The goal of writing blog posts is to get the attention of your target audience and introduce them to your brand. From here, the possibilities are endless. They can join your email list, buy your products, or subscribe to the services you offer.
However, this will not be possible if they cannot find your blog post online.
There are many ways that you can promote your blog content to your readers. But arguably, the best and most sustainable way of doing so is by ranking high in search engine results. Writing SEO-friendly blog posts allows your audience to find them on Google with little to no effort from you. Once your blog post starts ranking on the first page of search engine results pages, you can expect to receive a steady stream of high-quality traffic.
Keyword research plays a pivotal role in creating an SEO-friendly blog post. If you do not target the right keywords in your content, your chances of ranking higher on SERPs are pretty slim.
Search Volume and Keyword Difficulty
When conducting keyword research, two things that immediately come to mind are search volume and keyword difficulty. Search volume refers to the number of times a keyword is searched per month on average. Free tools let you type in a topic and show you keyword ideas and suggestions, each with their respective search volume range.
Keyword difficulty is a score that tells you how easy or hard ranking for the keyword on the first page of Google is. The higher the score, the more difficult it will be to rank for that keyword.
From here, it would be logical for you to find keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty. When doing your keyword research, there is no exact monthly searches or KD score that you should look for since each niche and industry are different. Therefore, you need to find as many keyword ideas relevant to your niche as possible and see its average search volume and KD score.
Keyword Intent
To help you expand your keyword research, you also need to keep keyword intent in mind. It refers to the reason why people are searching for the query on Google in the first place.
There are three types of keyword intent to be mindful of: navigational, informational, and commercial. Unless your brand is very popular in your industry, most content on your blog is going to be informational. In particular, you need to find informational keywords to help share your industry knowledge with your audience and build trust with them.
Researching keywords with intent in mind also allows you to write a more focused blog post. For example, optimizing for "content marketing" is difficult because the keyword covers many things like definition, benefits, examples, and others. Now, if you are optimizing for "content marketing for beginners," the goal with writing your blog post becomes much clearer. Write an informative post explaining content marketing to beginners. The intent gives us insights into why users search for the keyword and helps narrow down the topic.
Mention Keyword in the Right Places
Once you have found your keyword, make sure that you mention your keywords in the correct places inside the content.
However, we are not referring here to keyword stuffing. Mentioning your keywords as many times as possible in the blog post does not work anymore because it does not provide value to readers. What is important now is to create authoritative content that satisfies the searcher's intent by answering the question or solving a problem.
Nonetheless, strategically targeting the keyword in your blog post serves to provide context and help search spiders index your content to appear for the correct search queries.
The three most important places to include your keyword are:
- SEO Title: The title of your post that appears on search results
- URL: The page address of the blog post on your website
- H1 tag: The title that appears on your article page
Mentioning your keyword in these places immediately gives your blog post an edge over those without the keyword in these places. You can also mention the keyword in the actual content, although it will not do as much help as opposed to mentioning it in the places mentioned above. Just make sure that the keyword makes sense in the content since you do not want to include it there for no reason. You may also use variations of your target keywords inside the article body to keep things natural.
One of the best ways to publish easy-to-read and SEO-friendly blog posts is by breaking down each subtopic into sections.
Each section must have a subheading that introduces it to readers properly. Since you already have an H1 tag which is the post's title, you should use H2 tags for the sections in your post. It is also possible to have subheadings within your subheadings. In this case, sections under an H2 tag should use the H3 tag, and so on.
Back in the day, mentioning your target keyword in headings was something you should do if you wanted your post to rank for the search query. However, headers have lost some of their value as far as featuring keywords here is concerned.
Nonetheless, it would help if you add your target keywords or some variations in a few heading tags, while keeping it relevant. Similar to making your post much easier to read by your audience, this will also help spiders better understand the context of the article simply by referring to your headers. Therefore, regardless if you incorporate your keyword in each header, Google will reward your post with higher rankings as long as you cover as much ground about the topic.
To help you brainstorm for headers, refer to the websites showing up on SERPs of your target keyword. From the results page, you can refer to Google autocomplete prediction on the search bar. It will show you a maximum of 10 search phrases that you can use as-is or as jump-off points for your headers. For some search queries, there is a People Also Ask section that shows you the most common questions about the keyword you searched for.
Write Killer Content
Everything discussed above is half the battle of ranking on top of Google search for your keyword. The other half is spent on the actual writing of the piece.
Now, there may be automatic content generation tools that will help generate content for you with a few clicks of a button. However, you still need to review and edit the article to ensure accuracy and grammatical correctness. You will find yourself rewriting the entire generated section most of the time because it does not capture the quality of detail you need for your post.
To help make the writing process easier for you, you need to prepare an outline, which we have already discussed above. By structuring the topics you plan on covering in your article using headings and subheadings, you have a clearer picture of what to write from start to finish.
Also, when you start writing articles, you need to answer these questions for each section:
- What is the section all about?
- Why do the readers have to learn about it?
- How can the readers put what they have learned from this section into practice?
You can tweak the questions based on the topic of each section. The goal here is to answer questions that your readers may have about the topic. By answering them clearly and concisely in your content, you offer value to readers and search engines at the same time.
Finally, once you are done writing the post, you need to review it before moving on to the next step. If you wrote the content yourself, you would ideally want to spend a few hours away from the post and distance yourself from it completely. This way, once you read the post, you have a fresh perspective about the topic which allows you to edit the article by adding more information to it.
Add Images
As part of structuring your content, you need to add as many relevant images on your post as possible.
However, we are not referring to stock photos here. While you may use them if they capture the essence of what you are trying to say in a particular section of your article, it is best to use unique and custom images instead. They help elevate and make your blog post stand out from the pack. Creating images even without design experience is possible, thanks to modern design tools. Choose a template that you wish to edit, add images from its collection, and add filters and elements to spruce up its appearance.
Before uploading images in your post, you need to compress them first. This helps reduce the file size of your images, loading them faster on visitors' browsers without compromising their quality.
Finally, you need to add alt text on all of the images you upload to your website. Since search spiders cannot read images, they check their respective alt texts instead to understand what the image is about. Therefore, make sure that the alt text describes all of the images to a tee.
Use Internal and External Links
Once you are done writing your blog post, you need to add external and internal links to it. External links point to pages from other websites from your blog post.
External links are valuable in the sense that you point users to valuable resources relevant to the topic. By providing your audience with additional reading, they will be more thankful to you for it. Search spiders connect your blog post's topic using the pages you linked out to.
At the same time, do not get too crazy with outbound links. Linking away from your page also allows link juice to escape from your site, thus decreasing your site's authority and sending them to pages on other sites.
Internal links, on the other hand, point to pages or blogs on your own site. Arguably more important than external links, developing an internal linking strategy allows you to create topic clusters on your site. You create a cluster by grouping blog posts talking about the same topic via internal links. Creating topic clusters allows you to build topical relevance to help pages on your site rank higher for their respective keywords.
Expert Perspectives
Following the steps above should help you create well-optimized SEO-friendly blog posts that will eventually rank on Google. Most of your time will be spent on researching the right keywords and getting the content written.
Regarding keyword research, make sure to target search terms that you feel you can realistically rank for. Eventually, once you build enough authority from the content you have published, you can target keywords with higher search volumes for more significant traffic.
Final Thoughts
The most crucial part of creating SEO-friendly blog posts is to provide value to your audience. By covering everything you need to discuss in the blog post in a clear manner, you will also get in the good graces of search spiders and index your page on top of your target keyword.
A well-optimized blog post is a powerful asset. It attracts visitors, builds trust, and drives conversions. By following these steps consistently, you can create content that ranks, engages, and delivers results.