Whether you own a small business or a megacorporation, blogs remain one of the best ways to distribute information and bring new users to your website. Knowing how to write SEO-friendly blog posts helps your content reach more eyes organically, allowing you to reserve your advertising budget for other forms of marketing. Keep reading to learn how to write blogs for SEO and how they can complement everything from digital marketing to local SEO services.
Defining SEO Writing
SEO, or search engine optimization, describes the process of using keywords, photos, and videos to rank a website higher on search engine result pages. Writing for SEO requires careful planning of everything from the format to the keywords, so learning this skill increases the likelihood of blogs and other content climbing the ranks. A higher page rank translates into more views and clicks, valuable commodities for any website.
Nine Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Blogs
Search engines rank pages depending on details like content quality, timely and consistent content, internal and external links, and many other factors. Use these nine tips to create SEO-friendly blogs that attract and inspire while climbing the search engine ranks.
1. Understand Your Audience
Writing any sort of website content should start with a basic understanding of your target market. Who buys your products or services, or which segment of the population best fits the intention of your website or blog? Consider where your audience falls in the decision-making journey and help them explore that level or advance to the next step.
Knowing your audience also helps you decide how to write in a language that speaks to them. For example, you might use modern slang if you’re writing an entertainment blog aimed at Generation Z, while you’ll use more formal language writing content aimed at corporate business owners.
2. Choose a Clear, Concise Topic
Many business owners have a difficult time landing on the right topic for their blog. Sometimes they want to include as much information as possible, while others don’t have a clear idea of what to write about. Some ideas for choosing a topic for your next blog include:
- Describe how something works
- Answer a question
- Create a guide
- Provide a top-ten list
- Inform about a product or service
3. Build a Keyword List
Now that you know who you want to address and how, build out target keywords based on your subject. Target keywords can consist of a single word or many, with long-tail (multiple word) keywords bolstering the effectiveness of single keywords. For example, choosing the keyword “shirt” can lead to using the long-tail keyword “blue plaid button-up shirt.”
While keywords help search engines find and identify your blog for search engine queries, keyword stuffing will count against your SEO attempts. Keyword stuffing refers to attempting to change your search engine ranking by placing keywords everywhere on your page, often in spaces that feel inorganic or don’t make sense
4. Outline Your Blog
Writing a blog without a plan can cause you to deviate from the main subject of your article, so create an outline complete with headers and subheaders to stay on point. Use your keyword list to create relevant titles for your blog as a whole and each individual segment. Tagging your headers as H1, H2, H3, and so on helps tell search engines about the significance of each blog section.
Besides using your outline to guide your writing, you can also use the headers to format your blog for easier reading. Users prefer small paragraphs with only two to three sentences to walls of text with few line breaks. Segmenting out your ideas with an outline proves handy in how to write SEO-friendly blog posts.
5. Use Keywords Strategically
You can use keywords more effectively by including them not only in your blog post but in your meta description and URL as well. Meta descriptions show up under your blog’s title in search engine results and tell searchers about the article, making it a great place to use your keywords effectively. You can also use your keyword in your URL, changing it from the full title of your blog to a short but descriptive link that entices readers.
7. Write with Readers in Mind
Writing for SEO can easily turn into writing for search engine algorithms instead of people if you’re not careful. While you write, consider how easily a person can understand the information you present and avoid using your keywords too frequently. Keyword stuffing not only pushes you lower in search rankings but can turn readers away from your blogs.
8. Use Optimized Media
You can strengthen your blog posts by including relevant media and optimizing the files with keywords in their titles and descriptions. This keyword optimization won’t appear on your website, but search engines can recognize the keywords and use them to boost your blog’s ranking in the search results. Besides photos and videos, you can also use graphics that show the following:
- Graphs
- Funnels
- Timelines
- Templates
- Screenshots
10. Link to Internal and External Pages
Search engines also use external and internal links to help verify the accuracy of your blog’s information. Linking out to sources of statistical or historical data backs up your claims while also telling search engines that you provide sound information. Internal links, or linking a phrase in your blog to another page on your website, help customers find the natural next step on their particular journey without leaving your page.
Write Your Blogs with the Help of SEO Pros
With these nine tips for learning for how to write SEO-friendly blog posts, you should have all the tools you need to create content that ranks. Keep your posts human-centric and conversational, and you should experience growth in clicks and readership.
But what if you’re starting at the top and don’t yet know what keywords to use? That’s where Peppermonkey Media steps in.
Our SEO professionals can guide you in everything from creating comprehensive keyword lists to the best local SEO strategy for your business. Contact us today to request a digital marketing consultation for your New Jersey business.
