Regardless of which blogging niche you’re in, there is something we always want: to rank on the first page of Google. That’s where SEO strategies come in!

Ranking in the top results of Google gets our content found by the 5.5 billion search queries made on Google every day.

It would mean a consistent flow of passive traffic to our site on auto-pilot. Growing our blog with visitors, leads and potential customers every single day.

But it’s not easy, though. There are over 200 ranking factors on Google and learning the foundations of SEO takes time.

Google uses a sophisticated search algorithm to rank pages on its search results and it takes continuous practice to get it right.

We know that ignoring SEO can be a very costly mistake for a business, but it doesn’t have to be difficult.

So, what we are going to do in this article is breakdown 3 essential SEO strategies to get your blog found on search engines.

#1. Write content with a keyword strategy

Content serves one purpose: to be read and found by the right audiences.

How do we make sure our content gets found on Google?

With keyword research, of course!

Doing keyword research is the quantitative part of content marketing. It’s the only way to ensure your content has search-demand – an audience from Google.

So the first step to growing your blog’s organic traffic is to determine whether your content topic has search demand and so would it be worth your time.

Start with seed keywords

Seed keywords are 1-2 words phrases that describe a primary topic. Such as “vegan recipes”, “yoga”, “travel guides”.

Let’s say you have a travel and lifestyle blog, what keywords would your readers search for to find your content?

• “Japanese food”
• “Singapore food”
• “Bali hotels”
• “Bali hostels”

Always start off keyword research with 5 – 10 seed keywords. This forms the foundation of your blog and helps you decide which content topics to focus on.

Then, head over to Google’s Keyword Planner tool to check if your content topic has search demand.

Valid keyword search demand

Without validating the search volume of your target keywords, we are essentially creating content blindly.

Google’s keyword planner tells us how many searches there are for a specific keyword phrase, which is important to know if there is anyone looking for our content in the first place.

Alright! From here we know that “Japanese food” has 10 times more search demand than “Singapore food”.

And that “Bali hotels” is also searched for waaaay more than “hostel Bali”.

So if we were to pick a content topic to focus on, my bets are topics related to “Japanese food” and “Bali hotels”.

These high volume keywords would generate thousands of search traffic to our site and that’s what we want.

Related: How to Get Amazing Ideas for Your Content Marketing Strategy

#2. Topic Clustering to Rank for Thousands of Keywords

Topic clustering is an SEO strategy that focuses on creating comprehensive pieces of content around a single topic.

This originated from HubSpot’s hub and spoke model to rank on Google by establishing yourself as an authority on a subject matter with many articles on a single topic.

Each “hub” served as the main topic and the “spokes” were sub-topics that surrounded or clustered around it.

Imagine creating a massive, article on “How to start an online business”. Now break this down into 10 smaller chunks, each with a target keyword.

This can help us rank for hundreds of keywords related to “online business”.

So instead of putting all our bets on a huge ultimate guide, try creating smaller pieces of content that target the keywords “online business”.

Some ideas:

• Profitable online business ideas
• Successful online business types
• Easy online business ideas
• Start an online business with $100
• Start an online business that makes $500/month

You get the idea.

Each individual article would cover a sub-topic comprehensively and together they cluster around the “hub”, which is our primary topic.

Now we have 10 articles instead of 1 giant guide that nobody will read; that can boost our chances to rank for any keyword search term related to “online business”. Because we’ve covered the subject matter extensively through topic clustering.

Internal linking strategy in topic clustering

The next step is internal linking. This is when you hyperlink one page to another page on the same website.

Internal linking connects your site architecture and helps both users and search engine crawlers discover your content.

Back to our topic clustering strategy – now that we have our content pieces ready, it is time to give it some internal linking love.

Link your relevant articles to your best content asset, which is the page you want to prioritize ranking on Google.

Related: How to Get Clients with Search Engine Marketing

#3. Link Building through Guest Posting and Outreach

Link building is the process of acquiring backlinks to your website. A backlink is an external hyperlink from someone else’s site to yours.

Think about backlinks as a vote of confidence on the Internet.

When somebody links to you, it signals to search engines, “this website must be credible because all these other sites are linking to it.”

Backlinks are a signal of authority, and it is a major ranking factor on Google. If not the most influential.

Content no matter how great is useless without being found and without backlinks, our chances to rank on Google are near zero.

In an ideal world, backlinks would come naturally. Other bloggers and publishers (think Forbes, Huffington Post, etc) would read your content and link to your site with a mention.

Sorry to break your heart, folks, but the reality is far different.

Backlinks need to be built manually through deliberate outreach.

Guest Posting

One of the best ways to build backlinks is through guest posting. It is the practice of publishing an article on another website as a guest contributor.

Within your guest post is an opportunity to link back to your own articles. Voila, backlink built!

There are four steps to guest posting:

• Find niche-relevant websites accepting guest posts/contributors
• Reaching out to the website owner and request for a guest post
• Writing a high-quality guest post
• Optimizing your guest post article with keyword-rich anchor text

Step 1: Finding niche-relevant websites accepting guest posts

This is the first step to guest posting.

Start by using a Google search operator to find a list of websites currently accepting contributors.

Keyword + write for us

Boom! 130 million results that are in the entrepreneur niche looking for guest writers. Now, we don’t have to reach out to all these websites.

Pick 20-30 high authority websites that would be worth our time to write for. These should be established blogs with relatively strong domain authority.

Use a free tool like Moz link explorer to check the domain authority of a website:

A domain authority score of above 30 is fairly good. In our example, asianentrepreneur.org has a score of 46/100 which is quite high.

Okay cool, we know that this is a high domain authority blog and getting a link back from this website will improve our SEO.

Step 2: Reaching out to the website owner for a guest post request

The next step is crucial – the outreach email.

On the website, you should find the contact information of the site owner.

Sometimes, the target website may have specific guest post submission guidelines.

Make sure to read those guidelines carefully and follow the steps laid out. In the case when you have to email the site owner directly, take time to craft a really good outreach email.

As a blog owner myself, I have come across some really baaaaad emails. They are usually pushy or sound too “templated” and the result? It gets ignored. That’s the last thing we want.

For a good outreach email, keep things succinct and sincere.

Outreach Email Template:

Hi {name},

I’m {name}, {designation} at {blog/company}. I’m writing to request a guest post opportunity on your blog. Interestingly, I’m also in the {niche} space and have been a fan of your work for a while now.

Particularly, I enjoyed {article name} and have {shared on my social network/used your strategy in my own work} as well.

As our audiences are similar, I believe I would be able to contribute some valuable content to your blog.

I’d like to propose a few topics:

• First Topic, Title
• Second Topic, Title
• Third Topic, Title

Thank you so much for your time. Please let me know if the above topics are suitable and I would be delighted to send the first draft of the article your way.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,

{name}

Step 3: Write a high-quality guest post

A guest post is just like your own article published on your blog. Treat it with as much detail and care as you would writing your own blog post.

First, make sure you’re meeting the requirements of the website you’re writing for:

• Specific topics
• Word count
• No. of links accepted
• Author bio
• Type of media (images, gif, video)

Now, begin writing your guest post!

Step 4: Optimize your anchor text with keywords

Finally, your backlink. This is when you add a link back to your own website (page or blog post) within the guest post.

I recommend linking back to a key page on your site or a high traffic blog post. This further boosts the SEO value of your best-performing page that you’re linking to.

The anchor text of your backlink is important.

Make sure it has a target keyword instead of something generic such as “click here” or “learn more”. It should be a keyword-rich anchor text that you want to rank for.

Conclusion

Things move fast with SEO strategies and search engine ranking factors ever-changing, but content and backlinks are still key.

With that said, I hope you have enjoyed these 3 SEO strategies that focused around keywords, content and link building.

Questions? Drop them in the comments below!