If you’re looking to create an SEO-focused blog but you don’t know where to start, here are some things you should know. 

Why SEO?

Why does SEO even matter? Organic blogging can be great on its own, but good SEO techniques put your content in front of a much larger audience than an organic blog post may ever reach. That’s why it's called Search Engine Optimization, it's all about making web pages more appealing to search engines.

When you’re writing an SEO-optimized blog, you’re actually writing both for real people, and for a search engine’s algorithm. Balancing the needs of both without sacrificing value is a skill. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind.

Keyword Research

When you’re thinking about the best ways to talk about your topic or brand, there are always important supporting ideas that come to mind. They’re probably the same things you or anybody else would plug into Google, looking for the same topic. They are definitely what a search engine looks for to relate websites to a search.

That’s why it's important to have one or two keywords in your title, and plenty scattered throughout the article. 

A search engine’s algorithm wants to see enough of those keywords to be able to say “ok, this is a pretty comprehensive article.” It may then rank your content higher on its SERP (Search Engine Results Page). When it does that, it sees a website as an “authority” on a subject, a source of quality information. That can naturally happen with enough web-traffic and high-quality content, but the right keywords can help you cut through more of the noise.

There are plenty of keyword generators online, both paid and free, that look into the backends of search engines. They’ll show you exactly what relevant words people are using most to search for your topic or brand, and how much. The most popular words are great for everybody, but less popular ones could be just what a customer needs to make a purchase.

But remember, don’t overdo it! Having a lot of keywords can be great for the algorithm, but if you’re trying to fit them into every sentence, you’re probably going to dilute your blog’s value to its actual customers.

Build A Really Strong Structure

Make sure your SEO blog still flows like any other blog. Whether it looks like a list, an essay, a how-to guide, or anything else, it needs structure to be understood. Yeah, that’s exactly the same as organic blogs. BUT, it makes it easy to naturally slide internal links into your blog posts. 

Internal links go to other pages on your website, most often with relevant information that explains a subtopic in more detail. The algorithm can see those links and use them to show people more of your blog posts related to their search. 

Another way search engine algorithms see that a website is a topic authority is the amount of backlinks from one website to yours. If other businesses respect your content enough to reference it in their content, the algorithm will show it sooner on a results page.

Read Other Content

There’s a good chance that any blog appearing higher in a search engine results page (SERP) is SEO-optimized. If you’re new to the concept, reading other blogs will give you a better concept of ways to take advantage of SEO while keeping your content natural and valuable.

One thing to look out for is the length of both sentences and posts. The more words a post has, the more comprehensive it looks to a search engine, and the more likely it is to push it higher on the results page. Google likes about 1,000 words or more. But also, the more concise and impactful your sentences are, the more value they give to a potential customer. Balancing the two will help you give your content an easy-to-digest structure.

Keep Writing Quality Content

The most important piece of an SEO blog is, well, the blog itself! Search engine algorithms use consumer interaction to know how high-quality a page’s content is. In other words, they can see how long people spend on your blog, and they use that to guess how valuable the content inside is. And so, the more a blog provides interesting, detailed, and relevant content, the more likely the algorithm is to rank it higher.

SEO has the potential to take your blog to the next level, and we’d love to help you get there. Thinking about how that may work for you? Let’s chat today!