Quality content has always been one of the leading ranking factors for website content. Simply creating content without research is not enough anymore.
In this article, we’ll provide you with our 10 top tips for creating SEO blogs that will help you boost your search engine rankings, attract more visitors, and ultimately grow your business. Whether you’re a seasoned blogger or new to the game, our tips will help you improve your blog’s visibility, increase your website traffic, and generate more enquiries and sales.
1. Use a keyword planner
Before undertaking any blog writing exercise, it’s important to ensure that you’re not only writing content that people are searching for, but also that you understand some of the similar topics that people may also search for. Keyword tools have various metrics that allow you to recognise not only the popularity of certain search terms but also the level of competition from other websites.
By using these tools, you should aim to find topics, terms and questions that have a high search volume, but a low level of competition.
First, you should enter your core keyword into a tool such as Answer The Public or Google Trends, or even Google, which will provide a range of commonly searched for questions in relation to your core topic.
Your ‘core keyword’ is likely going to be the specific service or product that you offer, such as ‘Immigration Solicitor’ or ‘Accountant’.
Once you’ve entered your core keyword into a tool like Answer the Public, you’ll get data on similar terms. In this example, these terms may include ‘How much does an immigration solicitor charge?’ or ‘Do I need an accountant for my tax return?’.
Once you have a list of common search terms that you’re able to provide an answer to, you then need to find out the statistics on how many people are searching and the level of competition these keywords have, using a tool such as Wordstream or Ahrefs.
As well as common questions related to your core keyword, Wordstream also offers autocomplete suggestions for keywords, allowing you to explore additional search queries that may be related to your original keyword. This provides valuable insight into other potential search patterns that your target audience may be using.
In our opinion, Ahrefs is a superior tool, as it provides a lot more data than Wordstream, however this is a paid tool, and isn’t essential for someone starting out in writing SEO blogs.
Particularly with SEO, getting the strategy right is essential, as you could easily be spending hours on creating content for an audience that you’re unlikely to rank for. To gain in-depth insights into the opportunities within your website and an analysis of your competitors, request a Free SEO audit from our team, where we’ll provide you with actionable recommendations on how to gain higher spots on search engines.
2. Create a blog structure
Now that you’ve found a range of high search volume, low competition keywords to go after from your keyword research, it’s now time to boil the best questions down to a cohesive blog structure. Your blog should include an introduction to explain the topic and purpose of the post, a main body with answers to the keywords you’ve found, and then a conclusion. It’s also wise to include a few call-to-actions where relevant. Although this won’t impact your SEO, it could increase enquiry rates.
You’ll want to include each secondary keyword as a H2 (heading 2) tag, as this will help search engines such as Google to find the key topics that you’re talking about and summarise the answers that you’re providing.
3. Aim for at least 500 to 1,500 words
500 really is the bare minimum, oftentimes we would recommend over 1,000 words, but 500 is the absolute minimum you should aim for when planning and writing your blog posts. Whilst word count in itself isn’t technically an SEO ranking factor, the more content you have surrounding particular topics and questions, the more signals you’re giving to search engines that your content is suitable and relevant to the topic.
Whilst content length is a point that’s worth noting, it’s more important to ensure that your content is generally of high quality and is genuinely useful to the searchers. Simply writing for search engines doesn’t work anymore, and your content needs to provide a better, more useful answer than the competition in order to stand a chance at ranking higher on search engines.
4. Add in some relevant links
Internal links are links that point to other pages on your website. These help search engines to understand the structure of your website and how different pages are related to each other. This can improve the overall user experience and make it easier for visitors to navigate your site. Additionally, internal linking can help distribute link equity throughout your site, which can boost the authority and rankings of individual pages.
External links are links that point to other websites. When you include high-quality external links in your blog posts, it can signal to search engines that your content is valuable and authoritative. This can improve the credibility of your website and help boost your search engine rankings. However, it’s important to only link to reputable and relevant sources, as low-quality or irrelevant external links can have a negative impact on your SEO.
5. Consider featured snippets
See below an example of a featured snippet.
Featured Snippets are highly coveted locations on search engines, occupying the topmost position in the results page (sometimes even above paid ads!). By providing direct answers to users’ queries, they generate a significant surge in website traffic, making them the ultimate prime real estate on search engines.
Analysis as to whether your site stands a chance of gaining a featured snippet includes looking at the level of domain authority that the current occupier of the featured snippet has. If you’re curious to see if your website stands a chance of occupying this highly valuable part of search result real estate, you may benefit from a free SEO audit from our team of SEO specialists.
Within the audit, you’ll receive actionable insights into the opportunities available to you for ranking higher on search engines, based upon a detailed analysis of both your website and the websites of your competitors.
6. Optimise your title
Your blog’s title is one of the most important ranking factors, as it’s the signal that tells search engines an overview of what your blog is about. From your keyword research, we would recommend including the most appealing keyword in your title tag. This is a keyword that has high search volume, low competition, and is an accurate description on what your blog is about.
As well as clearly including this keyword in your title tag, be sure to keep your title tag concise, as a title that’s too long is less likely to be included in the search results, and may confuse both search engines and users in the topic of the blog.
7. Compress images for a fast load speed
The user experience is one of the most important factors for SEO, with page speed being a significant ranking factor in itself.
Loading large images results in a much longer page load speed, as there’s more data for the server to load. By compression your images, you’ll reduce the amount of data within your images without any visible reduction in the quality, typically reducing the amount of time it takes to load your page.
ShortPixel is an excellent free tool for compressing your images down to a suitable size without any visible loss in quality.
For detailed information on the aspects that are slowing your website down, we’d highly recommend using a free tool called GT Metrix. This is a website offering advanced speed testing for free. It furnishes valuable insights on how to optimise your website speed, including tips on enhancing page composition, resizing bulky images, reducing large blocks of code that can slow down your site, and more.
8. Optimise image alt-text and descriptions
Many people forget to do this, but it can help to improve the user experience of your website, and feeds information to search engines about the media included on your website.
When importing an image or video onto your blog, in the ‘alt-text’ section, be sure to provide a brief but accurate description of the image or video, as this helps people that use screen readers on your site, and it helps search engines with further signals on what your page is about.
Optimising your page description is useful in encouraging the click to your website rather than another website. Make sure they are not too long, and include some of your keywords where relevant, as these will be presented in bold when people search with the keyword, helping your website to appear more relevant.
9. Use an SEO Plugin
Now, we promise we haven’t been paid to say this, but if you’re using a WordPress site, we would strongly recommend that you use the Yoast SEO plugin. It’s one of the first tools we install on a client’s website, as it’s genuinely excellent for analysing your content for SEO improvements, and making direct changes to help in improving your sites SEO.
If you’re not using WordPress, fret not. There’s plenty of alternative SEO plugins available on a wide range of website builders. When searching for an alternative SEO plugin in the ‘plugins’ menu of your website builder, aim to go with the one that has the highest rating and a high number of downloads, as they’ll usually be a lot to choose from, and some will be better than others.
10. Have a content strategy
It’s all well and good creating a great blog post, but the frequency of updates to your site is one of the best signals of a quality website to search engines such as Google. It’s been proven time and time again that frequent updates to existing pages with more accurate information, and new blog posts that are relevant and useful show search engines that your website is great at solving a searcher’s problem.
The content strategy is an area that a lot of people fall down on, as so many people will write a blog on a keyword that they think is popular, but haven’t fully researched, and hope for page 1 results overnight. For example, you may spend hours creating a blog post, only to realise that, whilst it’s a popular topic, there is fierce competition for ranking highly.
By conducting thorough keyword research, and scheduling a series of monthly blog posts, not only will you be constructing a website that provides a better user experience, but you’ll also be expanding the number of searches that your website ranks highly for.
Oftentimes it’s much easier to hire an SEO Agency to undertake the data-analysis and technical SEO aspects of your site, leaving you to provide your expertise in the blog content. Here at Key Principles, we’re currently offering a free SEO audit, where we’ll use industry-standard tools to recognise realistic opportunities for your website to rank higher, alongside an analysis of your competitors.
Conclusion
The planning and content strategy phase is one of the most important parts of content creation for SEO. It’s important to undertake keyword research to find terms that are both relevant to your business, and that you have a high chance of ranking for. Once you have your list of high volume, low competition keywords, and applying the best practices found in this article, you’ll stand a good chance in ranking highly for your keyword.
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