Shouldn’t the SEO for your website overall work just fine for your individual blog posts? Actually, the answer is “not so much.” Obviously, you’d want the keywords of your blog posts to intersect a bit with your website keywords. But you do not want the keywords to be exactly identical, and therefore, competing against one another. Your website is your space for your business, where you want potential clients to come, learn about your and your business, and hopefully hire you/buy your products. Your blog posts provide unique information about your services/products. You most certainly hope that your blog posts will drive sales, but the main purpose of a post is to be informative and get potential clients interested.
In addition, you don’t want your blog post to compete against your site. You want people to use your keyword phrases to find your business, not an individual post. Your post needs to bring them in via another route.
I could use my own blog and business website as an example, but it’s more fun to use others. For this example, I’ll use the video gaming website, PlayStation Lifestyle. The site’s purpose is to garner steady readers to the site for video game news, editorials, and reviews. It’s an ad-based site, so their revenue comes from page-views. The website’s home page has one distinct set of keywords, but each individual post has their own unique keywords.
The homepage title for the site is simply its name. The following is their meta description:
<meta name=”description” content=”PS3, PS4, PSN and Vita News, Trophies, Reviews, Guides, Cheats and More!“/>
Now if we go to a post, “Looking Back at Sony’s 2016 Published Games,” we’ll see some overlap with the keywords, but it’s a completely different beast for search.
<title>Looking Back at Sony 2016 PS4 Exclusives</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Take a look back at Sony 2016 PS4 exclusives, and see if the Japanese console maker is doing a good job. The results might surprise you.“/>
From this, we can see that for this particular post, the keyword phrase is “Sony 2016 PS4 exclusives.” The only identical keyword between the website SEO and the blog post SEO is “PS4.”
It’s also possible that the blog post keywords won’t overlap at all. It all depends upon the following two things:
- what the topic of the blog post is about, and
- what keyword phrase ranks well in searches.
How do you know if your keyword will rank well with search? Go to Google, type it in, and see for yourself! The search rankings are compiled both by the SEO of the page/post and how much that particular phrase is searched for. Google is out to help search users, not publishers. Always remember that. Always think of what a user will search for, not what your topic is. (See more tips on our keyword post!)
Let’s look at the blog post from PSLS above to show what I mean. The post’s headline reads, “Looking Back at Sony’s 2016 Published Games.” Let’s try “Sony’s 2016 published games” as the keyword phrase. That’s what the post is about, right? Here are the search results:
Oh hey look, PSLS is second in the search rankings! That must mean it’s a good keyword phrase! No, no it is not. Look at the other results. The first rank is to Wikipedia, the third is a reference to N4G.com, which is a bit like a reddit or StumbleUpon strictly for gaming news. Further down the line, you see that the “published” part of the phrase is separated from the rest. Searchers do not use this phrase often enough for it to pull up consistently with the search results.
Now let’s try their actual keyword phrase, “Sony 2016 PS4 Exclusives.”
PSLS ranks number three, but notice that Gamespot ranked twice with two different posts. That’s how strong this phrase is, meaning that’s how often searchers use this phrase in Google. All of the sites that made this first page of search all point to unique posts with consistent keyword phrases.
When writing your blog posts for your business website, don’t get stuck with your business keywords. Look at what the topic of the post is, and then find a keyword phrase that users actually search for.
If all of this is over your head, take heart! This takes practice to gel with Google’s finicky requirements. You won’t get it overnight, but with practice, you definitely will. Of course, if you’d rather I do that for you, I’m more than happy to help your blog succeed in the realm of search. Contact me, and we’ll make some blog post SEO magic!
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