Today I am going to talk about the strategic plan you need to have when building your blog.

The truth is that you need to treat your blog like a business. And when having a business it is very important to have a plan, a strategic plan. The internet is about content, like Marketing Gurus in the digital marketing world say: “Content is king”. This is true but is not the only thing for having a successful blog. Google is the most popular search engine where billions of searches are performed every day. Google uses algorithms to give you the results for what you are looking for. Through the years this algorithm has changes and become “smarter”.

Currently, the last algorithm is called RankBrain, and uses artificial intelligence. First of all, you need to write content for your readers, give value to them but also you shouldn’t forget to make your content as Google likes it, in this way you will rank more pages higher on Google, get more traffic and thus increase your income. It’s a numbers game.

Content Strategy

By Content strategy I mean that you need to know what to write about by following a plan.

For example, you can have a site about recipes and follow this structure:

This is called silo structure and this is a good SEO practice that will make your site rank higher. You go from writing content for more general keywords with high traffic and linking from them to other more in-depth and specific pages. However, you shouldn’t be extremely specific, google prefers articles with more than 1000 words and all the related content to be included.
Fish recipes and Salmon recipes are going to be also “categories” in your site. But then you can create a main article related to fish recipes and do some internal linking to other salmon recipes.

Keyword research

Now you might be asking: how can I find which keywords are good or what is their volume of searches? For a free tool you can use Google Keyword Planner. And also Kwfinder allows up to 5 free searches a day. For a paid premium tool I recommend Long Tail Pro. The google keyword planner is not going to show you the keyword difficulty but only the search volumes per month and keyword recommendations. In fact, the google keyword planner is a tool used for advertisers. Long tail pro and Kwfinder will give the keyword difficulty, that is, how hard can be to rank on Google for the chosen keyword. It is always recommended to start with easy keywords and then when your site gets more authority you can go for harder keywords. It is worth to mention that choosing easy or hard keywords has nothing to do with the traffic volume or how much money you can make.

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