How to write an SEO-friendly blog post

SEO

If you’ve been involved in marketing your company online for any length of time, you are probably aware that writing blog posts are something you’re meant to do. Releasing blog posts help you generate enquiries through your website. 

But if you don’t write your blog posts in an SEO-friendly way, you may be wasting your time. We’ve known business owners who have slaved away, writing thousands of words, only for the content to serve absolutely no purpose. As a time-strapped business owner, this is not a good return on investment!

How can you make sure that your blogs are going to serve you well as a company? In a word, you need to optimise them. But what does this mean and how can you do it? 

To begin answering this question, let’s first remind ourselves why blog posts are so crucial to digital marketing. 

Why do you need to write blog posts?

Blog posts are one form of content marketing, and they help you generate sales. This is because blog posts when properly optimised, bring in traffic to your website. Not only may this new traffic include potential leads, but the traffic itself is a form of digital currency. Search engines see that your website is attracting traffic and rank your website higher on the result pages. The higher you’re positioned, the more likely potential leads will see your site and click through when they search for your services. 

But not any blog post will do. For users to find your content within the deep, dark recesses of the internet, you will need to ensure that it is optimised for search engines. An optimised blog post will be understood and interpreted correctly by search engines and ranked appropriately. It will also draw users to it, as it will be written around the search terms that users are typing into Google (other search engines are available!)

So, how do you go about writing optimised blog posts? There are 6 main steps, which are helpfully written out below. 

1. Find the keywords

You could write the most amazing blog, but if it’s not a topic that anyone in the world is interested in, it will never be read! The first stage of writing SEO-friendly blog posts is to make sure that the title (or topic) is actually being searched for by users online. 

By far the easiest way to use an SEO digital platform. There are loads of them out there, and a lot give you a free account to get you started. Let’s use Ubersuggest as our example. Using its keyword ideas tool, I can find all the search terms users are using associated with one of the services we provide. Here you can see I’ve typed in “SEO” and the tool has thrown up a whole list of terms, showing over 437 suggestions and 89 questions associated with the term.

The tool lets you identify the questions that users have typed around that topic. When we click on that filter, we can see the questions users have typed in. These are known as “long-tail” keywords.

You can see that the top result is “What SEO is”. 6,600 people search for this term, so I know that a lot of people will be looking for content that answers this query. However, I can see that it’s got a high SEO difficulty score of 85 out of 100, which means it will be hard to rank for (the high score means that lots of people have written content around this search term, so it’s going to be difficult to write content that will rank more highly than this. 

So, let’s look for a less competitive query that we may have a chance of ranking for. “why seo audit is important” is much less competitive – it has a difficulty score of 34 out of 100. The search volume is not great, only an estimated 10 searches per month, but this longtail keyword may be overlooked by bigger sites due to its lower volume, so a really great piece of content about this topic may be able to rank well. Every piece of traffic counts, after all! And if the content is really good, it may be we get plenty of backlinks to the content over time too, which will help our website’s domain authority long-term. 

2. Check out the competition

Type your blog title into a search engine and have a look at the top five that appear. Not only will this give you ideas for what to write about, but you will be able to come up with ways of beating the competition. It might be that the article contains no images (so you determine to add some to yours), or they only have 5 reasons why SEO audits are important, whereas you have 6. Whatever it is, note down ways that you can beat (or if not beat, meet) the competition. 

3. Iterate

I always do this stage before conducting any more keyword research. There are a few reasons why. Namely, I want my articles to be written for humans, not a search engine bot. I don’t want to be swayed into including something in an article just because it’s a keyword. I want to make sure that the information I’m giving is of the best quality and is best suited to a human reader. 

As such, I tend to spend thinking time (the posh agency term is iteration time) noting all the key points I want to make or facts I want to share. 

4. Include keyword clusters

Once you’ve decided what title you should use, find out which keywords should go in each article. There are so many contradictory ideas out there about how many keywords to aim to include. Some say only aim for one, some say go for up to 25.

As Google wants well-written user-centred content, I don’t think it’s wise to keyword stuff for the sake of it. If you’re writing for a human, then some keywords will be included organically. I try to aim to consciously include about three in each article (at least), one of which will be the long-tail keyword title. A lot of keywords will be included subconsciously as your write.

In our case, a keyword we need to include is SEO audit (obvs!). Putting the topic into a keyword tool you can find a cluster of keywords that will suit. For our topics, I’ve found “seo audit benefits”, “what is an seo audit” and “what is included in an seo audit”. All these keywords are closely associated with our topic. Also, the intent behind the user’s use of these keywords seems to be to discover more about why an audit is important or what it is. This makes them suitable to put into our blog post. 

Helpfully, I’ve already got two complete subheadings already written for me, which will help me structure the article. “Seo audit benefits” is a short-tail keyword, and will take a little more ingenuity to weave in.

5. Optimise your Subheadings

Now I need to lay out the structure of the article and make sure that my headings are optimised.

To do this, put yourself in the shoes of the user reading the article you’re planning to write. What are the key concepts they need to understand? For our blog, before we launch into a list of reasons why an SEO audit is important, we need to make sure our readers understand what an SEO audit actually is!

Keep subheadings (known as H2 in the biz) keyword-friendly too. So, “What is an SEO audit?” (which has a search volume of 70 per month) is a keyword in its own right. H2s are read by Google and can help demonstrate that your article is worth ranking well. Don’t jazz up subheadings too much. Subheadings are there to make it easier for the reader to scan your content and find the answer they’re looking for, not a chance to crack jokes (as tempting as that may be).

Then, note down the main reasons why an SEO audit is important, and use them as your subheadings for the rest of the article. In the case of our topic, these subheadings might be: “Audits allow you to benchmark”, “Audits identify why your website isn’t performing well” or “Audits help you see how your competitors’ websites are performing”. I’m going to add them as H3s under the H2 heading “SEO Audit benefits: what are they?” as a way of weaving in my other keyword. 

You must make sure that your headings are H2 headings. Most websites’ Content Management Systems allow you to identify your headings as H1, H2, H3 etc. 

Our article structure is starting to take form. So far we have:

• Introduction

• What is an SEO audit? [H2 heading]
• What is included in an SEO audit? [H2 heading]
• SEO Audit benefits: what are they? [H2 heading]
  • Audits allow you to benchmark [H3 heading]
  • Audits identify why your website isn’t performing well [H3 heading]
  • Audits help you see how your competitors’ websites are performing [H3 heading]

• Conclusion

6. Add metadata

Once you’ve written your article, and uploaded it to your website, you need to make sure you add metadata. Metadata includes all the information that search engines use to understand what your article is about. As a bare minimum, you tend to have a meta title, meta description and alt text/description for any images you have in your article. Normally, you need to have your developer install an SEO plugin on your website so that you can fill out this information for the blog post you’ve written. 

a. Meta title

A meta title tends to be the same as the title of the blog. As your title is already optimised and based on a keyword, just use the blog title. If it’s too long, you’ll have to chop it down a bit, but aim to keep the keyword intact. 

b. Meta description 

The meta description is a little like a tiny advert for your blog post. When your blog post is shown in the results pages, the meta description appears just below the blog title. The SEO plugin you use will insist that you write meta descriptions that contain your keyword. Do so. I tend to wrap the keyword up in a bit of sales copy so that the meta description appears like a little advert for your article. You’re trying to hook people in and get them to read yours afterall!

For this article, I might write: “Ever wondered why an SEO audit is important? If you want leads, you better find out now.” 

c. Alt text

Alt text is important, as search engines want to know what your images show. It also helps screen readers that may be used by blind users and so are an important part of making your website more accessible. Here’s the image I want to add:

A decent alt text would read “a confused man, grasping his hair, at a desk looking at a laptop”. If you can get a keyword in there too, it’s even better.

Write for humans, label for search engines

When it comes to writing blog posts that are SEO friendly, a big part is trying to remember that you’re actually writing for the end user first and foremost. People read blog posts, and Google is increasingly interested in websites that create content that will benefit the human reading it. So, write for humans. Optimisation should be more about labelling an article well, so that search engines can find it and get it in front of the audience it was designed to help. Keeping this in mind should future-proof you against any future updates to Google’s algorithm.