If you have a blog on your Houston, TX, business website, you know the importance of business blogging. Top SEO companies in and around Houston know how important blogging is. Your business blog has tremendous SEO benefits and can attract high-quality leads to your website.

But wait…none of that is happening in your case. You have written informative and engaging posts. You have shared them on your Facebook page. And yet, you don’t find your posts on the front page of search results. Are you wondering why?

When blogging, persistence is critical. You won’t see it working if you haven’t been posting regularly. If you hope to see overnight results, frustration is almost inevitable.

Top SEO Companies SEO on chalk board with up arrow exclamation up arrow

Blog Posts Feed Local SEO

Overlooking SEO while creating blog posts is another common mistake. You may have heard that Google rewards fresh content. While accurate, you must maintain some SEO content best practices to make your blog posts search engine friendly. In this post, we’re about to shed some light on that.

Top SEO Companies Targeted Keyword Tips

Target Long-Tail Keywords! Many business owners complain about the same thing: “We are not ranking for our target keywords even after using so many of them in our posts.” Incorporating too many keywords in a post is no longer a good practice. It hurts the SEO and the readability of your blog.

Houston’s top SEO companies’ best practices are about relevancy and intent. And that’s why you need to focus on long-tail keywords. These are longer and more specific phrases that your customers will likely use when they are ready to buy. Therefore, when you rank for these keywords, the chances of conversion are higher.

You’re trying to rank for a common keyword like “home renovation service.” Next, your site must compete with more prominent websites like Houzz, Yelp, or Angie’s List. Can you knock these sites out from the first page of search results? Only if you have a massive amount of money to spend.

Instead, “home renovation service in Houston TX” is a longer and more specific keyword that will help you target a more niche audience. ProEngage Local recommends: It’s enough to use 1-2 such long-tail keywords in each post.

Place Your Keywords Strategically

After you’ve picked the right keywords, you need to know how to use them in your posts. Randomly sprinkling or stuffing keywords won’t work. There are five essential spots where your keywords should be featured: Body content, header tags, title tag, URL, and meta description. It’s sufficient to use your keyword just once in these places. More importantly, keywords should not disturb the flow of your content. It should sound perfectly natural and reader-friendly.

Optimize Your Images

No one likes to read through stacks of text. Therefore, your blog posts should include images. This provides visual relief and offers a better reader experience. But search engines don’t see the pictures like we do. The alt text tells them what the image is all about. Adding keywords to your alt text can help the images in your blog post rank in Google Images results. Also, take a moment to change the image’s filename into something relevant to your post. You could even include a keyword in the filename.

Top SEO Companies Inner Linking Recommendations

The top SEO companies in Houston know when your content has high-quality inbound links, search engines view it as valid or relevant. The same happens when you link your content to other pages on your site. For example, if you write a blog post on “SEO tips for Houston, TX businesses,” you could link it to another blog post or web page about Houston, TX SEO. See how we just did that? However, don’t overdo this. 1-2 internal links per blog post are enough.

Distribute Your Blog Posts

You may be sharing your blog posts on Facebook. But that’s not enough. It would help if you promote your blog post on 2-3 more channels, be it Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, or YouTube. It not only increases search engine indexing opportunities. But it also enables your target audience to access the post through multiple channels.

As you connect with existing and potential customers on these social media sites, your blog posts will gain more visibility among them. And, they will likely navigate from your article to other parts of your website.

Posting your blog manually on every social media site can be time-consuming. But don’t worry. There are tons of tools that can automate the process for you. As a result, you can distribute your blog post in just a few clicks. And, you can even schedule the posts ahead of time.

What Top SEO Companies Do – The Bottom Line

Include all of these top SEO companies recommendations in your ongoing search engine optimization efforts. And, over time, you will find your website on the first page of search engine results. If you need more in-depth assistance, give ProEngage Local a call (832) 857-0065.