10 Expert Tips on Writing SEO Friendly Blog Posts

For many sites, it’s a struggle to get traffic from SEO. Teams work hard to produce blog content on a regular basis, but it still seems to miss the mark.

WordPress users alone produce 70 million pieces of content each month. You’re competing against more sites and more content. Plus, with search algorithms changing, it seems like the target is always moving.

Despite those challenges, it is possible to write SEO friendly blog posts that will please search engines and users.

How can you write a blog post that is geared for SEO? Keep reading to find out.

1. Plan Your SEO Friendly Blog Post

Writing an SEO friendly blog post takes careful planning. Not only do you have to write great content for search engines, but your content has to resonate with users, too.

Start planning by thinking about your reader. Ask yourself what the purpose is of your post and how the piece will help them.

2. Connect Content with Search Intent

Many people view an SEO strategy as a way to get traffic to drive conversions immediately. Yes, that might happen, but not as much as you might think. About 98% of people will visit your website before they’re ready to buy.

They’ll turn to search engines to do research, learn about products, try to solve problems themselves, and decide which product or service to buy. Your job is to connect your content to each stage of the buying cycle and the user’s search intent.

For example, if someone wants to lose weight, they’ll research the best weight-loss diets or the best workouts to do at home. They’ll try to solve the problem on their own. When they realize they can’t they’ll look for a personal trainer or a gym to join.

You want to provide content for each stage. Think of your ideal client and think about how they would search online. What do they initially look for? What problems are they trying to solve on their own?

The more helpful you can be in these early stages, the more likely someone will trust you to provide the services they need when they need them.

3. Do Keyword Research

Now that you have some basic ideas as to how your ideal client searches, it’s time to do some keyword research to validate your ideas. There are tools like Ubersuggest and Ahrefs that will enable you to find the search volume for your keywords.

You want to choose keywords that are relevant and have enough search volume. You also want to find keywords that aren’t too competitive. The best way to do that is to use long-tail keywords. These are keywords that are more than three words long. These are more specific and draw in the right audience.

As you write your blog post, you should have your keyword appear naturally in the title and a few times in the article. You don’t need to stuff your keyword a dozen times. That could get your site penalized.

4. An Interesting SEO Friendly Title without Clickbait

Advertising guru David Ogilvy once remarked that 80% of your advertising budget is spent on the headline. To him, it was the most important thing because readers were sure to read the headline. It’s true with the title of your content, too.

Your title serves as your headline. It’s meant to grab attention and tell readers what to expect when they click through to the blog post. One problem with headlines and titles today is that they’re clickbait. They’re compelling headlines to get you to click, but don’t fulfill the promise to the reader.

You should practice writing headlines before you publish your article. Try to keep it between 50-60 characters.

5. Make Your Content Scannable

This applies to users and search engines. A frequent mistake that publishers will make is that they’ll have nothing but text in the article. This wall of text will make people click away quickly.

You’re missing an opportunity to engage users and give search engines more information about your content. Break up your content by using headings and short paragraphs.

6. Make Your Content Meaningful

The best way to make your content SEO friendly is to make it meaningful to users. If there’s one thing that you hear from Google, it’s that quality content matters.

When you produce quality content, people will read it and share it. When they share it, that creates more backlinks. It also sends a social signal to search engines that people like your content. That will result in a higher search ranking.

7. Smart Linking

Internal links are important because they give users more content to read on your site. They also give search engines more context as to what your content is about. You don’t need to go overboard with internal links. Use them when it’s appropriate throughout your post.

8. Add Images

Images are another way to break up content on your site and engage users. You can optimize your images by compressing the image size to maintain a fast page load time. You can also optimize your images by filling in the alt-text tag. This is a short description of what the image is about.

9. Optimize Your Meta Description

Google’s bots scan your website’s HTML code to determine what your site is about and how it should be indexed. Your meta description plays a big part in that process.

It also plays a role in what people see in search results. A meta description is 155 characters long that tells users and search engines what the page is about. If you look in search results, you’ll see the text that appears under the title of search results.

You can optimize this by writing something that would compel searchers to click and by including your keyword in the description.

10. Put On Your Editing Hat

You could damage your credibility and trust by publishing work that didn’t go through a rigorous editing process. If you can, get another set of eyes on the blog post before it’s published.

If you can’t get help from anyone else, sit on the article for a day or two and read it out loud. You’ll be able to spot minor things and typos before you publish it.

Start Creating SEO Friendly Content

It’s not easy to produce quality content on a consistent basis. Once you understand what it takes to create content that’s SEO friendly and appealing to users, you will see more traffic to your website.

Do you need help creating content that will get found on search engines? Contact us today to find out how you can drive high-quality traffic to your website.