Realistic SEO for New Blogs

SEO seems to be all the rage over the last few months in the blog community. But can SEO be a realistic focus for a new blogger?

I highly recommend figuring out how important SEO is to your blog. It is very easy to get carried away and use your entire marketing budget instead of spreading it out over the year. You have a marketing budget, right?? 🙂

Let’s discuss some realistic SEO plans, and how you might create a growing blog in the first year.

Always serve your existing audience first.

The ‘low hanging’ fruit in marketing is always your existing customers/readers. Serve them well and often! SEO is about new visitors – coming from search engines.

First Year of Blogging

I highly recommend focusing on networking and collaboration at the beginning. Inbound marketing is about getting people to visit your site. They cannot do that until they know that you exist. One of the easiest ways to get known is to get recommendations from other bloggers.

• participate in link-ups
• listen to your favorite bloggers – learn from them
• comment on their posts and social media updates
• collaborate with other bloggers with complementary audiences
• link to other bloggers who your audience may enjoy, don’t be afraid to promote others in your niche. Together you can have an exponential impact than with one blogger alone

After networking and collaboration, I recommend a joint approach between Call To Actions, and Social Media…

Social Media & Call to Actions (CTA)

Start with two platforms (IG and Pinterest?) that your audience already spends lots of time on. Get optimized profiles and start using them regularly. Post your evergreen material, your personal photos and ‘a life in my shoes’ types of stories. Of course what you post and when depends on the platform and your audience.

Social Media presence and the communication with your peers is essential for SEO. Realistically, SEO is a combination of on-page optimization AND outside people that link to you. So get your social media working in your favor. Gain people’s trust. Join collaborations. Gather up a following.

Any time you grow your audience or have any visitors at all, the main point is to get them to take action. Action can be in the form of:

• email sign ups
• view another page
• click on an ad
• leave a comment
• share the post on social networks

If you’re going to start growing your site, you need to have a CTA (call to action) on each and every post.

Realistic SEO for the First Year

Once you have some CTAs in place and a few posts under your belt, you’re ready for SEO. A realistic plan for SEO includes:

• keyword research
• google analytics
• creating cornerstone pages
• optimizing your posts and pages

These are the basics of the on-page and on-site optimization tactics that we use. I’ve heard SEO referred to as a “Toolbox” and I think thats pretty accurate. There are quite a few tools. First lets learn to use the daily ones. This will help with your day-to-day writing and lessen any work load in the future.

Find more about these four items here:

Keyword Research

Google Analytics

Cornerstone Pages

Optimizing Posts

Have a (Realistic) SEO question? Leave them below!