12. Don’t SKIP the Small Stuff

Stephanie 0:01

We've all heard the expression, don't sweat the small stuff. But when it comes to blogging, the expression should be, don't skip the small stuff. Let's chat about what these little things are, why they matter, and how they can add up to big results for your website.

Stephanie 0:18

Welcome back to the podcast. We are going to continue looking at your blogging workflow to hopefully identify those hurdles that could be getting in the way of consistent content creation. So far in this series, we've talked about identifying your topic and keyword, creating an outline, writing reader focused content, and gathering your images for the post. Now at this point in the blogging workflow, you are probably getting sick of looking at this post. You just want to hit the publish button and move on with your life, but it's at this point in the blogging workflow that you can have a huge impact on user experience and your search rankings. But as you can probably tell from the title of this episode, it's those small finishing touches on your blog post that are going to make this big impact.

Stephanie 1:22

Now, before we dive into specifics, I wanted you to think about a time where you have done a home improvement project or helped someone with one so that could be an outdoor project or painting, whatever it is, but there comes that point when you get to about 90 to 95% completion and everything looks great. There's just a few more things left, and it can be really tempting to just be done, put the tools away, clean up the mess and get to the last of it at some point. So our family has lived in several fixer uppers over the years, but shortly after we bought our last home in Idaho, I decided that the pet stained carpet in the basement, it had to come out immediately, like that weekend, I couldn't handle the look or the smell, and so we worked around the clock for two days. We got the carpet ripped out, got the LVP going, got the baseboards in, and we had that job to the 90% point, all that we had left was just to add a few more pieces of shoe molding to the baseboards, and we had to fill the nail holes and then paint the trim. But since the material we used for the trim was already white and the nail holes really were tiny and didn't bother us that much, that project stayed at that 90 to 95% point the whole time we lived in that house. In fact, we eventually sold the home for over the asking price, with those nail holes still unfilled and the trim unpainted. Now I'm sharing this with you at the risk of sounding like a lazy homeowner, but I wanted to point out that our basement was 100% functional with the flooring 95% done. I can guarantee you that no one who visited our home said, Wow, this room would be so nice if only those nail holes were filled. But it's a much different story when we're talking about blogging, when you look at your mostly finished blog post with the well outlined keyword rich content and those images you carefully selected, it might feel totally functional. It will get the job done without all of those extra little things. But unfortunately, a blog post is not the same as an almost finished basement flooring project. That final 5 to 10% can get in the way of user experience and search rankings. In short, you likely won't see a return on your time investment from writing the post because it won't rank well on Google or convert to TPT traffic. So what exactly is the small stuff that you shouldn't skip? Well, there's quite a list, but I'm going to share the three most important things, in my opinion, and then we'll talk about how those little things can improve user experience on your website and improve your search rankings. So the first thing would be internal links, the second is alt text for your images, and the third is a pinnable graphic.

Stephanie 4:30

But before we talk about how those three non negotiables can impact user experience, we need a refresher on why that matters. Why is user experience important? Well, first and most importantly, as a website owner, you do have a responsibility to create accessible content on your website, just like a brick and mortar business needs to make their business accessible to all patrons, including those with disabilities. Your online business needs to do the same. Second, content that's difficult to navigate, it just won't convert as well. People won't stick around long enough to see what you have to offer in your blog post. And then finally, when people don't stick around, Google takes note, and there are certain analytics for your website, like your bounce rate, that can give signals to Google about the quality of your content. So a really high bounce rate tells Google, oh, this content isn't something that I want to be sending users to, and that will impact your rankings over time. So those three things I mentioned, internal links, alt text and a pinnable graphic, they can all have a positive impact on user experience. So first, internal links, they improve user experience by pointing your website visitors to related content on your website. So if you're talking about a certain topic in your blog post, you can link to another piece of content on your website that can give the reader some additional context. Alt text is another vital part of user experience. If the image in your post is more than just decorative, be sure to include text that describes the image. Alt text is read by screen readers, so it is vital that you use this field appropriately, don't use it as a keyword opportunity and stuff a bunch of keyword variations into the alt text box. Another thing I see a lot is that people will just try to save time by copying their blog post, meta description, and just adding that to the alt text box for every image because they figure it's close enough it has a keyword in it. This is fine, but alt text is an accessibility feature first and foremost, and so that's why you don't want to skip it, but you also want to use it appropriately. And then finally, a pinnable graphic makes it easier for your blog visitors to save your content for later. Now, technically, any image on your website can be added to Pinterest unless you use a plugin or code to block pinning for certain images, but it's helpful to have an image that follows the best practices of pin design so that users are more likely to add it to their Pinterest boards. And just as a side note, pins that are saved by your website visitors are an amazing way to increase your visibility on Pinterest, so you want to make sure that it's easy for them to do that. Now let's talk about how those three small things can have a huge impact on your search rankings. So let's go back to internal links. This is one of the most important things that you can do for your search engine optimization. You need to treat it as a non negotiable in your blogging workflow that you are going to add internal links. I recently had an experience that shows just how important internal linking can be to your search performance. A service that I provide for some of my clients is updating and optimizing their older blog content. Because I have some clients who have been blogging for many, many years, and they just want another set of eyes on their older content to make sure that they are following current best practices. And so the first step that I take is to figure out what the targeted keyword was for that post, and I type it in to Google. I want to see where that post pops up in the results. Now, some people would tell me that I can use a fancy SEO tool to do this, but I actually think this step is too important to outsource to a tool. I always suggest using human eyeballs and reasoning to analyze search rankings. So anyway, I could not find this particular post. I scanned page after page after page. Now the amount of scrolling that I was doing was a little bit abnormal for this client, because usually I could find even their old blog content within the first couple of pages. But eventually this semi related blog post - it wasn't targeting the same keyword, but it was vaguely related - it popped up in the search results around page 10. Now, being so far down the search results made sense in that case, because the post was only somewhat related to the keyword that I put into the search bar. What didn't make sense was that Google preferred my client's semi related post over her post that was actually addressing the keyword. But it didn't take long for me to figure out what was wrong. I clicked over to the post that wasn't ranking at all. All, and the answer was obvious: the post had zero internal links. It wasn't linking to any other content on the client's website, and there was no content linking back to this post. So in the SEO world, this is called an orphan post, and orphaned content is much less likely to rank on Google. Long story short, always include internal links. Now let's talk about how alt text can help your search rankings. I know it's only been a couple of minutes, but I have to revisit what I said earlier, that first and foremost, alt text is an accessibility tool, but it is true that Google can crawl your alt text to help make sense of your blog content and your images. Now, some people interpret this to mean that your alt text is an SEO strategy. You should always include the targeted keyword or a variation in the alt text description. But as I mentioned before, you definitely should not be treating alt text as an SEO tool, but I did want to mention that it can help Google make more sense of your content, which in turn, could help your rankings. Now, finally, adding a pinnable graphic to your blog post can actually help your search rankings. When it comes to Google Image Search, Google will pick whatever they want from your blog post to include in the image search. But I have found that pin graphics are often the image that Google will choose, and sometimes the pin graphic is even pulled before the featured image. I'm assuming that it's because the text overlay on the pin matches the keyword that people are typing into the search bar. But also, when you think about the elements of a high quality pin, those same things that help your pins stand out on Pinterest are going to help your pin graphic stand out in Google image search.

Now that you've seen how important these finishing touches are to your blog post, I want to give you one last piece of advice, if you feel like you just can't keep up with a weekly blogging schedule, if you have to take care of all these little things, then just publish less content. Your business is going to be better served by fewer blog posts that are optimized for users in search than a whole bunch of 90% blog posts. My goal for this episode was to share with you how important that final 10% of publishing a blog post really is to do this, I shared three things that you should never skip, internal links, alt text and a pinnable graphic. To be honest, there are many additional elements of on page, SEO and user experience that you should address before hitting the publish button, but we just don't have the time to go over all of those in one episode. But don't worry, these final things really don't take that long. In fact, if you're a student of my BYOT course, you can see the entire process of writing a blog post in a very doable workflow. Just head over to module three. Lesson 3.7 in particular includes all of the finishing touches that you don't want to forget when uploading your blog post to WordPress. At the end of the course, you'll even find a printable checklist so you don't forget any of those little things. In the meantime, we're almost done with the audit of your blog post workflow. Next week, we'll have a little bit more food for thought about publishing your blog content. Be sure to hit the subscribe button so you don't miss the next episode in this series. If you're already subscribed to the podcast, please consider leaving a review. This is one of the best ways to support the pay less for traffic podcast.