If you have a business website, you hope that when someone Googles a product you sell or a service you offer that you’ll appear at the top of the search results page.
Unless you offer a truly one-of-a-kind service or product, you’ll be up against your competitors to get those top-ranking results page spots. This is where SEO blog writing can help.
You may have heard of SEO – search engine optimisation – before, but if you don’t know your keywords from your backlinks, this post will explain everything you need to know about SEO blog writing and how it can benefit your business.
What is SEO blog writing?
SEO blog writing is when you plan, create, and optimise blog posts for the purpose of improving your website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Search engines use “crawlers”, or bots, to scan websites for a variety of factors that determine how high they will appear on a SERP. These include technical factors, such as your website’s loading time, its information architecture, and whether or not it’s optimised for mobile users. Search engine crawlers look at:
- visible (on-page) content. This is all the written content on your website which includes blog posts, keywords, headlines, images, and meta-descriptions.
- invisible (off-page) content. Search engines analyse other websites that link to your website. That’s why getting high-quality links to your website from external sites, also known as backlinks, is an important but often overlooked part of SEO.
Why is SEO blog writing important for your business?
SEO blog writing ensures that there’s content on and off your website that will boost your search ranking. Blog posts must be carefully planned, created, and optimised so that when search engines crawl your website they find quality, SEO-friendly content. It’s even better if you also create blog posts for other people’s websites and include a link back to your website.
If you’re still wondering why SEO is important, here are some statistics to bear in mind:
- only 25% of users look past the first page of the search engine results page (HubSpot).
- 93% of customers use the internet to find a local business (BrightLocal).
- 3% of website traffic comes from organic search (BrightEdge).
- the average click-through rate (CTR) of the top result on Google’s organic search is 31.7% (Backlinko).
SEO blog writing will help you score those top SERP spots, which drives traffic to your website. That traffic can then be converted to leads, clients, and sales.
SEO blog writing: best practices
Now that you know what SEO blog writing is and why it’s important, let’s dive into how you can ensure your blog posts are SEO-friendly.
Plan your blog topics
For your blog posts to be SEO-friendly, they need to be useful to your potential customers and enjoyable to read. This means you should plan your content early so that you have a few months’ of content scheduled at all times.
If you’re stuck for ideas think about what content will be useful and readable for your customer.
Use Frequently Asked Questions
The questions your customers and potential customers ask Google can make fantastic, SEO-friendly blog post topics. People often type questions directly into Google or use voice recognition tools like Siri and Alexa to ask questions. By writing blog posts around these questions (and using the questions themselves as your blog post headings) you help search engines direct users to your website.
To find the questions website visitors are asking search for topics, products, or services related to your business on Google. Check the ‘people also ask’ section on the Google results page. Or you could use a free tool like Answer the Public. On this website, you can type in topics and see what questions users are searching for online.
Perform keyword research
Keywords are an important part of SEO blog writing. If you want to be on the first page of a Google search result, you’ll need to make sure that your blog posts have the right keywords included in the right places. Keyword placement is more important than keyword quantity.
Include keywords in your headings, URL, and meta-descriptions
Once you have your list of keywords, do not stuff your blog post with them (this will damage your search engine ranking). Instead, use your focus your keywords in your blog post title, a heading, the URL, and meta-description. This will help those search engine crawlers identify the keywords you want them to see right away.
How do SEO blog writing services optimise your website?
Here we’ve outlined the basics of SEO blog writing and offered some tips for planning, creating, and optimising your blog posts. However, free SEO tips can only get you so far. Researching, planning, creating, and optimising your blog posts is time-consuming. On top of this, search engines move the goalposts all the time, so it is vital to keep up to date with the latest SEO strategies.
This is where our SEO blog writing services can help you. We can help you identify the best keywords and plan and create content that does exactly what it should do – increase your bottom line.
First published on writespark.co.uk