What is SEO? Why Do You Need SEO for Your WordPress Blog?

Nowadays, creating a blog has become simpler and easier than ever with content management systems (CMS) like WordPress. However, making the blog famous and attractive is much more difficult than just owning one. The success of your blog primarily depends on two factors: good content and SEO strategies.

It’s widely known that good content will help you get more readers, especially the loyal ones. But what about SEO? I assume that you might hear this term at least once, but you might not fully understand it, right? So, after 5 minutes reading this post, you can definitely find out what SEO is, and why you need SEO for your WordPress blog.

What is SEO? Some Popular SEO Strategies

SEO and SEO optimization

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. But in fact, we need to optimize the website, not the search engines. So, don’t be confused!

Actually, SEO optimization is optimizing the website in terms of content and technique to make it more “search engine friendly”. Thus, the website can be ranked higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

• Content: edit the content of posts / pages to meet SEO criteria such as keywords length, keywords density, image alt text, excerpt, primary and secondary keywords in the title, heading optimization, ...
• Technique: implement SEO techniques such as using internal links, outbound links; embedding anchor links; optimizing meta tags, display on mobile devices, website speed, website structure, …

Some Popular SEO Strategies

Below are some popular SEO strategies for getting more blog traffic. Take a look and choose the suitable ones for your blog:

• Come up with an attention-grabbing title for all your blog posts.
• Utilize a WordPress meta description plugin if you don’t have a great idea on how to start your sentence for your meta description.
• Produce unique and quality content, along with WordPress plugins and SEO tools. Keep in mind that no matter how many tools or techniques there are, content is ultimately the core. It brings value to the readers and it’s the key factor determining the success or failure of a blog.
• Keywords should be incorporated naturally. Don’t put them in random places because readers might find them awkward. Besides, you should avoid keyword stuffing because Google is far advanced in identifying this bad SEO practice.
• Regularly update your keywords and plugins because the SEO algorithm is rapidly changing.

Alternatively, you can hire SEO experts or marketing agencies (such as SIXGUN) to build a suitable and effective marketing plan for your blog.

Why Do You Need SEO for Your WordPress Blog?

As for bloggers, SEO can bring a lot of benefits as follows:

SEO Helps Your Blog Get More Organic Traffic

As mentioned above, SEO optimization helps your blog to be ranked higher and increase the chance to be shown on the first page of SERPs. So, why is it so important to stay on the first pages?

According to Moz’s resource, the first page of SERPs has a click-through rate (CTR) up to 71.33%, respectively 3.99% and 1.6% for the 2nd and 3rd pages. It means that users usually focus only on the results listed on the first page. And the CTR will be drastically lower when your site is on page 2 onwards. In fact, the CTR of the first page is more than 12 times the CTR of both the 2nd and 3rd pages combined.

Besides, CTRs of the results on the first page are different as well. According to the research by Advanced Web Ranking (data in August 2020), the CTRs in the top 3 positions are 32.12%, 12.38%, and 6.62%, which are more than a half. In addition, the CTR of the first result is higher than the CTR of the positions from 2 to 7 combined.

All the statistics above prove that the higher a page is ranked, the easier for it to be seen, got interested in and got more organic traffic.

To sum up, good SEO optimization will help you attract more readers. In addition, if your blog has useful content, fits the needs of readers, and provides good user experiences (beautiful design, fast speed, useful features), they may come back many times.

SEO Helps Your Blog Get More Loyal Readers

Increasing the number of loyal readers is a thing that every blogger desires. And SEO is an easy and effective way to do it. Loyal readers are people who follow and read your blog regularly. Additionally, they can even introduce your blog with friends. Therefore, these “fans” can bring your blog a lot of organic traffic without running advertisements.

SEO is the most important factor to get more loyal readers for your blog because of two reasons below:

SEO Helps Targeted Audiences Easily Find Your Blog

Keyword optimization makes it easier for search engines like Google to identify the main topic of the article, thus showing the search results for the proper audience. For example, when your post is optimized for the keyword "moon cake", Google will recognize and display your blog on SERPs for targeted audiences.

Besides, inserting the primary and secondary keywords in the titles, excerpts, and headings following SEO criteria will help readers easily determine if the post content is what they’re looking for. And when readers see that your post meets their needs (writing about the topic they are interested in), so you have achieved initial success in building a community of "loyal fans".

SEO Indirectly Increases the Quality of Blog Content

When you follow SEO criteria such as content length, keyword density, ... your article will be naturally better (for example, the content isn’t too long or short; avoiding repeating keywords unnecessarily in posts, ...). And as a matter of course, good content attracts readers.

Note that in addition to the content, you also need to pay attention to the aesthetic factor in designing the blog. A neat, clean, and beautiful design will improve the user experience and contribute to getting them to stay on the blog!

Some Tools to Optimize Your Blog for SEO

It’s undeniable that SEO brings a lot of benefits. However, optimizing SEO manually isn’t simple, especially for beginners. To make this task quicker and easier, you can use some tools below:

SEO Plugins

There are many plugins to optimize blogs for SEO such as Slim SEO, Yoast SEO, SEO Framework, All in One SEO Pack, … These SEO plugins provide you with a lot of features to implement SEO techniques or optimize the content such as adding XML sitemap, schema and alt text automatically; suggesting internal links; ...

We wrote an article on the best SEO plugins for WordPress, refer to it here, and pick a suitable one for your blog!

Keyword Research Tools

To produce a “hot” article that drives a lot of people to the blog, you should use a keyword research tool to search for “trending” keywords. After that, make a plan to incorporate these keywords into your content. If your content contains hot keywords that attract readers, it may have more chances to be ranked higher. These are some popular tools that you may want to try:

1. Ahrefs: This tool helps you determine trending words/phrases that can be incorporated into your posts’ content to get more traffic.
2. Wordtracker: Use this tool to search for keywords used by your main opponents.
3. SEMRush: This tool allows you to search for data of websites that currently have high ranks with some specific keywords.

Last Words

In conclusion, SEO plays an important role in attracting new readers to the blog, making them stay on your blog and keeping them back to become loyal readers. The benefits that it brings are enormous and undeniable.

If you want your blog to reach a lot of people, then SEO will definitely be so essential that you must always keep it in mind. As people often say: Content is king, SEO is queen, these two factors are very important and inseparable, at least up to now. Therefore, it’s crucial to spend time and effort in SEO optimization, along with improving the quality of blog content to make it more attractive and useful.