SEO Best Practices: How to Optimize Your Blog for Organic Search

Search engines are evolving more rapidly than ever, but their goal remains the same: to serve information, products, or services that will satisfy their users' needs.

Optimizing a website to rank highly in Organic Search results used to be a relatively straightforward process.

This is no longer the case in 2025.

If you want to capture a spot on page one or within an AI Overview or answer box, your brand needs to be recognized as an expert in your space. That means publishing blog content to build your brand’s topical authority while providing genuine value to your readers.

Here’s everything you need to know about optimizing your blog to improve your brand’s Organic Search rankings and search engine visibility.

Before you can publish the best blog content in your vertical, you need to understand Google’s most vital acronym for content creators: E-E-A-T.

To be clear, there’s no such thing as an E-E-A-T “score,” and it’s not a ranking factor, which means Google does not grade pages on how well they exemplify the E-E-A-T principles.

Even so, E-E-A-T is still crucial.

It’s a Google Quality Rater Guideline, which means E-E-A-T is what Google wants to see in search results because it’s also what users want to see.

Think of Experience, Expertise, and Authoritativeness as three elements that comprise the fourth: Trustworthiness. Using appropriate techniques to demonstrate E-E-A-T in your content and across your site is key to maximizing your brand’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) visibility.

The best place to start, of course, is with a team of genuine experts.

Freelancers or AI writing tools simply can’t produce content of the same quality as real experts.

In addition to E-E-A-T, here’s a look at a handful of other considerations for getting the most mileage out of your site’s blog.

Remember, you don’t want to show up on just any SERP; you should strive for visibility on the SERPs that hold the most promise for your business because that’s where you’ll get the best possible ROI of SEO.

With this in mind, it’s wise to write your blog posts around the keywords most valuable to your brand.

It’s best practice to stick to two or three keywords per piece of content since it can be difficult to fully optimize a single blog page for more keywords, especially if the keywords don’t share key terms.

Remember, your best bet will likely be long-tail keywords while considering the keyword’s search volume and difficulty score.

The search volume should be high enough that you can expect meaningful site traffic but not so high that the SERP is impossibly competitive and you don’t have a realistic shot at ranking.

Pillar content is a single blog page that comprehensively covers one topic. It links to your other blog pages, which are each narrowly focused on subtopics or individual keywords that support the pillar.

Pillar content allows for a robust internal linking structure, which ensures a world-class UX and shows Google you’re optimizing with users in mind.

Creating pillar content also helps your team get the most content possible out of each topic, keeping your content calendar full and allowing your brand to post frequent updates on your website and social media accounts.

SERPs are more crowded than ever.

To achieve meaningful visibility, you must think beyond the “10 blue links” that characterized early iterations of Google and other search engines.

AI Overviews (AIOs) routinely dominate the results pages for informational queries. They eat up considerable real estate at the very top of the page, with sources (and brands) listed in a box at the right.

Appearing in this box puts you above the ads, other SERP features, and Organic Search results.

Here’s how to optimize your content to appear in AIOs:

Many of the practices that help optimize content for AIOs will also help you appear in answer boxes, People Also Ask, and other SERP features that enhance your brand's search visibility.

“Freshness” has several different meanings in Google’s eyes. Content that isn’t considered fresh will struggle to rank highly or appear in SERP features.

Here’s how Google evaluates content freshness:

The best ways to optimize for freshness include monitoring social media, forum discussions, and leading industry news publications to spot emerging information/trends/developments on your topic, then regularly update your existing content with these details.

Scheduling regular content audits is a helpful way to stay on track.

It’s a great feeling when high-authority sites link back to your content on their own, but you’ll build more backlinks faster with a proactive approach.

Conducting outreach pays dividends, particularly if you follow these tips:

As you accumulate backlinks, use SEO tools to monitor your site’s backlink profile and ensure you aren’t the target of an overly large number of spammy links.

Your blog’s UX is crucial.

Users are impatient, and they won’t wait longer than a couple of seconds to see if your content is worth reading. Besides, the longer it takes your blog to load, the more skeptical users become about the quality of your content.

With the importance of UX in mind, here are some tips for delivering a world-class experience for your users.

While brands frequently use content to enhance Organic Search visibility and achieve business goals, the foundation of winning blog content will always be its value to the reader.

Yes, you should always strive for correct grammar and punctuation, but you may have seen plenty of content ranking well on SERPs despite the fact that it would merit a C-minus grade at best from any self-respecting educator.

This kind of content ranks well not because it’s objectively “high-quality” but because it’s valuable to users, and users who interact with it send all the right signals to Google.

In short, if you want your blog to rank well, you need to give the people what they want.

Keyword stuffing, cloaking, and other black-hat SEO techniques have been dead for years, so save yourself time and simply do things right from the beginning.

Your internal linking structure determines your users’ ability to navigate your website.
Aim for a maximum click depth of 3 for any given page. This ensures users don’t have to do too much work to find what they’re looking for.

A lower click depth helps reduce bounce rate while increasing conversion rate.

When users struggle to find what they’re looking for, you’ll see a high bounce rate. The harder users must work to reach your revenue-driving product or collection pages, the lower your conversion rate will be.

Ensure your header and footer navigation allow users to easily move from a blog page to your collections and product pages and vice versa.

It’s also wise to use textual links in your blog posts, product descriptions, FAQs, How-To sections, and elsewhere to help users explore relevant information and answer questions as they arise.

Over half of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices, which means your content should be easy to read regardless of screen size.

Two of the most common mistakes publishers make are:

For example, darker orange text on a lighter orange background will be difficult to decipher, especially when you factor in shifting natural light and varying screen brightness. You might love how colorful your blog looks, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of readability.

Be sure to use responsive web design for the best possible experience on your blog pages and your site as a whole. This ensures your pages will render properly and be easily usable regardless of screen size or resolution.

High-quality photos, infographics, and videos are all excellent ways to enrich your blog pages and create a more engaging user experience.

However, visual elements that are casually thrown in, improperly repurposed, or massive in size will detract from, rather than add to, the user experience.

Follow these best practices to optimize the visuals on your blog.

Although the technical side of blog optimization may seem arcane if you lack web development experience, there are some surprisingly simple steps anyone can take to improve site performance for better Organic Search visibility.

Meta tags are tags within the HTML of a given page. These tags tell search engines and users about the page, so optimizing meta tags is key to performing well in Organic Search.

Here’s a look at the critical meta tags for SEO:

Here are the guidelines for optimizing each type of meta tag:

Bonus: Use the VELOX Title & Meta Description Checker to write new tags or check the length of the existing tags on individual pages.

Depending on your CMS, you may not be able to edit the HTML directly. Instead, you can fill in the page title and meta description on a settings page.

Optimize your blog’s URLs by keeping them short and sweet.

How to create ideal URLs:

If you’re working with an existing URL structure that isn’t perfect, don’t sweat it. There’s no need to rework it to appease Google, except in extreme cases.

Using 301 redirects is key to preventing users and search engines from accessing obsolete content.

The old content living on your site is sending all the wrong signals to Google (not exactly fresh, is it?) and could pose duplicate content issues when you cover the same topics as part of your revived publishing efforts.

Conduct an audit to identify any outdated pages. If you don’t plan on updating the content and continuing to use the URL, then apply a 301 redirect so users and search engines will be taken directly to the new/current version of the page.

This is where it pays to have a great relationship with your web development team.

We previously discussed how important UX is to maximizing your site’s Organic Search rankings. A better user experience = higher SERP positions.

First and foremost, your pages need to pass Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment. An easy way to check this is to plug your URLs into Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

Beyond CWV, this tool also covers several aspects of site performance with specific recommendations on how to improve.

These recommendations range from the simple (like adding image alt text) to the more complex and technically involved, such as minimizing main-thread work and reducing the size of a page’s Largest Contentful Paint.

Your best bet is to run a comprehensive technical audit and meet with your dev team to review the results, identify priorities, and get the ball rolling.

Optimizing site speed and performance is typically a prolonged effort, but will certainly pay dividends for your blog by helping boost Organic Search visibility, draw traffic, build a loyal audience, and convert your readers into satisfied (and loyal) customers.

Optimizing a blog is a vital project, but it requires considerable bandwidth and knowledge. That’s why brands looking to maximize their Organic Search visibility turn to the experts at VELOX.

As an ROI-focused digital marketing agency, VELOX creates fully custom strategies, leverages leading-edge technologies, and uses proven techniques to drive revenue and help you create a more profitable business. We consistently exceed client expectations, which is why we’re recognized among the top 3% of agencies globally as a Google Partner.

Contact VELOX today for your free marketing plan.