Blog posts are perhaps the most important element of any digital marketing strategy. With each new post, you have a new opportunity for a user to find you via a search engine. However, with so many other websites creating blog posts and driving up the competition, it’s important that you create posts that search engines absolutely love.
If you’re interested in improving your content production, you’ll want to ensure that you’re getting the most out of each post by creating SEO-friendly content. This will prevent you from creating an article that doesn’t live up to its maximum traffic potential. Below is a complete guide on how to write the perfect SEO-friendly blog post, along with some SEO content writing tips, that you can use to have a better chance of appearing high in search results and bringing in more traffic.
Why Is Quality Content Important for Better SEO Results?
The perfect SEO-friendly blog post starts with focusing on quality content. Having a post that provides valuable information to an audience is much more important than any other on-page SEO tweaks you might make to move up the search engine rankings. There are a few reasons for this.
First, when you have valuable content, your visitors are more likely to stay on the page rather than leave, which can lower your bounce rate. Also, Google considers the average time users spend on a page, so keeping your audience around with high-quality content can improve your search engine rankings. Second, other websites are more likely to link to your article if it offers something valuable. Backlinks are a big part of SEO results and quality content is often the best way to earn them. Finally, good content improves your reputation with your audience and can convince them to visit other pages on your site.
To produce valuable and engaging content, ask yourself what your audience needs to know. Provide as much information as you can within a post, along with helpful visuals like pictures, infographics or videos. It’s often better for SEO to create one very in-depth long-form article rather than ten articles with only a fraction of the information.
How Long Should Blog Posts Be?
There is no set amount of words that’s best for SEO content. According to a recent study by HubSpot, the ideal length for a blog post should be around 2,100 to 2,400 words. However, plenty of websites rank highly in search engines with posts under 1,500 words. When you’re writing, try not to focus too much on the word count. Instead, you want to make sure you’re adequately covering your topic and ensuring that readers leave satisfied. These are much more important elements when it comes to ranking factors.
This often means you’ll write posts of at least 1,000 words. If you’ve finished writing your post and it’s under 1,000 words, ask yourself if there is more value you can add to the post before publishing. If not, it’s perfectly fine to publish something shorter.
Creating Different Types of Content
When coming up with ideas for blog posts, it’s important that you not only create relevant content, but that you try and create a wide range of SEO content. Creating different types of content gives you a few advantages. For starters, with a variety of original content, you give yourself a better chance of attracting more organic traffic. Rather than covering a topic once, you can do so in different styles, giving you the opportunity to rank for each blog post. You can then link these articles to one another, helping you to rank for more competitive keywords.
In addition, choosing different post styles helps you to generate fresh content. If someone sees all of the same types of content on your website, they may become less interested. Variety helps to keep things interesting, which can help keep visitors on your site. For example, you don’t want every article to have the same format. Instead, you could use content types like:
Lists
A common type of blog post is a list. These are articles like “10 Things to Add to Your Website” or “15 Reasons Why You Need Social Media Marketing.” When looking to create a list, do some research into similar blog articles. If you can, try to create a list that has more items than the top-ranking results in Google. This will give users a reason to choose your article over the other options.
How-To Guides
The purpose of a how-to guide is to walk your audience or customers through the steps they need to complete an action. For example, you may write a how-to guide on how to use your software or how to select the best product for their needs. How-to guides provide a lot of valuable information to users, which helps them to rise to the top of search results.
Product Reviews
Many people look for product reviews online before they buy something. If you review a product in-depth, you can often gain a lot of organic search traffic from customers who have an interest in that product. You can also do a round-up style article, in which you list all of the best products in a certain category. Creating SEO content like this gives you the opportunity to create a lot of external and internal links, along with targeting a lot of long-tail keywords.
Customer testimonials
Customer testimonials are reviews of your products or services. If you receive some strong reviews from customers, you can create content dedicated entirely to these testimonials. This will help you rank for keywords that include keywords like “reviews” or “testimonials.” Creating a customer testimonials post also demonstrates to viewers the dependability of your product or services, which may help to improve your customer conversion rates.
How To Use Keywords In Content Writing to Generate Traffic
Target keywords are another important factor that search engines consider when determining where to rank a web page. Keywords are a word or a phrase that users type into the search box. Google then scans websites to determine how closely that phrase, or other relevant keywords, matches the content on your page. If there is a close match, Google is more likely to rank you higher. This makes keyword strategies an essential element of SEO content.
You will typically want to include common and relevant keywords throughout the content of your blog post. Some important areas to insert keywords include the title of the article, article subheadings and throughout the body of the content. After you’ve used a keyword research tool and determined the target keywords you want for that blog post, look to include the primary keyword, or variations of it, a few times per post. You can also look to add some long-tail keywords in your posts, which are keywords that receive less traffic but are highly specific to your content.
External and Internal Links in Your Content
Another helpful strategy when creating a piece of content is to add some internal and external links. Internal links are ones that direct users to other pages on your website. This not only helps your audience by providing them with additional information they might need, but can further improve your SEO performance.
When scanning a page, search engines like Google consider the links on the page. Having external links to authority websites demonstrates to Google that you’re using reliable resources for your article. With inbound links, you tell Google which of your pages are the most important. For example, if many of your articles link to the same page on your website that describes your business’s services, Google knows that your services page is important.
Look to include at least a few internal and external links within each of your blog posts. The longer your content, the more links you should have. Also, when possible, include keywords within the link text for even better results. Links are the foundation of SEO content writing, so be sure you’re getting the most from your content efforts by including them whenever you can.
Structuring Your Articles and Blog Posts
The last major element of the perfect SEO content is how you structure it. When you write a post, you don’t want the user to see a long page containing the same type of text. Instead, you want to divide your post into sections, with each section having a title that’s in a larger font.
Imagine if, when opening this article, we didn’t have subheadings like “Why Is Quality Content Important for Better SEO Results” and “How Long Should Blog Posts Be?” You’d likely find the article harder to read because it would just be a long wall of text. You also wouldn’t know what each section is about, making it harder to understand the article.
When creating your post, try to keep paragraphs to around 100 words. If a paragraph goes a lot longer than that, divide it into multiple sections for easier reading. Then, use subheadings to divide your entire post into sections, using a clear hierarchy of heading sizes to help the article flow. For example, you may have one large section that uses an H2 header that has multiple subsections in it that each has its own H3 header.
SEO Tools to Help You Generate More Traffic
Creating an SEO-friendly blog post or article is difficult without the right tools. Guessing which keywords are best and hoping you’ll get traffic from them is not the best way to go about things. Instead, you can implement some great SEO tools that will help you bring in more organic traffic.
A great place to start is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool that provides a ton of information about the traffic to your website. It can tell you the primary keywords people use in search queries to find your website and which keywords perform best at generating organic traffic. You can also analyze which types of SEO content are performing best for you, then focus on those types of posts.
Another great tool is Yoast. Among the many things that Yoast does is analyze your posts. It scans through your article and tells you how you can better optimize it. For example, it can help you target rich snippets, and tell you if you need to use a keyword more or if you need to improve the content quality. This is practically a must-have content analysis tool, so be sure to set it up with your website.
Finally, the last tool to explore is SEOQuake. This is a browser extension that provides you with real-time information about search results. When you search for something in Google, the SEOQuake plugin displays information about each of the results, including the number of backlinks and how competitive it is. You can also see the search volume for those keywords. With this tool, you can better plan out your SEO content creation strategy by seeing which articles are doing well and where there are opportunities to quickly appear on the first page of search results.
The Bottom Line
Creating the perfect SEO-friendly blog post requires just a few key elements, but too many writers overlook them. It needs to provide users with quality information, it has to properly use target keywords and it needs to be easy to read. Without these essential elements in your SEO content, you could miss out on potential customers and substantial traffic growth. However, if you include all these elements in everything you write, you’ll establish a strong foundation for your content marketing strategy that should lead to long-term success when it comes to search engine optimization.
