When I was starting out, I thought that producing high-quality content that is relevant to people is the most important thing when it comes to being successful and ranking high on SERPs.
I was surprised when after a lot of posting, the results were not ideal to say the least.
As time passed by and my knowledge widened, I realized that high-quality content is just one of the ingredients for writing a successful and good-ranking blog post.
There are many other things that one should pay attention to when creating content like the frequency, the competition, and many other things.
One of the most important things in those is SEO. Good SEO is what will put your content to the top of the SERPs and lots of people can read it.
Okay, so SEO is important, you already knew that. What many people don’t know is that SEO is a skill and like any other skill it can be developed to a point where it makes a very big difference in your blog’s success.
It’s not one of those things that you either have or not, in my opinion. The more you learn about what SEO practices you need to include in your blog posting, the better your overall SEO will be.
That is why I decided to write this guide on how you can create a blog post that is good for SEO and offer some of my top tips that can truly help you out as much as they have helped me.
You can’t just sit down and start typing right away, even if you have a lot of good things to say.
Before you get to the part where you actually write the content, you have to go through a few steps of preparation.
Relevant: Also read top content marketing examples here
Subject and Structure
The first step should always be defining what you’re going to be writing about, and in which order.
If you just have a general idea, starting to write without any pre-formulated structure can make your post look hectic and unorganized.
And readers do not appreciate that. Well-written content that is structured the proper way and is relevant to the audience is what you should be aiming for.
For example, if you want to write a blog post on “How to Get More Instagram Followers in 2020” you should go ahead and find several high-ranking posts on the same subject and see how they are approaching the subject.
Read the comments of users, see what else they are interested in, and always try to write more helpful content than the top-ranking one.
After you know all this, plan the structure. Write down an actual plan on how you progress with the content.
In our Instagram followers example, it might look something like:
- Introduction: mention Instagram follower statistics, how much more influencers there are now than before, what is the future of influencer marketing, and why is it worth doing.
- Main body- subtitles: here you can write about different things depending on where you want to take the article. You can start with influencer marketing, how much influencers earn, mention examples of people’s strategies to get more followers, mention tools that might help for getting more followers, offer the best tips that are proven to work in growing the following like the right use of hashtags, promotions, etc.
- Conclusion: summary of all things previously written
If you have these titles planned, it’s much easier to be focused and write good content. Once you’re past this stage, you have to think about SEO.
Keywords
Even if you know just the basics of SEO, you probably know that you absolutely have to incorporate keywords into your content.
If you are looking to rank higher on SERPs, you have to know which keywords your audience searches for and incorporate them into your content.
There are many ways to see the relevant keywords, and there are many tools with which you can analyze them.
In some cases, you can even Google the keywords you think are relevant and see what comes up.
If you want a more data-driven approach, it’s needless to say there are A LOT of options out there both free and paid.
Some of the best keyword tools are:
- Google Keyword Planner
- Ahrefs
- SECockpit
- KeywordTool
- Keywords Everywhere
- Soovley
- Jaaxy
- Google Search Console
And many, many others. Do your research and find the one that’s best suitable for you.
Start writing your content
Once you’re done with the previous phase of preparing, you can start writing your content.
But still, it’s not just a staring-forward process- you have to take into consideration many different things to achieve excellent on-page SEO.
1. The content is for people
Sometimes, we are getting too hooked up in all these SEO rules and competitions that we forget the fact that our content is primarily for users and their pleasant experience.
If you are making SEO changes to your content that is making the SEO better but lowering the value to the readers- stop. That is not the right way to go about it since SEO shouldn’t be the absolute first priority.
What’s the point in people coming to your page only to be disappointed and annoyed by your keyword overfilled unhelpful content.
2. Write over 300 words
Depending on the subject you have, you will need to write different lengths of content, but generally don’t write extremely short articles.
There are many different opinions on this subject as to what is the best length for blog posts, but usually, all of them have words between 500 and 2500 as the optimal length.
If you need more words to cover some subjects, the smart thing to do would be to divide it into several blog posts and link them.
Keep your articles long, but make sure to pay attention to the structure and organization so people won’t get scared away.
3. Optimize the content
As you are writing your content, there are some things that you should keep in mind for better optimization:
- H2, h3: these are very important for the SERPs because it lets them know what the content of the blog post is about
- Bolds, bullets: people really like it when the content is organized, and easy to read. Also, they like to find relevant information and skip certain things
- Keywords: keywords should be used in the first paragraph, in the body, with a density of maximum of 5%. This means that you shouldn’t use your keyword more than 5 times in 1000 words.
- Paragraphs: make shorter paragraphs of 2-3 sentences to make it even easier for readers to skim through the content.
- Internal links: add links that lead to other relevant blogs on your website
- External links: do the same with posts that are relevant in the industry.
4. Write with simple words
The point of the blog posts is not so you can display your excessive knowledge and rich vocabulary.
You might be a PhD on the subject, but the point of the blog post is to help people out and get them informed about the certain subject.
For that purpose, you have to take into consideration that not all of the people reading your post are experts and highly-educated on the matter.
That’s why, you should write your content in the simplest way possible, using an eight-grade level.
Avoid long and difficult sentences, complex terms and phrases. Both people and SERPs appreciate a simple, clean, and straight-forward content.
5. Grammatically correct content
Your content might have the best tips and advice in the world, but if it’s full of grammatical mistakes both the readers and the SERPs might avoid it.
A great tip for this is to check your content with some grammar tool like for example Grammarly.
Also, do not check the text as soon as you wrote it. It’s harder to spot mistakes that way. Just leave it be for a day and then go and re-check with fresh eyes.
6. Use the keyword
Other than using your keyword in the content, you should use it in several other locations.
The title of the post is the name of the page that the readers can view on the page. Write a title for the page, using the keyword that you previously established.
Try to put the keyword as much as you can towards the beginning.
Additionally, try to use the keyword in the URL of the post, keeping it clear and on point.
Another place where the keyword should be used is the SEO title which is different from the page title.
This SEO title gives the search engine crawlers information about what the content is about and makes them better understand the overall post.
The SEO title should be less than 55 characters, and have the keyword in it.
The same goes for the SEO description or meta description. This text gives backed information to the search engine crawlers and also helps readers to see what the post is about.
The meta description should not be more than 155 words because if it is the whole text won’t be visible on the search engine page.
7. Optimize images
People prefer content that has visuals in it connected to the content. It makes it easier to read and more entertaining.
Adding 2-3 images per post is preferred, and you should optimize the images as well.
Make sure you write alt text for images since it provides contextual relevance of the images used in the content.
You can either take stock images or create your own, but people are more interested in real images.
If you are using an image from another source, make sure to give proper credits and avoid any legal issues.
If the images are too big, compress the storage size without having a worse visual representation.
8. Add Videos
Lately, there are more people that prefer watching a video instead of reading content and that is why you should always add one relevant video to your blog.
Creating a video content yourself would be the perfect solution, but if you can’t then any video content will suffice.
9. Give the content to someone else for reading
Sometimes we can get too much into our heads and not notice some mistakes or content defects that other people might detect better.
Find a trusted colleague, friend, or family member that is familiar with the subject in question and let them read it.
They might offer a different perspective on things, or even add some critics and comments that might make you put out better content.
10. Post-publishing process
After you have published the post, you should think about promoting the post. There are many different options when it comes to promoting, both paid and free.
Additionally, share your blog post on all of your social media platforms, and add buttons so your readers can do the same.
Take notice and check the data on which blog posts are more successful with your readers and use that knowledge when writing the following posts.
Wrapping up!
I am sure these tips will help you put together an impactful content sought by the readers. All you have to do is being mindful of what you want to share with the readers, structure the content well, and make sure the content is optimized to read a larger audience.
Learned something about blog post SEO? Check these other blogs to help you grow your business:
- A guide to understand market segmentation
- SEO strategies for now and after COVID-19
- A guide to write SEO articles: Top 10 tips
Leave a comment letting me know what else you’d be interested in when it comes to SEO practices.
