Search Engine Optimization is the single most important thing when you are blogger or want your website to receive a lot of visitors. With SEO you will be able to attract the type of audience you want for your blog and even make a lot of money from them. These are SEO tips for South African bloggers and webmasters.
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of optimizing your website or blog in a way that it ranks on search engines and brings you organic (free) traffic. We all want our websites to receive traffic, what’s the point of creating a website if it is going to end up being a ghost town with no visitors?
There are many methods of attracting people to your website or blog, SEO is by far the best one because it is free, other options cost money. You can advertise your blog on Facebook or social media but you will stop getting visitors immediately when you stop with advertisements.
With SEO, you optimize your website to rank on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines. Google has over 70% market share of the search engine field, it’s best that you focus on Google. SEO will allow your website or blog to appear on search results when someone is searching for information on Google. They might click on the link to your website, resulting in a free visitor for you.
How long will it take to grow your site traffic?
How long will it take to grow your site traffic through SEO if you are in South Africa? Realistically speaking, you will have to wait between 6 and 12 months to start seeing results. You might see your blog get some traffic at month 2, this is usually a few people, maybe 3 people per day. The bulk of your traffic will pick up after 6 months.
Why does SEO take so long? When you open a brand-new site, you can either alert Google that your website exists or wait for Google to discover it naturally. Waiting for Google to discover it naturally may take longer, but Google is usually fast, your site will be discovered within 14 days maximum.
You alert Google about your site through the search console. The primary reason why SEO takes so long is because Google is still trying to figure out your website and doesn’t really trust it. Imagine if you opened an online store today and it started appearing on Google, receiving massive traffic then you shut it off tomorrow after scamming people off their hard-earned money.
People would blame Google or Bing since they’re the ones that sent them to this shady online store. Having your website live for at least 6 months shows that you mean business, Google will start trusting you with the not so critical search results. The longer your site lives, the more authority it gets with Google and the more it will be preferred in search results.
How long should you wait?
You should do SEO for at least 18 months before giving up, that can be a lot of time to wait for something that you don’t know if will ever work. The rule of thumb is to wait 10 months, your blog should receive a significant amount of traffic from month number 10 onwards, that seems to be the magic month in my opinion. A lot of data suggests that you should see some results by month 10.
It also depends on your niche, if you are in a very competitive niche like beauty and fitness then you might have to wait a bit longer. if you are in a niche where there is not much competition then you might start seeing results in month number 3.
Try to write the bulk of your blog posts within 4 months, it usually takes 5 – 6 months before a post reaches its high traffic potential. You won’t write the post today and have it appear on Google today in most cases, there are some cases where that is possible.
How many blog posts should you have?
You should aim to get at least 500 pageviews per month from each blog post. The amount of blog posts that you write will depend on how many pageviews you need. If you are looking to get 50 000 pageviews per month then you need to write at least 100 posts.
There are blog posts that will bring in 2 000 people in a month and there are blog posts that will only bring in 50 people in a month, your average should be 500 pageviews. A business website that only requires 10 000 pageviews per month will need to write 20 high-quality blog posts.
You should first have an understanding of your goals, 20 000 pageviews may be more than enough for other bloggers while it’s a joke to others. If for example you sell an e-book on your blog and you receive a traffic of 20 000 people, you might sell around 400 books per month.
This is derived from the average lead conversion rate which is just above 2%. A blogger who doesn’t sell anything will not make a lot of money from 20 000 pageviews, but you will make between R1 500 and R5 000 per month from ads with that number of pageviews. Maybe that’s all you really need.
If you want to make serious money from blogging then write at least 75 posts. The amount of money that you will make will be enough to cover your living expenses.
Write high quality content
Your blog posts should be of high-quality, otherwise they won’t rank on Google. Provide the best information possible with regards to the subject. Writing quality content is a guarantee that your site will rank on Google.
Your blog posts should be at least 600 words long, this depends on your niche. Some topics can be answered with just 150 words, don’t strain yourself trying to write 600 words. But provide all the relevant information, otherwise Google will see your content as too thin and not informational enough.
Your blogging should be consistent, if you release a post once per week then be consistent, if you release a post every 3 days then be consistent.
Install SEO plugins
SEO plugins will help you remember some of the things that you might forget when doing SEO. A plugin will tell you if your content is too thin or doesn’t include enough keywords.
I have personally used the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress and I highly recommend it. Another plugin that is gaining a lot of popularity is Rank Math. SEO plugins will take care of all the technical staff.
Understanding backlinks
A backlink happens when someone links to content that is in your website. A lot of SEO advice is centred around backlinks. Why are backlinks so important? When another blogger links to your post, that’s a signal to Google that your post is good and relevant.
Let’s take a detour to some history, Google originally used an algorithm called PageRank. What PageRank did was look at all the backlinks within the web and websites that had the most backlinks were deemed to be high-quality. This is how Google was able to be so accurate, it only showed results from reliable sources.
Backlinks are more like references and citations, when a website gives you a backlink then it’s vouching for your content. Bloggers spend a lot of time begging for backlinks, backlinks might get your website to rank sooner on Google.
I personally don’t recommend you to go around hunting for backlinks, Google is moving away from that system of backlinks, they are now focused on high-quality content. Focus on quality content and you will be just fine, you will excel.
Hosting
Host your website with a reputable hosting company. Hosting affects your website performance, which in turn affects your SEO. Google doesn’t want to send people to a website that is down 50% of the time, your website or blog should be up 99.9% of the time.
Hosting also affects your website speed, your website might load terribly slowly if you are hosting with the wrong hosting provider. I highly recommend that you use Bluehost, they are simply the best.
Internal links
Always link to other blog posts that you have published; those blog posts should be relevant to the current one. Internal links help search engines to navigate your blog with ease.
Conclusion
These are the top SEO tips that we have for South African bloggers. Do you have any thoughts or questions? Comment below.
