You may have heard that publishing regular blogs on your website is good for SEO, but how do you actually write a blog with SEO in mind? Content SEO is more than simply writing a good, informative blog; you need to consider a number of SEO factors that have an impact on keyword rankings. In this article, our experts take you through the most important of these factors and offer a few top tips for success.
So, how do you optimise a blog for SEO? To optimise a blog for SEO, begin with keyword research. Then:
Read on to learn more on how to optimise a blog for SEO with our content writing specialists at Wildcat Digital.
There are thought to be over 200 different Google ranking factors, a good portion of which can affect the success of blogs. Some of the most important factors include:
Google is evermore prioritising content that is actually relevant, helpful, and of a high written quality. Some experts believe this to have more significance than a number of other traditional SEO factors.
Both internal and external links are super important for SEO blog writing. Internal links encourage users to click around the website, showing Google that your content is relevant and useful, and may also encourage visitors to convert. External links show trustworthiness by pointing users towards reputable sources, data, quotes and other important information.
Keyword research and implementation are some of the most important things you can do when optimising a blog; you need to know what words and phrases your readers are searching for in relation to a given topic in order to be found for that topic.
Metadata is a part of the code that Google reads when trying to understand your content, therefore it’s essential that it is properly optimised if you want your content to rank. For blogs, this means having an appropriate title tag – something similar to your title (which should contain your keyword!) – and a useful meta description that tells readers what your blog is about.
E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness) is crucial when blogging, particularly across YMYL (your money or your life) industries such as finance, health, law and education). This can be achieved through well-researched, sourced content that is valuable and beneficial to users.
Learn more about E-E-A-T for blogs below where we go into more detail.
Duplicate content covers a range of different things within SEO, but in relation to blogs, means content that is quite literally copied from another page or another website.
Learn more about duplicate content and how it impacts SEO in our recent blog where we discuss the different types of duplicate content and how to fix them.
You can also learn more about other Google ranking factors and how they impact SEO in our blog, What are Google Ranking Factors and How Do They Impact SEO?. Whilst it’s not strictly tailored towards blogs, there’s definitely a few things in there that will help your SEO blog writing! Alternatively, learn more about duplicate content in our blog, Why is Duplicate Content Bad for SEO?
The first half of the blog was all about the different factors that can impact blog SEO, but now it’s time to put it into practice. Here’s how to optimise a blog for SEO.
Good keyword research and proper implementation of that research is crucial to the success of a blog; you’d have to be incredibly lucky for a blog to rank well without including relevant keywords.
Before putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard…) conduct keyword research around the general topic that you want to write about. This will give you an indication of how many people are actually searching for information about that topic, their search intent (whether they want information or to purchase something), and how difficult it would be to rank for those keywords.
From here, you can then determine an optimised title (using your primary keyword) and begin planning the rest of the blog ensuring that:
Tip: SEMRush and Ahrefs are both great tools for conducting keyword research.
We touched on optimising metadata above when we recommended using keywords in the title tag, but optimised metadata is actually pretty important for SEO and deserves its own section.
Play close attention to your title tag; this is a key ranking factor and helps search engines to understand what your page is about. What’s more, they are often the first impression many users see when they discover your page via organic search.
Be sure to include your main keyword in the title tag, and ensure that it sufficiently conveys what your page is about. We actually often recommend using a version of the page’s title as the title tag for this reason. Keep it short and sweet though, Google will truncate anything over approximately 60 characters long.
Meta descriptions are less important for SEO as they no longer affect rankings, but are incredibly useful for user experience; they are a great opportunity for you to concisely summarise what the page is about and entice the user into clicking through.
You can also go one step further if your blog contains FAQs by implementing FAQ schema. This increases the chances that your FAQs will appear under the metadata on search results. Schema can be implemented through HTML on the page or through Google Tag Manager if your CMS is restricted.
The structure of your blog can be just as important as the actual content. This is for two reasons;
To help break up the text a little bit, experiment with using additional features such as tables, bullet points and numbered lists, rather than writing out your text as a standard paragraph. This makes the text much easier to read for users and increases the chances that they will make it to the end.
Subheadings are used to break up your content into bite-sized chunks. They also act as a signpost to both the reader and Google to where different bits of information about a given topic is located within a blog (this is further enhanced if page jumps are used at the top of a blog!).
But, subheadings shouldn’t just be used for the sake of it. They need to be relevant to the content beneath them, and be relevant to the overall article – don’t be tempted to go off on a tangent of only kind of relevant information.
Also, try to get some of your chosen keywords into your subheadings.
When writing your content, be sure to structure it so that the most important, most relevant information that directly relates to the title query is close to the top of the article. This helps to reassure the reader that they’ve found what they’re looking for, encouraging them to keep reading.
When writing blogs, you must ensure that you as an author, your content, and the website as a whole comes off as being Experienced, shows Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). There are a number of ways of doing this, including:
If, when writing your content you think “wait, we’ve already written something about this topic”, be sure to link to that content. This both offers the reader more, detailed information on a given topic, but also signals to Google that the content across your website fits together cohesively, is relevant to each other, and is useful to the reader.
In this blog, our expert content writers have taken you through their top tips for optimising a blog SEO, but, if you’d like a little more help, Wildcat Digital is on hand with a range of bespoke SEO services. Get in touch with us today for a free initial consultation.
