How To Write An SEO-Friendly Blog

Keyword research is the process of finding out what your customers type into search engines such as Google to come across your products or services. When you incorporate your chosen keywords into your blog, you’re telling Google exactly what the page is about, and it is much more likely to rank you for that keyword as a result.

Keyword research forms the foundation of any SEO strategy. It’s the first step in the SEO process and determines the angle of your blog.

Specialist paid SEO software such as Ahrefs or SEMrush enable you to identify which keywords your business can realistically rank for, based on many different factors such as search volume, competition, and trends.

New to keyword research? Take a look at our beginner’s guide.

Once you’ve got your keywords, it’s time to incorporate these into your writing. Long gone are the days when ‘stuffing’ your keywords into your website would help you rank. It is important that you incorporate your keywords throughout the blog post so that they read naturally and don’t drive users away from your page.

Writing well doesn’t mean fancy language or complex vocabulary; it means that your writing is clear, concise and conveys your key messages effectively. Here are our top tips for writing ‘well’:

Be Concise

Carefully craft your content so that every sentence adds value to your reader. Cut the waffle. We recommend that your blog is a minimum length of 300 words to rank well and add value to your readers, but longer blogs of 600 words+ are great, as long as your main points are broken up into small chunks. More on that later.

Vary Sentence Length

A mix of long and short sentences help to keep the reader interested and adds flow to your work. It is also a great way to add emphasis to an important point.

Proofread

Proofreading is a simple step that is often overlooked. Read your content aloud or ask a colleague or friend to read over it for you before publishing. Typos are easy to miss but also easy to fix – don’t risk the credibility of your piece for the sake of a quick review!

The structure of your layout also plays an important role in engaging your reader. More than half your website visitors will leave your website within 15 seconds if there isn’t a clear value proposition or there are huge chunks of text to wade through to find what they’re looking for.

Divide your blog into main headings and subheadings to organise your content into bite-size, readable chunks that can easily be skimmed. This is where H-Tags come in.

Heading Tags

H Tags (also known as Heading Tags) help to create a hierarchy of importance in your writing. Not only does this create skimmable points, but it also shows Google that your page is of a high quality and accessible to your readers. Your webpage will allow you to assign a Heading Tag to each of your headings.

Here’s a quick rundown of the basics:

H1 – Page title

H2 – Heading

H3 – Subheading

H4, H5, H6 – lower-level subheadings

Meta data is made up of two key parts: a meta title and a meta description.

Meta Title

An SEO title is the title of your page and is often the first thing searchers will see when browsing Google search results. Give each page a unique SEO title that includes your keyword to entice visitors and capture their attention. Don’t forget to pay attention to the length of your SEO title. Search engines generally show 50-60 characters of your title.

Meta Description

A meta description is the little snippet of text underneath a search result.

Google will either utilise your meta description in search results or it will pull a snippet of text from the page it deems relevant. Your description should:

• Summarise your page content
• Include your keyword
• Add a Call To Action (CTA) to entice users