New Year’s To-Do List for Bloggers – How I will Improve my SEO in 2022

I have been spending a lot of time working on my blog recently. I have written posts every day In October and December, I have worked with social media, and I have focused on my keyword research. Over the past couple of months, I have learned so much, but there is still a lot more that I need to do to improve my website. So because of this, I have created a New Year’s to-do list for bloggers.

One of the things I have been doing on my quest to improve my blog this year is research. I have read countless amounts of articles, listened to podcasts, and watched youtube videos, all about SEO.

However, even with all the work I have done, I know there is a lot I still need to learn. And there is also a lot I still need to implement on my site.

So I have made it a goal for the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 to do this. To ignore the frustrations I feel with the slow progress, and do all the things that the “blogging experts” tell me to do.

2022 will be my year, I can feel it. I am going to come back to this post in one year and I am going to see how much I have improved! Luckily, I already am seeing improvement, so the motivation is there. Now it is time for the hard work.

So, if you are in the same boat as I am, and you are looking to improve your SEO and blog this coming year, stay tuned for my New Year’s To-Do List for Bloggers. Let’s all achieve our dreams in 2022!

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Why Should You Care About SEO?

SEO can be so frustrating. In all honesty, it is my least favorite thing to work on when it comes to my blogs. It feels like I can put hours of work into it and I will see little to no results.

But it is also incredibly important when trying to build a blog into a business. So because of that, I have been focusing on it for the past few months. And I have actually seen results.

Before I tell you my results, just know they are small. I am not out here getting 50,000 page views a month, like some other bloggers. That is the goal, but I am just starting to form my blogging business, I don’t expect to see those results right away. So set your expectations low. I am just trying to show what I have been able to accomplish.

Anyway, here is what has happened in the past couple of months that I have been focusing on SEO.

Below is a screenshot of my “referrers” for August, before I was ever worried about SEO. In August, I was simply writing whatever I wanted and I knew nothing about SEO.

As you can see, I only got 24 people in the entire month of August coming to my site through search engines… that’s not a lot.

Now looking at December’s stats, there is a huge difference.

This month, December, I have had 162 people come to my site from search engines. That is way more than before I started focusing on SEO! And I still have a couple more days to go!

Breaking this down into numbers…

In August: 19% of my views came from search engines

In December: 47% of my views came from search engines

That is a huge increase! Just from the small amount of research and changes I have implemented in those four months, most of them happening in the past 2 months!

It is clear how important it is to focus on SEO!

New Year’s To-Do List for Bloggers

With all that being said, I am still not seeing the numbers I need to see to turn this blog into a full-time income, which is my ultimate goal for 2022. So, there is a lot more work I need to do, and some things I want to get done before the end of 2021, to prepare myself as much as I can for the new year!

1. Make every post and page on your website > 1,000 words

Google, and other search engines, like long-form content. They like when posts and pages on a website have a lot of information on them.

When ranking your blog posts, search engines look at the credibility of your entire site, not just the post. So it is important to have a lot of long-form content on your site.

Some of my posts from the beginning of this blog are no longer than 300 words, and I would like to change that. For example, my first blog post is only 500 words! I plan to go way back to the beginning and bulk up my content in order to have a more credible site and to improve my DA score (Domain Authority Score).

2. Improve the depth and quality of content on your site

Not only do search engines like long content, but they also like good quality content. If your posts are full of fluff, and irrelevant information, they are not going to rank as often.

So, not only is it important to bulk up the word count, it is important to bulk up to actual content. Define things, explain things, and go into detail about why things are important. It will be beneficial to go into your articles and pages and make sure you cover all the topics in-depth as much as you can.

A lot of my old posts would answer one question and one question only. I plan to go back and fix that, adding more depth and information to every page, post, and article.

3. Optimize all photos on your website

This includes a couple of things:

• Compress all photos to a smaller size to speed up website
• Make sure every photo has “Alt Text” added, which describes the image accurately
• Get rid of old photos I have and replace with more aesthetcally pleasing photos

It is easy to forget the photos, but they are just as important as the words.

In many of my old posts, I used my own photography. I started my site wanting all the photos to be my own and I soon realized… I’m not the best photographer. I can take pictures of books easily, but everything else… I’m not very good.

So, while optimizing the photos on my blog, I am going to go back and replace those with stock photos that actually look good, and convey my information better.

4. Implement SEO strategies in old posts

I used to write just to write, I wasn’t thinking about SEO at all. I would even ignore everything Yoast was trying to tell me. This is probably a common issue amongst amateur and new bloggers. Blogging is seen as an outlet for your thoughts and ideas, and that is totally valid!

But for me, who wants to turn this blog into a business, I need to think I little more like a business person, instead of a creative.

So, I plan to look back at old posts, implement SEO strategies that I have learned over the course of the past couple of months, and overall improve the content.

This will improve my domain authority while also hopefully leading to more of my content to rank on Google.

5. Implement off-page SEO strategies

While focusing mainly on on-page SEO is great, there are other ways to improve your ranking on google and that is off-page SEO. I am taking the social media marketing and pulling views in from other sites, rather than only relying on search engines.

Why is this important? Because if Google sees that an influx of people is coming to your site from Twitter or Instagram, they will see that people are enjoying your content and you will rank better.

So, in order to improve your off-page SEO, here are some things to do

• Use Pinterest to market all new blog posts (I plan to do this 4 times a day)
• Increase followers on Instagram and use new “link sticker” to drive traffic to your site
• Engage in discussions on Twitter to gain followers and bring readers to your site

There are other forms of marketing you can do like Facebook, but these are the three I plan to work on because I am most comfortable with them.

6. Create keyword database to use in 2022

Finally, I want to start looking forward to the new year and start planning some of my content. The aspect of SEO I am the newest to is keyword research. I am just starting to understand that I need to find keywords that are searched often, but that don’t have too much competition. It is a delicate balance!

So, to prepare for 2022, a great thing to do is sit down, do some keyword research, and develop a database of words and phrases you can write about and target in the coming year. That way you are never looking for something to write about, you have a whole list ready for you.

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Not only is this New Year’s to-do list for bloggers good for the beginning of 2022, but it is also good to remember the rest of the year as well. You should be going through and making sure everything on your site is search engine optimized so that you have the best chance of ranking on engines like Google.

I know, New Year’s resolutions tend to fade away by the middle of January, but working on this blog and turning it into a business is something I really want.

So hold me my word! I am going to come back next year and we will see how this new year’s to-do list for bloggers went for me. How much it has improved my site. I will include numbers as proof!

And I am wishing every other blogger out there who is on the same journey as I am all the luck. I want everyone to succeed as much as I want myself to succeed. We got this!