How I write for SEO on revisesociology.com

in LeoFinance3 years ago

I thought I'd share a few tips on how I write for SEO over on my main blog @ revisesociology.com.

I just finished writing a post which I titled: 'Global Development Trends 2020' - it's not the best post in the world, mainly just collating selected development trends from the World Bank and other sources for a quick update on the gross average development stats since the year 2000.

Context

The blog is for A-level sociology students (16-19) - around 40 000 students study the subject, and my blog consists of the entire content of the most popular modules online for free - I have about eight top level pages which direct people to more specific content.

A-levels are the more academic option for 16-19s so there is A LOT of content you can put out for a humanities subject like Sociology.

NB this blog is what enabled me to quit full time work in 2018 and is now my primary income source - I make > £10K a year off the back of resource sales alone, then there's ad revenue on top and revision webinars if I choose to do them in March-May for the exams.

I get around 30K visits per month, not all will be students of course!

My new content and updating schedule

I've now got over 1000 posts on that blog, so it does require some maintenance, NB it's just me who writes it.

I've got into this routine now of updating the key posts every two years on a rolling cycle, which I combine with some teacher resource subscriptions I've just started selling (subs are gold in blogs!) - there are six modules students have to study across two years, which means I spend 4 months updating the content for every module - trust me, text books get published every 5-7 years, so a two year update is rapid!

ATM I've just started 4 months of updating Global Development - and the first post I needed to write was a general 'global development stats update post' - and that's what I'm talking about below.

SEOing my post stage one - Google key word search

I wasn't sure what I wanted to call the post - the obvious phrase to use in the title was 'global development' as that what's the module is called, but I tried a few other things that students might be searching for as below:

Screenshot 20201112 at 16.23.49.png

You'll note that 'better world' comes out with twice as many hits - HOWEVER 'global development' isn't too bad - so I went with that phrase in my title - which is global development trends 2020

My reasoning was that it better describes what students and teachers looking for academic content are going to be typing into Google search - the 'better world' query ('do we live in a better world today') is a more layperson's term but also too general and not as useful for landing the kind of people I want on my site, the kind who might click through and buy my resources.

The first few lines

Screenshot 20201112 at 19.56.21.png

Three things about the above....

  1. I've got a description of two questions using some other popular key words
  2. My first and second paragraph set the scene and stack with key words again, but hopefully without being too OTT (although I'm probably pushing the spam words a bit, I may even go back and calm that down a little!)
  3. My first link is to my main GD page - telling Google to rank that rather than this post. I do this in practically every post.

A couple of pictures, labelled appropriately...

A bit further down and you come to my first picture (rather than live data feed)

Screenshot 20201112 at 19.59.56.png

This picture is labelled 'global development 1990 to 2020' - not the best description of it, but it describes what the blog is about. Again this will help ranking.

Headings

I've got about 12 headings in that post, all usefully descriptive and all reinforcing words like 'development' 'trends' and so on.

The rest of the post

The rest of the post is quite simple - just an update on selected GD trends, doing exactly what I want it to do, providing an introductory overview to development trends since the year 2000 with links for students to explore further and a few other links to some of my relevant posts as appropriate.

NB - this isn't a typical post

Less than 1/20 of my posts is like this - this is a basic list post, which is what I use at the beginning of modules, but I don't think too great if every post is like this! This format serves a purpose but I certainly wouldn't have an entire blog or website consisting of posts like this.

Most of my posts have fewer sections (3-6 typically) a lot more text and more static pictures.

Keeping it manageable

It's not the best post in the world, but I'm on a time budget, it's sufficient, it's SEOd, it's integrated with the blog, it'll do!

Relevance to LEO SEO

NB in fairness I'm not the best SEOer on LEO but if I wanted to improve I'd do the following:

  1. Write a few signature posts to always link back to.
  2. IDEALLY I'd make these so good they could feature on leopedia - and put them there first, before on here.
  3. For every 'sub post' I'd then write after those signature posts I'd firstly do my keyword searches to get the best title, but don't fake it.
  4. Make sure I do this tweak with the title and slug. Thanks @fknmayhem
  5. Pay extra attention to the first few lines, make sure to use relevant query words, stack with a couple of questions the post answers.
  6. Link back to one of my signature posts - and aim to get the SEO boost there!
  7. Put in one or two pictures and label them.
  8. Make sure I use appropriate headings - NB heading level 2 is best for Google!

It's quite a lot of work, but that's SEO for you!

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Indeed a lot of work that you put out there. Hope it pays off.

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I've set up a few experiments where i've tweaked similar posts to see how they perform - just need to wait a while!

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I love to see how much "SEO" talk there have been recently. I made a mini-series recently sharing some tips on how to optimize your posts on Hive/LeoFinance and I've been optimizing some of my content more and more before I share it on social media to attract more eyeballs.

SEO is essential for organic traffic, but it's extremely time consuming. Especially for someone new to SEO.. I like your tips though, just imagine the impact if 50% of the users started to optimize their posts..

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It is hard work SEOing - every picture, linking, spending longer on the intro, if you're writing standard 500 word posts it's about 20% of your time I think, but worth it.

It would make a difference I think - But I need to actually start practising what I preach first!

Indeed, it is hard work and time consuming. I guess that is the reason for people to ignore it completely, but it definitely helps to increase rankings if people would optimize their content a little bit. It would lead to more organic traffic over time.

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