As all quality writing requires skill, it should be to no surprise that writing blog posts require a certain level of skill, too. Not only do you want to focus your efforts on capturing the attention of your audience, but you also want the content to be informative. Let’s be real, blogging can be time-consuming and challenging work at times. However, the potential benefits you can reap by having a successful blog that’s SEO-friendly is immeasurable. Think more traffic to your site which can then lead to higher sales for your business. Doesn’t sound too bad, right?
While it can be easy to craft a blog post that’s creative and captures the attention of your intended audience, is the blog post also SEO-friendly? An SEO-friendly blog post requires a little more research beyond just the basics of crafting a blog post. Keyword research becomes a crucial element of ensuring that a blog post is going to be seen by users. So how do you crank out informative and creative content for a blog post that also incorporates valuable keywords? Well, here are some of the best tips for accomplishing that goal.
Put yourself in the shoes of your intended audience
When it comes to the industry that your business is in, what would you be searching for as a consumer to find the information you’re looking for? This should be an essential question to ask yourself before beginning your keyword research. If you end up ranking for the wrong keywords, all your hard work to create the blog post has gone down the drain. Therefore, it’s important to carefully select keywords that are relevant with some level of search volume for those to boost your blog post.
Use Headings
Not only are headings important for keeping a blog post organized and easy to read, but they also serve a purpose for SEO. By using headings, this helps Google get a general idea of the main topics of your blog post which can lead to better rankings. Make sure that you use some of your target keywords in some of these headers, but not every single one of them. By doing that, it will make your blog post seem unnatural and it will hinder people from smoothly reading your post.
Link to previous content
Even though you may be an expert on the topic you’re writing about, it’s very likely that your audience could have some questions about a certain word or topic and need additional clarification. This is the perfect opportunity to utilize internal and external links into your post. Internal links are links that will point you to another page on your own website. On the other hand, external links are links that will point you to page on another website. Using links can be helpful to readers in order to further aid their reading. However, it’s important to not overload your post with links where it becomes overwhelming to the reader. One to two links per section is a great guideline to follow.
Have someone else read your post
It’s extremely important to have someone else look over your writing before you decide to publish. As the writer, it can be easy to look over something that could be confusing or choppy to readers. This can especially become an issue when inserting keywords into your blog post. You don’t want to simply copy and paste the keyword into the body copy as it tends to not flow with the other content. Therefore, use a technique to weave these keywords into the body copy so that everything flows smoothly without interruption. You don’t want your readers focusing more on the grammatical composition of your blog post instead of the meat and potatoes – the content itself.
Use SEO writing tools (they are your friends)
A tool that I’ve been using a lot lately is the SEO Writing Assistant Tool from SEMRush. It’s seriously been a gamechanger when it comes to optimizing blog posts for certain keywords. You can choose to download this add-on for either Google Docs or for WordPress. From there, you can use this tool to have it analyze the content you have along with even making additional keyword recommendations. Below, you can see some of the metrics it provides you with.
Conclusion
It can be very time-consuming and a bit overwhelming at first when you are trying to write SEO-friendly blog posts. To your advantage, there are endless resources and tips out there that you can find in order to produce quality content that has potential for ranking. At the end of the day, quality content rules over everything as it can lead to links, returning visitors to your site, shares, and more. Happy writing!
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