Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have heard it said time and time again from gurus about the importance of publishing a blog post a couple of times a week to boost your websites SEO.
But, while that may be true, should you just write blog posts for search engines?
Yes...and of course...no.
While yes, they should be as optimised for SEO as possible, you have to remember who will be reading them *should* they get found and ranked well by Google.
Your blog post should be geared towards people who read them; it should help answer a common question, help them address an issue in their lives, etc. In other words, it should add value, and when it does, that will establish you as an expert.
In this article, we’ll examine exactly how you can go about creating an SEO-friendly, highly readable, and hopefully authoritative blog post for your business website.
Start with Topic and Keyword Research
Keyword research should be tied to topic research. Your topic research should answer what you’re going to write about based on trends and information that’s not readily available. Ideally, you’ll want to write about something you have insight into within your industry so that the blog post adds value - making it worth reading by someone other than the big G.
During the keyword research phase, you’ll want to find what keywords potential readers will use to find your article, naturally pepper them throughout the post.
Draft the Structure of the Post
The structure of your blog post needs to be easy to understand and read. The best design, IMHO, is what already works, so stop trying to reinvent the wheel here.
Here is how a typical blog post is structured:
- A short introduction to the topic
- A body for the main message
- A conclusion which should summarise everything
Add Headlines
Headlines make it very easy for readers to scan through the text to determine if it’s something they want to read. Using appropriately placed headlines can instantly tell anyone who arrives on your page if the blog post will satisfy their query.
Add Links To Supporting Existing Content
If your website has other blog posts on a similar topic or ties into this one, make sure to link to them. It will help strengthen your new blog post; plus, it’s good for SEO and internal structuring. Or, if you find content online related to what you’ve written about, and you think it will add value to readers, don’t be afraid to link out to other websites and their posts.
The idea is to ensure that your blog readers have an excellent experience, which answers their questions. Once you do that, getting ranked isn’t all that difficult.
Use Transition Words
This is where a copywriter can often step in…while many of us can ‘build’ a blog post, e.g. collate the content into a logical order, it takes a writer to write the post. To take it from a bucket of information into a post that’s easy to read, flowing from one sentence to the next.
But here’s a quick tip for you to ‘DIY’...
Use transition words. These words help your text flow and show readers the relationship between phrases and paragraphs. Turning your bucket into an easy to read article - just as you’d find in a newspaper or magazine.
Finally, Don’t Forget a Call to Action
Most people assume that a call to action is only for landing pages, not true. Your blog post can also serve as a somewhat passive sales page.
A gentle nudge at the end, or in between the blog post to subscribe to your newsletter, or perhaps a link to where they can buy the products you’re talking about, can help drive up conversions without being intrusive.
..plus, without a call to action, it’s a completely wasted opportunity.
Hire a Freelance Blog Copywriter
And on that point, fancy some help writing your next blog post?
Drop me a message.