If you have a business and are online in any capacity, you have probably heard that an important part of marketing and online strategy is to write blog posts for SEO. Writing blog posts can help build your authority on a topic, and can also help new prospects find your website.
Here are the six steps to writing a blog post for SEO:
1. Understand who your target audience is
2. Plan your content
3. Research keywords
4. Write a post
5. Compress and Optimize your images
6. Optimize title tags and descriptions
Let’s jump in and go over every one of these in detail!
Understand Who Your Target Audience Is
Before we can even begin to write our blog, we need to have a firm grasp at who we are writing it for. (Hint, we are not writing it for Google!) In order to be successful at optimizing your website for Google, you need to write your content for other humans. The more targeted we can get with who our blog is for, the more successful we will be at driving traffic to our website that is likely to convert into clients. This includes writing up an entire persona of the person you are hoping to serve with your website. Unsure where to start? Read the guide to Identifying Your Ideal Client Profile. Once you have an idea of who you wish to write for, we can proceed to the next step.
Plan Your Content
Now that we know who we are writing for, we can begin to plan content for them. What are their pain points? What questions do they have about your area of expertise? What are they searching for? Start making a list of questions you see potential clients/customers asking. All of these questions can definitely be content on your blog that you could potentially write about.
Once you have a good list going, you can start assigning dates to that content. When you are making the list, consider that instead of writing multiple blog posts about similar topics, combine them into one longer blog post. This will help your content from competing with each other and help you to avoid keyword cannibalism.
Research Your Keywords
After you have an idea of what topics you would like to write about, you will want to do keyword research. This entails using a tool such as Keywords Everywhere or SEMRush. You can see how many searches are being made for a particular term as well as the competition (search volume) for that term. You are looking for keywords that have a low competition but high search volume. Full details of how to do this in my blog post about keyword research.
Write Your Blog Post
Next, you can write your blog post. You want to include your keyword where it fits in naturally but don’t try to stuff in the keyword so much that it feels unnatural or forced. You also will want to separate your blog post into sections, using H1 and H2 tags appropriately. You want to have ONE H1 tag on your page (typically your post title) and then have H2 tags to outline the rest of the blog post.
I like to use ChatGPT or Google Gemini to create a rough outline for each blog post I write. I simply type in: “Please create an outline for a blog post titled _____. My target market is ____ so please make it relevant to them.” This usually works well for getting me a baseline for starting off all my blog posts.
Another tip to leverage all you can from Google search is if you are answering a question, to answer the question in short form right at the top of your blog post. This might include typing out a short-form answer, or making a list (such as at the top of this post.)
Helpful Tip: How Long Should Blog Posts Be For SEO?
Blog posts that perform well have over 500 words and are written by a human (as opposed to fully by AI.) You are striving to write unique content that serves a human audience.
Compress and Optimize Your Images
Next, you will want to compress any images that you will be using in your post. If your images are quite large (such as photographs from Lightroom) you will want to resize them and then compress them. Read the full guide on Image Size for SEO to learn how to properly compress your images.
Next, you will want to ensure that your images are titled correctly. Change the file name to a relevant keyword. Once you upload the file to your website, you can change the image title to reflect your keywords and from there, add alt text. Alt text is there for visually impaired people to understand what is happening in the photo. Your alt text should strictly be for describing what is in the image and only include your keywords if it naturally fits into the description.
Optimize Your Blog URL, Title and Description
Along with using a proper heading structure as described above, you will want to take some time to optimize your title tags and description. What does this mean exactly? Most website platforms have a SEO section where you are able to add a meta title and description. This metadata is what is shown on Google when someone is searching. You will want to add a title with your keywords, (Usually this is the same as the actual blog post title) and a meta description describing what the post is about. The meta description should be between 150-160 characters.
In Conclusion
Writing a blog for SEO is not difficult. The most important things to remember to get a blog post to perform well is to do your keyword research, write your blog post for other humans (and not for Google) and then do your part at optimizing as much as possible
