Top 5 Essential SEO Tips For Bloggers Who Are Feeling Overwhelmed

So you know you want more Google traffic for your blog and that you need to work on your SEO, but you’re feeling overwhelmed and time poor and don’t know where to start?

This article is for you!

SEO is a big topic and it is completely normal to be overwhelmed until you have been working on it and doing it for a while. So don’t stress. It’s normal to feel like you won’t get a handle on it.

The good news is that when you break SEO down, it’s not hard at all. It’s really just following a formula – and I’m happy to give it to you!

Want to increase your traffic from Google right now? Click here to download my checklist for finding the best keywords for your articles.

In this tutorial, I’m going to focus on my top 5 SEO tips that you can do to see big results without getting overwhelmed.

Ready to start?

1. The most important elements of SEO are keywords and links

There are many elements to SEO but the two that matter most are links (so links from other websites to your blog) and keywords in your articles.

This means the best way to improve your Google traffic is to concentrate on these two things. This is especially the case if you don’t have much time or are feeling overwhelmed.

Become confident in these two areas and branch out to the rest when you have time.

2. Build links

Links to your blog are incredibly powerful and it’s an important area to keep working on. Google basically counts a link to your site as a vote that it is awesome. The more votes you have, the more likely you are to show up in search results.

If you are feeling stressed and overwhelmed, keep it simple.

You can do things like:

• Asking blogging friends if they will give you a link
• Swap links with other bloggers. Blogging groups on Facebook can be a good way to do this (like the DNW Facebook group)
• Comment on blogs which allow links (only minimal benefit from Google but better than nothing)
• Contribute to other blogger’s collaborative posts (again the DNW group can help you with this – and you can read a guide to getting started here.)
• Write guest posts for other blogs. This one takes more time, but it is more powerful.

Make a goal of how many links you will build per month, even if it’s just two, and work out time when you can work on this.

When should you stop building links? 

When you find that when you do keyword research (more about this next) you don’t have any problems finding keywords.

If you need help with link building, my 7 Day Link Building Challenge is a great way to kick-start your efforts while learning more.

3. Do keyword research for your articles

Links will only get you so far – you also need to make sure Google understands what your articles are about so that it shows them in search results for the relevant terms.

I would actually say it’s more important than link building but it’s hard to get far unless you do both.

If you don’t already do keyword research or are unsure if you are doing it well, I highly recommend you put aside a few hours, read through this tutorial and spend some time looking for keywords for upcoming articles you want to write.

Then keep doing this regularly for new articles.

Note that you won’t always find keywords for every article you want to write. However, if you want to grow your traffic from Google, this is only likely to happen if you spend some time writing articles where you have a good chance of coming up on the first page of search results.

The best way to make that happen is to be flexible with what you write about. If you can, spend some time doing some general keyword research for anything you can think of relevant to your niche and see what you can come up with.

You can also find my 10-step process for how to optimize blog posts for SEO here.

4. Improving your existing articles is the best way to see results quickly

Writing new articles is great but improving your existing articles for keywords is the fastest way to see results.

New articles can take many months to start ranking. Changing an existing article can lead to results in days.

It’s also far quicker to update an existing article than to write a new one.

What I like to do is to see what the article is already ranking for in Google Search Console and then add those words to my article if they aren’t already.

It’s quick, easy and very powerful.

You can read how I do this here.

It is worth trying to do this regularly, even if you only do one article per month.

5. Start a list of other elements of SEO you would like to improve

You can go a long way with search traffic by only concentrating on links and keywords but there are also many other elements that are important and many are actually just a one-off task to help you rank.

Rather than distracting yourself with all of these elements when you don’t have the time and head space for it, I recommend you start a list of what you want to work on and slowly go through it when you have a spare couple of hours. Or decide something like the first Sunday of every month, I will work on this list for 4 hours.

Here are some items you should have on your list:

1. Install Google Analytics and Search Console if you don’t have them already
2. Optimise your site for mobile. Make sure it looks good and loads fast. This is becoming more and more important so it should be at the top of your list
3. Improve site speed
4. Add an SSL certificate if you haven’t yet
5. Learn more about meta descriptions and make sure you are optimising for them
6. Optimise your titles for SEO so they entice people to click on them in search results
7. Look at how you are using subheadings in your posts and optimise these. They should help break up your article, make it easier to skim and (preferably) include keywords
8. Have a good internal linking structure on your site
9. Consider removing categories, tags and other archives that aren’t used
10. Make sure you have external links in your articles

You can find information about how to do many of these here.

6. Bonus Tip! Join SEO Fast Track

SEO Fast Track is your complete step-by-step system for how to kick butt with SEO across your blog for the low, low cost of $97.

Click here to get started.

What other bloggers have to say

I asked some other bloggers what their top SEO tips are. This is what they had to say!

• Every now and then I will spend a couple of hours in KeySearch looking for topics in my niche I could write about that would rank well in Google. It’s a handy way to content plan so I know I will get traffic – Keri
• Research keywords before writing the post so that you are creating an article that has a chance of ranking from the start – Amanda
• Invest time and money in a class from someone who knows what she or he is talking about. There is so much to understand with SEO, so making sure that you learn it right and know how to use a great tool is key to doing well with SEO – Jill
• Write for humans, but don’t forget the content needs to be easily readable for machines as well – Veronika
• Use a keyword research tool and take your time on keyword research.  Put the effort in up front in getting that blog post out and reap the benefits long-term rather than short-term – Melissa
• When you update a post, show that it’s been updated in your SEO title. For example,  PostTitle [updated for 2018]. Since doing this only to my guide to Viazul Buses in Cuba my click-through rate from Google has soared, my lead magnet for my email list of the updated timetables has jumped 10 times and my ranking is also improving – Sarah
• Fill in your image alt tags correctly with article name, website name, and of course keywords. Taking advantage of image alt tags have helped my photos be found in Google image search, and I’ve seen an increase in traffic as a result – Mary

Final words…

SEO is a powerful way to get more traffic and make more money from your blog. It definitely can be overwhelming at times but the best way to beat that is to just take it one step at a time and accept you won’t be an expert overnight.

However, if you can keep taking positive SEO action you’ll soon be enjoying plenty of sweet Google traffic and be an expert in no time.

Even if you only achieve a couple of links and an article written to keywords in the next month, you’ll be so glad you did when you start seeing the payoff.

Get started improving your search traffic right now with the 7 Day Link Building Challenge! Click here.

Find more posts on using SEO to get blog traffic here.