Blog posts are one of the easiest ways to regularly provide the fresh, relevant content that search engines love. They also give potential customers a reason to follow your business even when they’re not yet ready to buy.
However, effective SEO blog posts are written differently than the essays you were taught to write in school.
Why? Consider your own reading habits. What happens when you see a massive block of text? If you’re like most people, your eyes glaze over. And that’s just one of many examples.
Persuasive writing (which rests at the heart of effective SEO blog posts) means writing effectively for broad consumer audiences, not teachers or professors. In this post, we’ll show you how to write an SEO blog post that ranks and converts.
How Does Blogging Help SEO?
First, let’s discuss why this even matters.
Blog posts allow businesses of any size to regularly post timely, relevant updates to their website. These updates may cover industry innovations, upcoming events, awards, new services, better ways of serving customers – and pretty much anything else that’s newsworthy to potential customers.
Search engines like Google love to see content that’s both timely and relevant. It showcases your expertise in both your industry and local area. In Google’s eyes, this makes you more likely to provide the best answers for their users.
This is especially lucrative for small, local businesses. Blog posts show that small businesses stay in touch with their industry and how it impacts the local area.
Blogs can also help keep your business top-of-mind among potential customers. They give consumers a reason to follow your website, even if they’re not ready to convert now but might be later.
However, maintaining the modern consumer’s attention is no easy task. We’re all surrounded by more distractions than ever before.
Fortunately, studies have shown that specific factors help engage and maintain a reader’s attention. Search engines know this and consider these specific factors when ranking websites. We’ll discuss them below.
Consider Readers Before Search Engines
Search engine rankings are useless if they don’t convert. It’s not enough to get people on your website; you have to convince them to act. So, the most important lesson in learning how to write SEO blog posts is to write for readers first.
Determining Your Blog Post’s Scope
One of the greatest benefits of SEO-friendly blog posts is the ability to target long tail keywords. These are the more specific search phrases (aka keywords) that people are searching for. They live at the bottom of the sales funnel, so while there are typically fewer searches for them, those searchers are usually closer to converting.
This can make it difficult to determine the appropriate scope for your blog post. If it’s too broad, you’ll likely miss opportunities to attract the most motivated searchers. If it’s too narrow, your post may not rank for keywords that people are actually looking for.
Typically, we recommend using keyword research to find several lucrative long tail keywords that relate to a broader theme (typically represented by short tail keywords). Short tail keywords have larger search volumes, but are more difficult to rank for.
Targeting long tail keywords (which typically relate to subtopics) naturally creates a network of content that shows more relevance for broad short tail keywords. This sets you apart as an expert in even the most granular details of your industry. So, you can rank more easily for subtopics while steadily increasing your search engine rankings for broad topics with higher search volume.
Blog Structure for SEO
Studies and countless heatmaps (visuals that show how people read websites) confirm that we tend to scan more than we actually read. This means the structure of your blog post is absolutely vital for maintaining a reader’s attention.
Here’s a quick guide to blog structure for SEO.
Headings
Headings break up blog posts into relevant sections. Website code (HTML) uses six tiers for headings. Here are a few tips for proper heading use:
- Try to keep content between headings relatively short – aim for about 200-350 words and around 3 paragraphs. This isn’t a hard rule, so if using more or fewer words makes logical sense, go for it.
- While you want enough headings to make your content easy to scan, avoid stuffing an inordinate number of headings just to improve SEO rankings. It won’t work and readers will find your content confusing and unprofessional.
- Try to keep headings short. They should never be more than one sentence long, but they can (and usually should) be shorter than a sentence.
- Include just enough information for readers to understand the topic at hand. If you feel a longer introduction is merited, use a summary paragraph to introduce the content.
Paragraphs
Paragraphs probably carry the most disparity between school essays and blog posts. In school, you’re encouraged to write 6-8 sentences per paragraph. In blog posts, they should only contain 1-3 sentences. Here are a few more tips:
- Don’t try writing longer sentences to keep the sentence count in paragraphs low. We see this often, and it defeats the purpose.
- Keep paragraph topics tightly relevant.
- The more succinctly you can make a point, the better.
- Highlight important points with bold text, but don’t overuse it.
Lists
People love reading lists online. In fact, there are entire articles that are written exclusively as lists. While this won’t always be the best approach, you can and should include bulleted and numbered lists in your posts. Here are a few tips:
- If you find yourself writing several items separated by commas in a sentence, strongly consider turning them into a bulleted list. It’ll be easier for readers to scan and search engines will be more likely to rank you.
- When you break up lists into bullet points, you can include a sentence offering more content per item. This provides more context for readers, which may help improve SEO rankings.
- Use bullets for generic lists. Numbered lists should be reserved for chronological steps, ranking various items against each other, and dates.
- Try to keep bullet point items short. If it’s going to take up more than two lines of text, consider breaking it into more bullet points.
Proper Grammar and Spelling
The Internet has largely given us a free pass to ignore language mechanics, especially when we’re texting and posting to social media. However, this doesn’t translate well when writing blog posts (or any other method of business marketing).
Poor grammar and spelling undermine your professionalism. This often occurs on a subconscious level. Any mistake that undermines the perceived competence of your business can spell failure in metro Phoenix’s highly competitive economy.
It may also impact rankings. Google’s official SEO Starter Guide states that you should avoid “writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes.”
Google’s Search Central Blog also says that “low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings.”
So, poor grammar and spelling could contribute to lower search engine rankings. Even worse, a few poorly-written blog posts may impact your entire site’s rankings.
Note, Google does specify “many” spelling and grammatical mistakes. A few mistakes are inevitable and are unlikely to impact rankings negatively. Just remember to correct them as you find them.
If spelling and punctuation aren’t your strengths, there are tools that can help. Grammarly is one of the best-known solutions. It works as a browser extension that monitors your copy for errors as you type.
Avoid Plagiarism
Plagiarism runs rampant online. In fact, there was a time when website owners actually used it to improve their search engine rankings. They would find a blog post that already ranked for their chosen keyword, copy it, and make slight modifications before republishing it.
This tactic stopped working many years ago, but some bloggers still try to use it. Google penalizes sites for plagiarism, and it may even lead to legal consequences.
Of course, there are times when it may help to quote another blog or writer (as we previously did). Just remember to give credit when quoting others. Mentioning the original author and linking back to their post will suffice.
Even then, it’s still important to use quotes sparingly. They should only amount to a very small percentage of your blog post.
Images
Images benefit blog posts greatly. They help improve readability and SEO rankings. Here’s why:
- Images add spice to your blog posts. They help draw the reader’s attention and break up long chunks of text.
- Images can help enhance the message of your post or make concepts that are abstract in text more concrete.
- Blog post images can include “alt” text that describes what the image is about. This text may help pictures rank in Google’s image search if written correctly.
However, you should avoid using images solely for the purpose of improving search rankings. Images aren’t always necessary, especially if your post’s message can’t actually be enhanced by them. This post is a great example of one that doesn’t need images.
Professional Blog and Copywriting in Metro Phoenix
We get it; learning how to write an SEO blog post effectively takes time, especially in the valley’s highly competitive business environment. It takes more time to actually write each post. If you just don’t have the bandwidth right now, we can help! Phoenix Search Pros specializes in writing copy that ranks well and persuades readers. Contact us today to get started!
