The ‘Why’ & ‘How’ When Thinking About SEO For Kitchen & Bathroom Companies
It’s common knowledge that blog posts can be an incredible way to attract high-quality traffic to your website, but the amount of unknowns in the world of blogging leave many kitchen, bedroom and bathroom businesses wondering whether it’s an effective use of their time.
The answer is ‘yes’, blogging effectively is a fantastic use of your time and marketing budget, but a bit like driving a car, if you don’t do it correctly, it won’t work for you in the way you’d want.
An investigation by blogger.com has found that a massive 60% of businesses have a blog on their website, but 65% of those businesses haven’t updated their blog for a year, and this is very similar to our kitchen, bedroom and bathroom industry. By posting fresh, relevant and useful content on your blog, not only will your site be a whole lot more useful for your browsers, it will also be great for your website’s search engine ranking.
For those that do update their blog with new content, there are still more opportunities to be had. A great post that isn’t optimised for SEO is not far from useless as relevant searches for that subject will struggle hard to find it.
Without further ado, here’s a list of practical ways that you can optimise your blog posts for both human and search engine consumption…
1. Carrying out ‘Keyword Research’
Firstly, to create content that provides good advice and solutions to problems, you need to know what your target audience are searching for.
Start by opening up a Word document and listing five to ten key topics that people will be searching for based on what you know about your kitchen and bathroom business. Some of these topics will be the ones that come up in sales conversations with your designers. It’s important to get your designer’s views on this list as they could have some insightful information to add.
Some topics and questions to kick you off might be…
1. Kitchen design ideas for 2019
2. German/Classic/Traditional/In-frame kitchen ideas
3. Do I need a Kitchen island?
4. What appliances do I need in my new kitchen?
Now break your list of phrases down and add some keywords to each. For example, for the ‘Kitchen design ideas’ topic, you might have ‘kitchen tile ideas’, ‘kitchen design styles’ etc.
Now that you’re armed with your list of keywords, start punching them into Google to find related search terms. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll notice that other related search terms begin to pop up. These are search terms that other people have searched, and they can arm you with some insights to add to your list of keywords.
Now it’s time to look at how many of these search terms are ‘actually’ being searched. With the Google Keyword Planner, you can see how many people (in real terms) are searching for the keywords you have come up with. It will give you key information like how many searches (per month) are performed. This is useful for us marketers because if these search volumes are too low, it’s probably not worth our time to create a blog post about the subject. On the other end of the scale, if search volumes are way too big, there’s likely to be so much competition that it will again not be worth writing a blog post about.
You’re looking for the keywords that have a healthy amount of search terms; the sweet spot in the middle where search volumes are healthy but not ridiculous. They’re the keywords that you should base your next blog posts around.
2. Deciding on Your Keyword and Utilising It
Now that you know what people are searching for and you’ve decided on the subject of your blog post, you need to utilise those keywords not only in the post, but in the title, meta description and URL. Your keywords need to be in the places that are going to be most relevant for both humans AND the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Although this is all about getting search engines to find your content, please don’t forget about User Experience. This is the human side of blog posting, where it actually has to be readable. It’s arguably the most important piece of the pie, and it means that jamming in as many keywords as you can is often a bad way to go. You’re going to need to use your keyword a maximum of 7 times depending on the size of your blog post.
The best places to put your keywords are here:
– Title
– Headings, subheadings
– The first sentence
– Last paragraph
– Meta descriptions and title tags
3. Optimising Your Images
Often the images are the last piece of your blog puzzle and thus get forgotten about. If this sounds like you, then we urge you to re-evaluate the way you use them. Images can be a large source of traffic as they appear in Google Image searches. This is particularly true in the UK Kitchen, Bedroom and Bathroom industry because many people will turn to Google Images to do their research and find inspiration.
The basis of optimising your images is this: make sure your file sizes are optimised, make sure you fill out any Alt tag information with a relevant title, and make sure to add a description. We have a blog post that goes into detail on making the most of your images. You can read it here: flo-marketing.co.uk/imagery
4. Write a Great Meta Description
Meta descriptions sound complex, but in truth they’re simple. A meta description is a description of your page. They don’t help your SEO rankings, but they do help users to understand what is on the page they are about to land on. A poorly written (or blank) meta description will result in people bypassing your links in favour of other pages with more informative meta descriptions.
This is your chance to ‘advertise’ your page, and there will be a huge uplift in clickthrough rates if you get it right. Don’t forget to pack in your keywords to the meta description – matching keywords from the search term will appear bold in your meta description, like below…
5. Link to Others
A large part of getting more traffic to your site is to create high-quality backlinks. These are essentially links on other, high-authority websites that link back to yours. Whenever you reference another site in your blog articles, link to the site, too. Not only is it good etiquette, but there’s also a chance they will link back to your site, too.
6. Link to Your Site
Creating internal links in your site is also another ranking factor that is high on the priority list for sites such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Whenever you mention a topic that you have already created an in-depth blog post on, link to it. Not only should you do this for new posts, but you should also go back over old posts periodically to spot opportunities to link them to the new posts you’ve just created.
So, there are some success strategies to optimise your blog posts for attracting high-quality traffic. Building a successful blog strategy isn’t something you can do in a couple of weeks – taking the long-term approach is definitely the way to go here, and after you’ve added a plethora of great content to your site that serves popular and relevant search terms you’re guaranteed to gain some big improvements in organic traffic to your site.