a specific category that you want to audit by selecting it from the drop-down under “Categories” and then clicking “Filter”. I recommend starting with a category that has 10 or more posts in it.
Now create a simple chart in Google Sheets or your chart editor of choice and name it the title of the category you’re auditing. In the chart, you only need 2 columns, “Blog Post Title” and “URL”.
Now copy the title of the first post in the list in your WordPress dashboard and paste it into your new chart in the “Title” column. Now go back to the WordPress dashboard and right click on “View” for that post and “Copy Link Address”.
Now paste that link address into the URL column next to the title that you pasted in the previous step. Continue doing this for each of the posts in the category.
Now edit each post and make sure you have linked to every post in your chart, from every other post. To do this, you can simply add a list of posts like “Read More About [Category Name]” and paste the list below that, or you can manually add the links into the content of your posts.
Every post within a category should link to all other relevant posts within that category. By doing this, you can drastically increase dwell time and help bots to better crawl your website.
If you don’t have very many posts in a given category, it’s time to build some supporting posts. Every main SEO post should be supported by 5-10 smaller posts that dive into more depth on the subtopics of the main post.
In our NitroBoost Blogging Course, we take this method a step further and we even automate the process using a few free tools. If you’re already a member, make sure you check out week 5 to quickly optimize the internal crawl structure of your website.
Conclusion
These 3 quick and simple SEO hacks can have a massive impact on your site and they should each take less than an hour or two to implement.
I personally use these auditing techniques any time I’m trying to improve the SEO site for my own sites and I recommend these to my students as just a couple of the quick auditing checks.
We have plenty more information coming soon to the blog, and our full course includes video tutorials to walk you through all of the high-impact advanced SEO strategies that work for quickly building a website.
