If you’re embark­ing on an SEO cam­paign, there comes a time when you must learn the art of blog writ­ing. Though chal­leng­ing, you can reap mas­sive rewards once you per­fect your process. Here’s how to write the best arti­cles for SEO.

Opti­mised blogs and arti­cles are a fun­da­men­tal aspect of SEO strate­gies. It takes a broad range of skills to pro­duce SEO opti­mised arti­cles, and there­fore it can take mul­ti­ple team mem­bers to col­lab­o­rate. Plus, since writ­ing for SEO requires a lot more than just writ­ing, a lot of work is required before and after the actu­al writ­ing takes place.

Suc­cess­ful­ly opti­mised blogs can pro­vide greater site author­i­ty and increased organ­ic traf­fic. How­ev­er, the three main rea­sons mar­keters embark on SEO blog writ­ing are to increase brand aware­ness, edu­cate audi­ences, and build trust and cred­i­bil­i­ty. No won­der so many peo­ple want to learn how to mas­ter the craft!

Let’s start with the basics and then move on to how you can write the best arti­cles for SEO.

Importance of SEO: Explained

SEO (Search Engine Opti­mi­sa­tion) is a sec­tor with­in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing used by busi­ness­es to improve the posi­tion­ing of their web pages in SERPs (search engine results pages).

Although con­duct­ing SEO prac­tices costs mon­ey, it is dis­tinct from paid adver­tis­ing tech­niques as it har­ness­es organ­ic search. Did you know that 86% of peo­ple ignore paid ad ban­ners? Per­haps that’s why 70% of dig­i­tal mar­keters pre­fer SEO to pay-per-click adver­tis­ing when it comes to gen­er­at­ing sales. There is a lot of poten­tial in organ­ic search!

Despite SEO prac­tices requir­ing things such as web design and devel­op­ment, inter­nal and exter­nal link­ing, site cat­a­logu­ing, URL struc­ture, and site speed, the pro­duc­tion of online con­tent makes up a large part of it. This can also be called con­tent mar­ket­ing, which includes social media con­tent and, more impor­tant­ly to this arti­cle, blog posts.

We’ll run through some essen­tial steps in this arti­cle that will help you pro­duce SEO opti­mised blog posts. The steps are trans­fer­able across indus­tries and nich­es, so they are help­ful to mar­keters and busi­ness own­ers with­in any sector.

In short, blog posts are SEO opti­mised if they are 1) rel­e­vant to their audi­ence, 2) pro­vide exper­tise and use­ful infor­ma­tion, 3) com­mu­ni­cate them­selves clear­ly to Google bots, and 4) are found­ed on trust­wor­thy sources.

Keywords Are Your Best Friend

Key­words lie at the heart of SEO opti­mised blogs. They sig­ni­fy to humans and Google what your con­tent and site are all about. Plus, if you use the most rel­e­vant key­words in your con­tent, it will have the best chance of being found by your tar­get audience.

Key­words can be sin­gle terms or sev­er­al words, although the lat­ter is usu­al­ly called “long-tail key­words.” You can find your ide­al tar­get key­words by think­ing about your audi­ence: how do they find you? What search terms are they like­ly to use? What words are asso­ci­at­ed with your prod­ucts or ser­vices? What audi­ence pain points can you solve?

Years ago, it was com­mon to use key­word stuff­ing; this is when you include as many key­words in an arti­cle as pos­si­ble. Although these arti­cles were imprac­ti­cal, incom­pre­hen­si­ble, and unhelp­ful to read­ers, they did rank well on search engines.

Nowa­days, Google will not reward key­word-stuffed web pages and will actu­al­ly penalise them. This is because Google’s main aim is to pro­vide valu­able infor­ma­tion to its users, and only the most help­ful and gen­uine arti­cles do this.

Kyle Roof is an SEO pio­neer, and he has his own con­tent opti­miser. He encour­ages blog writ­ers to include key­words in the meta descrip­tion, title tag, sub­head­ings, URL, and main con­tent body. So, if you’re won­der­ing where to place your key­words, you’ll be good to go if they’re in these five places.

When it comes to con­duct­ing key­word research, there are some tools that will help:

1. Ahrefs
2. Google Search Console
3. Sem­rush

Find­ing the right tools is an essen­tial com­po­nent of con­duct­ing key­word research and writ­ing the best arti­cles for SEO. They can help you iden­ti­fy search vol­ume and rank­ing dif­fi­cul­ty, which will be influ­en­tial fac­tors in decid­ing which key­words to target.

If you can get your key­word imple­men­ta­tion down to a T, it has mas­sive poten­tial: “the aver­age top-rank­ing page will also rank in the top 10 search results for near­ly 1,000 oth­er rel­e­vant key­words.” (Ahrefs)

When a blog post is rank­ing well for a valu­able key­word, lev­els of organ­ic traf­fic can sky­rock­et, your site author­i­ty will improve, and your busi­ness will be in a much bet­ter posi­tion to attract leads and receive sales.

Your Content Must Be High Quality

Although you can use blog posts to pro­mote your ser­vices and prod­ucts, they’re not meant to resem­ble sales copy. Reserve that tone of writ­ing for your adver­tis­ing and email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. The ide­al tone for writ­ing the best arti­cles for SEO is a gen­uine one. Your blogs will do well if read­ers find them to be charm­ing, clever, com­pas­sion­ate, and help­ful. They’ll be deterred if you’re pro­mot­ing some­thing, and this will be reflect­ed in the SERPs.

Web­sites with SEO opti­mised blog posts have obtained many valu­able things. Their high-qual­i­ty con­tent is use­ful to users, mak­ing these sites high­ly trust­ed and revis­it­ed for advice. Fur­ther­more, an engag­ing blog post can encour­age site vis­i­tors to explore the rest of your website.

Gen­er­al­ly, search engines like Google pre­fer longer arti­cles and are more like­ly to reward them in the results pages. An arti­cle of 700 words isn’t bad, but writ­ing over 1000 words is bet­ter. You can use tools like Word­met­rics to get a sug­gest­ed word count to rank well for a spe­cif­ic long tail keyword.

Longer con­tent is just more like­ly to con­tain valu­able infor­ma­tion and there­fore pro­vide more use­ful­ness to its read­ers. Of course, length isn’t the only rank­ing fac­tor – it’s also impor­tant that the blog is high-quality.

You can ensure qual­i­ty by solv­ing your audi­ence’s prob­lems. Ask your­self what unique thing you could offer them, some­thing that sets you apart from oth­ers. Use your research skills to find out what’s gain­ing search traf­fic – Google Trends is a bril­liant tool for this. Top-rank­ing arti­cles that solve cus­tomer pain points tend to take one of these forms:

1. How-to guides
2. Top 10 guides
3. Best of guides

These forms are help­ful by nature. To ensure your con­tent is help­ful, make sure it’s well researched. There’s more on this below, but cit­ing trust­wor­thy sources is an essen­tial com­po­nent of pro­duc­ing expert advice and information.

Since 75% of inter­net users nev­er scroll past the first page of search engines, rank­ing on page one is of the utmost importance.

Cite Trustworthy Sources

It’s not sur­pris­ing that author­i­ta­tive sources are bet­ter than unestab­lished ones. Link­ing to a trust­ed site such as bbc.co.uk is going to give your arti­cle much more cred­i­bil­i­ty than a less well-known source.

If you’re going to claim some­thing sci­en­tif­ic in your arti­cle, make sure you sup­port this with links from aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals. Remem­ber, Google’s E.A.T acronym stands for exper­tise, author­i­ty, and trust. If you’re not sup­port­ing your claims with evi­dence, how can you expect to be seen as an expert?

Improve On What’s Already Out There

Before you begin writ­ing your arti­cle, type your intend­ed title into Google.

The top rank­ing arti­cles will like­ly inspire your con­tent, but that’s not all. These top rank­ing pages should inform your approach in a way where you are try­ing to improve on them.

These pages are rank­ing on page 1 of Google for a rea­son. In order to rank high­er than them, your arti­cle not only needs to be at the same stan­dard but also offer some­thing more.

Some­times you can search for some­thing and won­der how on earth the top result got there – it’s a poor­ly designed web­site, and the text is dif­fi­cult to read. These are gold­en moments where you can offer some­thing bet­ter to Google.

Ensure Your URLs Are Optimal

It’s real­ly impor­tant that your blog page URLs have your domain in them. That way, the SEO rewards you reap from your blog posts will ben­e­fit your main site too.

Your URLs should also be the same as your title or at least men­tion the tar­get key­word. As Google bots scan your pages, the URL will inform them of what your blog con­tains. So, this sec­tion must be descrip­tive of the page.

Short­er URLs are also user-friend­ly, eas­i­er to share and help with link building.

Strike A Balance Between Writing For Humans and Google Bots

If you’re new to SEO, you might not realise that a large part of it is cater­ing your web­site to bots. That’s right – it’s not just humans who access your site. Although bounce rate and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion met­rics will affect your SEO, bots have sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence over whether your site ranks well in the SERPs.

Bots crawl sites, which is like read­ing all the on and off-page data. The eas­i­er your site’s data is to read, the more accu­rate­ly it can be indexed. Even if your con­tent is high qual­i­ty, if cer­tain things make it dif­fi­cult for bots to read your site, your pages might not be indexed prop­er­ly or shown to the right audi­ence in results pages.

Although much of tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing dis­cuss­es mak­ing copy engag­ing and punchy, it should also be clear for bots to under­stand so they can cat­e­gorise your site correctly.

Nev­er­the­less, key­word stuff­ing can influ­ence the read­abil­i­ty of your con­tent. So, don’t go over­board. Your con­tent should remain as rel­e­vant, help­ful, and clear to vis­i­tors as possible.

Use Correct Tag Hierarchy

“Head­er tags are a sim­ple yet crit­i­cal part of SEO.” Says SearchEngineJournal

H1 tags sig­ni­fy the main title or theme of the con­tent (so there should only be one), whilst H2 and H3 tags are typ­i­cal­ly used as sub­head­ings. H4, H5, and H6 tags are just there to pro­vide any fur­ther struc­ture, if need­ed, with­in sub­sec­tions. Some like to think of head­ings as chap­ters in a book.

Since prop­er use of head­ings and sub­head­ings makes it easy for page vis­i­tors to scan and skim-read your con­tent, Google will reward it. After all, Google’s main pri­or­i­ty is reward­ing user-friend­ly content.

Head­ings and sub­head­ings don’t just organ­ise your con­tent for your read­ers. Sub­head­ings make it much eas­i­er for search engine bots to crawl your pages since they func­tion as sig­nals with­in HTML code.

Optimise Your Images

Blog posts might seem all about the writ­ing. But images are impor­tant too. These must be opti­mised in size and name. Search engine bots will “read” your images when crawl­ing your site. There­fore, it’s ide­al to use your key­word in the images’ file names.

For exam­ple, imag­ine your com­pa­ny sold cof­fee beans, and you pro­duced an arti­cle enti­tled “12 Best Coun­tries to Vis­it for Cof­fee”. Here are two ways you could name your images. The sec­ond is most opti­mal as it is sim­i­lar to the blog post.

• “image‑5.jpg”
• “italy-best-countries-for-coffee.jpg”

70kb is the ide­al image size – any larg­er and your pic­tures might take longer to load, which could depre­ci­ate user expe­ri­ence. For every extra sec­ond your web­site takes to load, con­ver­sion rates drop by 4.42%. There­fore, it’s impor­tant noth­ing slows your site’s load­ing time unnecessarily.

Don’t Forget About Your Articles – Update Them

You might think you can for­get about your blog posts once you’ve spent all that time research­ing, writ­ing, and edit­ing. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, your SEO efforts can’t stop there. You must keep an eye on cer­tain met­rics to track the per­for­mance of your blog posts.

You can do this by look­ing at the Aver­age Time on Page, Pageviews, and Bounce Rate. Look­ing at this data will help you gauge how your audi­ence engages with your con­tent and might prompt you to make valu­able changes.

You can also use Incog­ni­to brows­ing to see where your blog post is rank­ing in SERPs. The frus­trat­ing thing about SEO is the dread­ed algo­rithm changes. One month a site’s pages might be rank­ing favourably in SERPs but drop down after Google updates its algorithm.

If this hap­pens, there are a few things you can do:

1. Look at Google’s Pub­lic Liasion
2. Check SEO forums and those who report on algo­rithm updates
3. Check algo­rithm trackers

Experts rec­om­mend updat­ing your con­tent once every three months, and once every six months if you can’t do it any sooner.

Get Started on Your SEO Blogs Today!

There are quite a few aspects to con­sid­er if you want to write the best arti­cles for SEO. But the rewards are so numer­ous that it’s absolute­ly worth invest­ing the time and resources to per­fect­ing your craft.

If you want to learn more about key­word research, take a look at our arti­cle that dis­cuss­es why not all key­words are worth pur­su­ing.