You write blog posts to get traffic to your site, which in turn will bring you more customers/clients. But blog posts are also necessary for SEO purposes.

But how do you know if you are writing your blog posts correctly for SEO?

Well don’t worry we are here to answer that exact question, with some tips for writing blog posts that will help boost your SEO strategy,

(please read to the end of this post to check out our essential 8 step checklist before you hit the publish button):

1. Think about what you are going to write

Consider carefully before you begin how you want your work to communicate to your reader. Answer the following questions:

• Who is the blog post aimed at?

Think carefully about who your blog post is aimed at, even go as far as creating an avatar of them. How old are they? Where do they live? Who do they live with? What do they do for a living? What are their pains?

If you can answer every question about them it will help to create your blog post as a highly-targeted piece of content they will relate to and engage with.

• What is the aim of the post?

Is it to sell a product or service or get people to signup for something? Ensure you have ONE single call to action but this is duplicated throughout your post so that the reader is very clear that they have to take action and which to take. For example, don’t have “click here to signup” and “click here to buy now” buttons close to each other as this will confuse the reader and could reduce the number of sales.

• How does the content solve the problem the searcher has?

Write down the answers to these questions before you begin and think about the search intent someone may have. An easy way to get an insight into this is by looking at the search results for the search term you want to rank with.

Once you have answered the above questions, move on to the steps below:

2. Blog posts should include keywords that are relevant to the topic

Carry out extensive research and choose your keywords carefully.

Make sure to include keywords that are relevant to your topic, and that you can realistically rank for.

Look for buyer keywords if you are selling products or services,

e.g. “cheapest” or “best” surround sound system have buyer intent,

simply “surround sound system” could indicate that the searcher simply wants to find out more about what the item or wants to choose a brand, but is but is not necessarily ready to buy at that point.

3. Blog posts need to be well-written, informative, and interesting

Write quality content.

This is more important than ever since Google is now taking quality into account when ranking websites.

Make sure your blog posts are well-written, informative, and interesting to read.

Go to Google and enter the keyword you are searching for and click on the top 5-10 results.

Look at the length of the content that Google is ranking at the top and get ideas (not copy verbatim!).

Make a note of their headings and images and use these for inspiration.

Google has chosen these as the best so you know this is what they are looking for!

The structure of your content is also very important.

You should use heading tags throughout your content as appropriate starting with H1 which should be your page title and includes your main keyword.

After that, you should use H2 headings for each section and beneath those H3 headings if required.

4. Blog post content should include images and videos

Use images and videos.

Including multimedia content can help improve your blog post’s SEO, as well as its overall appeal to readers.

For example, having a video at the top of the blog post will almost certainly have the visitor to your blog staying on the page for longer as they watch the content.

This boosts your SEO as it will signal to Google that the person has found something relevant on your page which has answered their search query, the more this happens the more that Google will promote your page above your competitors.

An extra tip is to ensure that all of your images have your keyword as the alt tag.

Your website builder will have an option where you can add in the alt tag when you select the image for use.

5. Blog posts should be optimised for search engines

Optimise your blog posts for search engines.

Use keywords in your titles, H1, H2, H3 headings, and blog post content, also add a meta description.

These are essential steps to encourage the searcher to click on your page as opposed to your competitors.

Not only that but everything you can do to help Google understand what your page is about can only be a good thing.

You should make it crystal clear exactly what your website or page is about and Google will then send the relevant traffic to you.

6. Blog posts must be promoted across multiple platforms

Promote blog posts across multiple platforms.

Send blog posts to your email subscribers, share blog posts on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and connect with other blog owners and ask if you can either write for their blog or if they would like to feature one of your existing blogs.

It is usual for them to then link back to your website (which you can reciprocate with a link to theirs).

These links back to your site will add a boost to your website SEO performance as Google sees these backlinks as “votes”

Here is a final checklist to complete before you publish your blog post:

• Is the keyword in the title of the blog? (Ideally at the start)
• Is the keyword in the URL?
• Is the Keyword in all alt tags of the images in the blog?
• Is the keyword in the H1 heading and H2, H3 subheadings?
• Is the content matched to the intent of the post? (To get sales/subscribers etc)
• Is the keyword used throughout the blog post content?
• Have you used internal and external linking in the content?
• Have you added a meta description?

Conclusion

The days when a few SEO techniques would suffice to get your website to rank highly in Google are long gone.

These days, high-quality material reigns supreme.

More links, shares, tweets, and repeat visits to your website are just a few of the SEO benefits of excellent content.

Of course, there are always additional things you could do to make your post more SEO friendly, the most crucial thing, however, is to produce excellent quality content.

If you would like us to create your website blog content for you, please get in touch so we can put together a plan which is tailored just for you.

Contact our team at Bee Spotted and let’s get started!