How do you write great blogs for SEO? Often the first thing you’re told when you decide to write for SEO is the tired old expression of ‘Content is King’.
This is true, but the problem often lies in your ability to work out how to find content to write about. That is, content that both will connect with your audience and also support your business goals. It can be a tricky balance.
That’s why in true inception style I’ve produced this blog to write about …how to write blogs for SEO.
I’ll cover everything you need to do in 11 easy steps to find out what content is worth producing that appeals to your users and how to structure the perfect blog for best practice on-page SEO.
In this blog I’ll go through each of the following:
- Blog Purpose
- Keyword & Topic Analysis
- Write for People
- Word Count
- MetaData
- Headings
- Links
- Media
- Alt Text
- Readability
- Blog Conclusions
1. Blog Purpose
Before creating content or sending out ambiguous briefs to freelancers, the first step is to define a purpose for the content – ask yourself what are you trying to achieve? And, who is it for?
Often marketers are guilty of jumping the gun on this point. Marketers often write what they think is useful to users rather than understanding what the purpose of their blogs are and who it is for.
You should focus on aligning the interests of marketing and company objectives with valued content for users.
But how do you do that? Simple, just ask yourself what do your customers need and how can you help them.
You don’t have to be an SEO guru to work out that you need to help your customers. SEO is exactly the same. The only difference is you want to spend your time adding value to your company.
For example, say I run a travel agency for the UK. I’ve noticed that the majority of my customers are interested in visiting London. They spend most of their time flying in and out of the capital city.
Without having to go into heavy research on customer profiling and keyword research, I can immediately ask myself what would help me if I was visiting London from another country.
I’d want a variety of information.
For instance, I’d want to know where to stay, what to eat, what to see, locals tips, hidden gems, historical facts, tour options and even the best free things to do (in London it’s probably to stay at home!).
This gives me a number of blog opportunities I can investigate before I even start to look at the technical stuff.
Top Tip: Understand what your customers need and show them you are the source to help them.
It’s crucial to take the time to understand your customers, look at the data and balance it with experience.
Only once you’ve identified what you are trying to achieve and who your target audience is can you look more narrowly on content topics and keywords that will support this.
Your focus should always be on your users needs. Ensure you spend your time producing content that helps them whilst also aligning with the key objectives of your business.
2. Keyword & Topic Analysis
Without going into too much depth, each piece of content should focus on targeting between 2-5 target keywords. For instance, in this guide I could target the following:
- How to write blogs for SEO
- How to write for SEO
- Meta descriptions for SEO
- Meta Tags for SEO
- Best Practices for SEO content writing
Completing keyword research is often the bane of existence.
It takes time to find all the information you need. It then takes longer to work out how to structure your blog and even to google how to find the right keywords!
You’ll be relieved to hear, there are shortcuts! And some of them are free!
The free one I’ll show you is the classic Google Ads Keyword Planner.
To save time, create a Google Ads account select tools and settings and then Keyword Planner.
I won’t go into the full detail of everything. But the main section to focus on for this purpose is the discover new keywords option.
You’ll next get shown a screen asking you to enter some keywords you’re looking to learn more about.
So, taking the example of a UK travel company you can start adding some of the keywords and topics that came to mind when you uncovered the purpose you want your blog to serve.
The next screen shows everything people are searching for that relates to the keywords you inputted.
It also shows how often these keywords and other relevant ones are searched on average per month (search volume) and how valuable they are (top of page bid).
You can now see by glance that the search terms are focused on the main attractions and general queries such as ‘things to do in London’.
That should reassure you that your blog ideas are relevant. But how can you take this to the next level and structure your blog to answer a wide variety of questions and be relevant for more than just 1 simple search query?
You can do this by clicking filter, selecting keyword text and entering ‘who, where, what, why, when and how’.
This allows you to filter the keywords to only show the valuable questions your potential customers could be searching for.
With these questions you can start to construct a highly useful and well structured blog that helps answer key user questions.
This will benefit your customers with congregated valuable information, which will also help you to rank for a greater variety of keywords over time (can I get an amen?!).
You can also be tactical about things at this stage now that you’ve done your homework. Google helps you identify the level of competition each keyword has.
Another way to isolate highly competitive searches is to look at the top of page bid (low range) column.
The purpose of this is to help Google search advertising setup and keyword assessment.
From an SEO perspective you can see the higher the value attributed to the keyword (top of page bid – low range) the more people will be competing to rank for that search term so it’s statistically more valuable.
If you’re a young website trying to make a splash in the SEO game, it would be a wiser decision to instead target less competitive keywords.
These are often called long tail keywords which are more specific, but searched less frequently which makes them less competitive keywords to target.
This means you should avoid targeting highly competitive and low intent keywords.
Instead you should structure your blog to target a series lower searched and less competitive long-tail keywords.
Remember long-tail keywords are more specific and carry much higher user intent so these are fantastic keywords to rank for.
For example, if you’re a new website on the scene you’re realistically not going to rank for the term ‘London attractions’ with your first couple of pieces of content.
This is a highly competitive and incredibly broad topic to write about – do they want to see a museum or the London Eye!?
However, you could target the long-tail keyword ‘Best London attractions near Covent Garden to see in October’.
This allows you to write an SEO friendly blog post which targets a much less competitive but highly relevant keyword.
Not only will this help you rank higher quicker, but also focus your blog on a high intent search which should align to your business goals.
Top Tip – Always complete keyword research before starting every blog. List and use target keywords to breakdown your blog topic into specific and relevant sections.
3. Write for People
High quality blog content should integrate keywords naturally. They should always make sense to the user, rather than obviously added in to help you rank higher with the search engine.
Writing for people is the main goal when it comes to SEO writing for blogs, or in fact any content you produce.
This fundamental principle is by far the most important SEO tip you need to remember.
Previously webmasters would conduct keyword stuffing to ensure they ranked for every similar term possible.
The aim was to manipulate the search engine’s algorithm and rank for a number of keywords without producing useful content for the user.
They did this before search engine algorithms were sophisticated enough to work out who was actually worth ranking for certain keywords compared to those just obviously stuffing words on their page or in the ‘meta keywords’ tag to rank higher.
Nowadays search engines have grown in sophistication and now penalise this practice.
Effective keyword research and topic analysis is vital for the success of content created.
Without this you can write Moby Dick and no one will ever see it.
Once you have completed your keyword and topic analysis it’s also worth noting down all semantically related queries. What are they?
They’re simply the related search queries Google and other search engines associate with your target keywords.
You’ll find these at the bottom of any search results page.
Include semantically related keywords in your content when you can. This helps to answer wider questions your users have.
It will help your blog rank for more search queries over time by broadening the relevance of your blog.
This offers search engines a more valuable source to solve user queries from – boosting your ranking over the longer term.
4. Word Count
Word count requirements vary between different pieces of content.
Nowadays, tools such SEMrush offer a target word count to help writers understand the amount of content required to rank in search results for target keywords.
It’s not a concrete rule to follow. Instead the keyword tool tells you the exact number of words you should write based purely on the top competitors for that keyword irrespective of quality.
They scan other competitors ranking for that word and work out roughly what you need to produce to compete with them.
However, it’s much more important to focus on creating useful, readable and comprehensive (a couple of gifs won’t hurt either!) blogs, than just a stream of conscious because a tool tells you you need to.
However, it’s worth noting that there is a trend that shows the top 10 search results are often dominated by content of at least 2000 words or more.
Why is this? Basically, the way part of Google’s algorithm works is that the longer the user stays on a page/site the more valuable that page/site is at answering the users queries.
Google WANTS to answer all user queries as best as possible – this enhances the user experience.
Though it’s important not to get overly carried away and focused on word count. It’s much more important that you focus on the purpose of your blog (who and what it’s for) and that you help your users.
You should then ensure you include your target keywords and semantically related queries.
By doing the latter you are focusing on creating quality content rather than simply focusing on quantity.
This becomes massively important for your ranking longevity.
It’s not just about including keywords and pressing the big red button!
5. MetaData
MetaData can often be off-putting to writers as the language sounds as if it’s something a developer would need to do whilst coding in dungeon somewhere.
However, Metadata is actually very simple.
MetaData is basically all the copy that adds value to the search engine (off-page SEO).
It both helps users find your content and be incentivised to click onto it – it basically describes the page content.
Think of it as the bait to lure in your fish – you won’t catch a fish by putting a steak on the end of a line, but you might with a worm!
The most important aspects of MetaData for writers are as follows:
Title tags
From a content perspective title tags are the most important part of SEO.
Title tags are the headlines you see in the search engine list of results.
An appropriate title tag always includes the primary target keyword.
It must also always incentivise the user to click on the link with highly engaging copy relevant to the keyword or query the user types in.
So what is the primary keyword?
It’s the main keyword you want to rank for. It should also be relevant to the secondary keywords that build up your blog into sections.
Creating a title tag for your blogs should focus on the following 2 rules:
- Structure – Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword – Brand Name
- Maximum of 60 Characters (65 is ok in most circumstances)
The character count isn’t Google being power mad and weird, it’s all to do with screen real estate.
The more relevant, concise and enticing title tags and meta descriptions are, the more search results can load on browser screens across all devices.
These rules should guide you across standardising all title tags across your site as well as support optimizing your blogs.
For example, this blog is targeting ‘how to write blogs for SEO’ as the primary keyword.
To supplement this I’ve also included ‘steps’ which is a semantically related search on Google – this adds further value to my title tag (How to Write Blogs for SEO | Arctic Meta).
Top Tip – use of numbers (e.g. Top 10 steps to create blogs) or ‘How to’ guides (e.g. ‘How to write blogs while travelling’) is synonymous with higher click through rates (more people clicking on the link)
Meta Descriptions
Meta Descriptions on the other hand do NOT affect search engine ranking algorithms.
They are the pieces of text underneath the main headlines (title tags) within search results that offer further information.
They aim to reassure the user that the link is answering their query and further incentivises them to click. Ignore it at your peril!
Just like title tags, meta description lengths are hindered by the priority of mobile search.
This means that nowadays search engines focus on mobile search results over desktop results and the space per result (screen real estate) truncates both the title tags and meta descriptions for the device.
As a result, it’s important to use the following rules when writing meta descriptions for SEO:
- Structure – Target Keywords – Unique Selling Point (USP) – Call to action (CTA)
- Maximum of 155 characters to ensure visibility on mobile devices. This can be increased to c230 characters on occasion.
To blow my own trumpet once again, for this article I wrote the following meta description to make sure I ticked off my own key points!
Meta Description: Simple guide on how to write blogs for SEO in 11 steps, helping you rank your content higher and faster and beat your competition. Learn more.
6. Headings
The main focus of headings is to give a clear structure to the page in terms of content hierarchy.
When Google crawls the pages on your website it reads in a hierarchy descending order by H1- H6 and then P (standard text).
For example, an articles most important on-page SEO element (other than the ‘title tag’) is the main heading (H1) followed by subheadings (H2) etc – descends in priority down to H6.
All content in the main body of you blog should be made up by normal text. In code this is written as ‘P’ (like this sentence).
Search engines thus crawl and read the page in priority order when working out what your blog is about and who it should be useful for.
Search engines will read your blog post in the following priority order:
- Title Tag – must always include the primary keyword
- H1 (Page ‘Heading’) – must always include the primary keyword – clearly signpost to search engines what the blog is about
- H2 (secondary subheadings) – subheadings within the article to break up up your blog into logical parts (identify keywords in the keyword and topic research stage)
- Top Tip – H2 subheadings should have a shortcut within a contents section. This should come after the introduction. A bullet point list will help search engines read your content more easily
- Top Tip – these should take advantage of keywords within ‘semantically related search results’ (e.g. suggested search results from target keywords/queries)
- H3-H6 (lesser prioritised subheadings) – these are further subheadings that sit within H2 subheadings to prioritise a structure – it’s very rare for a piece of content to reach as low as ‘H6’.
- P (main body copy) – the body copy of your blog post (or ‘P’ in code). This copy should fully explain all the headings outlined previously. It’s where the true ‘quality’ of writing comes in. This should include:
- Consistent Tone of Voice – keep ‘on brand’ by maintaining the same one as all other pieces of content on the website
- Short Paragraphs – each paragraph should have a purpose and be broken in between 1-2 sentences to improve readability
- Break up text with media (e.g. images, GIFs, infographics and video) where appropriate
As an example, if I wrote a piece on ‘What to do in London in December’, I may break it down into the following structure:
- Title Tag – 9 Top Tips for What to do in London in December | Arctic Meta
- H1 – What to do in London in December
- H2 – What are the best attractions to visit in London in December?
- P – Body Copy answering question
- H2 – What should I do on New Years Eve?
- H3 – Where are the best spots to see the Fireworks?
- P – Body Copy answering question
- H3 – Where are the best New Years Eve Parties in London?
- P – Body Copy answering question
- H3 – Where are the best spots to see the Fireworks?
- H2 – Where are the best Christmas dinners served in London?
- P – Body Copy answering question
- H2 – What are the best attractions to visit in London in December?
7. Links
Links within content are valued because it widens the pool of potential useful information your users can quickly access.
It tells the search engine that you’re offering a wider spectrum of sources of information (both internal and external) which are relevant to the users search query.
This enhances the value of information your blog highlights to the user and is seen as value-adding.
For instance, why would you rank a site with 1 page of content with no links higher than one that can offer quality content AND wider information to other relevant sources?
The latter adds more potential value to user searches.
Linking can be both internal and external.
This just means whether you link to a source on your own site or an external site.
Both techniques should add value to your blog.
However, internal and external links should follow slightly different guidelines.
One thing they both should have in common is a thing called anchor text.
This is the copy you use to link to another source (internal or external).
You should focus on linking to other sources as naturally as possible.
For example, don’t try and add a link in for the sake of it. Focus on the quality of writing and allow your text to flow naturally.
Anchor text can take many forms. It can be brand names, exact match, phrase match, naked URLs or just random bits of copy.
Natural linking however is what you should focus on.
Links should be added in only when they add value and shouldn’t be forced into your copy – e.g. ‘Liverpool FC were able to recruit some great new talent after winning their 6th European Cup’, flows more naturally than ‘Liverpool were able to recruit some great talent after winning their 6th European Cup – click here.’
There’s also no hard and fast rule on the number of links you should have within a blog post.
Instead, focus on what links add value to your content (e.g. what further information might be helpful to signpost for your user).
It’s worth noting each link shares the link equity value proportionally when you add links to your blog post.
Link equity is distributed equally by the number of links you add to your blog, where helps support those other pages in terms of importance to search engine crawlers, and rankings as a result.
For example, if you had 1 link on your page (internal or external) it would receive 100% of the search equity passed from your blog.
However, if you had 10 links on the page, each link would receive 10% of the link equity.
Link equity value all depends on the value your content is perceived to have in search results.
If you have high quality content which is well targeted, you will naturally rank higher over time, drive more traffic and thus retain your blog’s link equity to other pages is more powerful in supporting those other pages to rank.
The greater traffic you blog receives, the higher impact it will have on supporting other pages it links to.
So, choose your links included in each blog wisely.
Internal Linking
Using the tips for linking highlighted above, you should look at adding relevant links to relevant blogs within your own site.
Internal linking shouldn’t be random. You equally shouldn’t add links for the sake of it.
Instead, it should support the purpose of the page and add further value to your blog.
For instance, if the purpose of the page is to drive users to specific internal link building information – relevant links should be added where the copy highlights this service offering.
It’s all about giving users the option of more useful information. Google’s algorithm massively supports this.
A good tip is linking to pages on your site which are more specifically related to what your anchor text has just mentioned.
External Linking
As mentioned previously, adding more links to the blog gives more value to the user.
The user is able to derive further relevant information on specific aspects of your copy.
For example, say you use the anchor text ‘daily weather forecast’. This anchor text tells the search engines that the page you’re linking to should rank for the keywords you’ve used (e.g. daily weather forecast).
For example, it also gives the user quick access to more information that they can look into when researching their upcoming trip – improving the user experience than other blogs which don’t include this link.
It’s also worth noting, that many sources will suggest your blog content should try not to exceed 100 links on each page.
This can make your blog will be perceived as spam by the search engines and not focused on supporting the user.
It’s a delicate balance to get right!
Top Tip – If you are managing multiple sites which have complementary content you can link between them (where relevant) which gives you an easy ‘backlink’ to your own sites. A ‘backlink’ or ‘inbound link’ is essentially a vote of confidence in another site. The more valuable votes (links from websites with higher domain authorities) leads to higher sustained rankings over time.
8. Media
Different forms of media are a great way to enhance the experience for the user, particularly from a readability perspective.
If you just wrote endless paragraphs of text, you will often lose the reader halfway through the piece (at best).
Losing the reader’s attention regularly leads to high bounce rates (how often people jump off your site straight away).
It also usually leads to low average time users spend on your website, so why would they rank you?
Using different forms of media such as images, infographics and videos (which can also be used as internal/external links) helps to bring your copy to life whilst also offering more information.
For example, an image can show an experience you’re writing about in detail. An infographic can get across the main points you’re writing about in just a few seconds.
Even videos can inspire users through the use of a different medium and break up the amount the user is reading.
This helps to keep users on the page for longer.
Keeping users on the page longer is another great metric to tell search engines to rank your blog posts higher over time.
Search engine rule – the longer someone stays on the page, the more likely the page is perceived to be relevant and useful to the user.
It really helps grow link building opportunities with other websites and social sharing when you ensure your blog content is easily readable and interesting to users.
Though Google has yet to come out and say social shares are a ranking factor, it’s widely anticipated that if it doesn’t already it will in their next algorithm update.
Both of these factors will massively help your blogs rank over time and boost their visibility – that’s the purpose of SEO within digital marketing after all!
9. Alt text
Alt text is another term created to confuse people – it means ‘alternative text’.
It’s essentially a clear and unique description of any image added to a webpage.
However, it will only display to the user if the image fails to load – supporting web accessibility.
If the image fails to load on the webpage, the description (alt text) is shown to the user.
This ensures the user has a good understanding of what they were meant to see on the page and its relevance to the wider content.
For search engines, it allows them to gather more information when they crawl the web page.
Search engines are able to crawl the page’s code and read the alt text keywords.
So as long as the alt text is relevant to the content, it furthers enhances the obvious relevance for certain keywords and search queries to search engines.
Without alt text added to your images, the search engine would only read the image file path (<img src="https://blog.hubspot.com/hubfs/google-image-pack.png">) which doesn’t help you at all.
Whereas, the alt text allows the search engine to read the image description and not a file path (e.g. “Image path on a search engine results page”).
This also gives the search engine more relevant keywords you want to rank for.
So always include media in your blog which is relevant and alt text will help support your ranking – win-win scenario.
Alt text rules
- Keep to 125 characters max
- Don’t use it as an excuse to stuff keywords (e.g. London Trip, Holiday, Vacation, Excursion)
- Be specific – it should explain what the image is clearly to users who can’t see them
- Images with text cannot be read by the search engines – avoid this as they can just read the file name (as above)
10. Readability
Readability often gets overlooked but it’s paramount for ensuring you keep users on the page.
This is achieved through using simple english and sentence structuring, a conversational tone of voice and short and snappy paragraphs (1-2 sentences).
Always break copy up into digestible chunks.
Integrate relevant value-adding media to break your blog copy up. It makes it much easier for users to browse and scroll through your page than being confronted with huge complicated paragraphs.
Google loves a good user experience (UX). It is now part of the ranking factor helping smaller companies out compete larger ones with huge domain authorities.
Being ahead of the game here in creating fantastic and simple user experiences, will help you leap-frog your competitors more quickly.
Bigger companies are frequently too slow and lazy to adapt to these kinds of changes, so react quicker than them!
If you take this blog as an example, I consistently try to add value with each sentence.
I intentionally keep it concise and fast-paced so you’re able to read the information in simple chunks.
This all helps me keep you on my blog page longer and boost my potential search ranking positions.
Bloggers like Neil Patel are experts at this and it consistently helps them build traffic and rank blogs higher.
Top Tip: Always break up your copy, keep a conversational tone of voice and add value to your users with every line of copy in your blog.
11. Blog Conclusions
All conclusions should include the primary keyword.
This more easily helps the search engine to understand what you’re targeting and what your content is about.
You should always ensure that your primary keyword consistently appears in the following places:
- Title tag
- Meta Description
- H1 (heading)
- Body copy (where relevant)
- Your conclusion
If you have any questions about how to write blogs for SEO I’d love to hear from you.
