A child care blog is a great way for your center to be a helpful resource to current and potential families through news updates, interviews, and educational articles, lists, how-to guides and more. Optimizing your posts gives you more opportunities to connect with parents searching for your services. Learn how you can make your blog posts SEO-friendly to reach more moms and dads in the search engine results pages!
How to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO
Find a Relevant Topic
If you want to engage with millennial parents through your center’s blog, it’s important that you write about relevant topics they’re searching for. Start with a simple Google search to find out what’s trending in the child care industry. Take a look at other child care websites, family-oriented blogs or parenting magazines for ideas!
Choose a topic that will provide value to young parents while demonstrating your expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness in the child care industry to Google.
Perform Keyword Research
Once you discover what topics parents are searching for online, it’s time to find out what keywords you can compete for on Google’s results page. Then, you can incorporate those keywords into your blog posts to reach moms and dads searching for your services online.
Avoid using popular keywords with a lot of competition. Instead, look for long tail keywords with lower search volumes and low competition to include in your blog posts that maximize your organic rankings. Long tail keywords are more specific keywords and phrases that help you deliver exactly what parents are searching for.
Use Appropriate Headings
Headings help readers and search engines easily navigate your posts and understand the most important parts of your article. When you’re structuring your blog posts, be sure to use a variety of heading levels (H1, H2, H3). An H1 should only be used for the title of the blog post. An H2 is the subheader of an H1, and an H3 is a subheader of the H2, and so on.
Keep Your Paragraphs Short
When you’re writing your blog, keep in mind that many parents will be reading your post on a mobile device. Make your content digestible for on-the-go moms and dads with short paragraphs, about three sentences long.
Optimize the Length of Your Post
While Google doesn’t necessarily evaluate your blog posts’ word count, longer posts demonstrate better search performance. However, if your post is too long and difficult to read, you may scare readers away. Aim for a minimum of 300 words and use headings to break your content up into manageable chunks.
Add Internal Links
Links are a very important part of SEO. When it makes sense, be sure to include links to other relevant blog posts or pages on your website! Adding internal links to your posts helps search engines discover other pages on your website and encourages your readers to read more about a topic while staying on your site.
Optimize the Title and URL
Write a descriptive title for your blog post that encourages people to click on your article when they see it on the search engine results page. Include a keyword in the title, and make sure the title accurately describes what your post is all about! Your title should contain between 50-60 characters if you want it to appear in its entirety when shown on the results page.
Next, optimize your blog post’s URL to help search engines understand what the page is about. Incorporate important keywords and use a hyphen (-) to separate words.
Add a Meta Description
A meta description is a snippet of text that summarizes the content on your page, or in this case your blog post, for search engines and search engine users. Google displays around 160 characters of your meta description on the results page. Use concise language in your meta description to encourage readers to click on your post and read more!
Optimize Images
Photos, videos, graphics and other media can add value to your blog posts! If you add any images or media, be sure to fill in the alt text with a few descriptive words to inform search engines and readers of its contents. Descriptive file names also help search engines understand your photos and videos!
