Creating quality content for your business can be time-consuming. If you’re making the effort to write blogs, it would be in your best interest to optimize those blogs for ranking on search engines like Google and Bing. 

Really, what’s the point in spending your time researching, writing, and posting blogs if your content isn’t being seen by potential clients or customers?

If you’re here reading this article, you’ve probably already heard about the basics about writing blogs for SEO: integrating proper long-tail keyword phrases, producing proper meta and title tags, proper H1-H6 headings, including images with proper alt tags, etc. But there is more that goes into a quality blog that will rank higher on Google than all of that.

5 Tips for “Writing Blogs for SEO”

In order for your blogs to show up on the first page of Google, there are several elements that you’ll want to consider:

1. Choose The Right Topics 

Before you start blogging about just anything, we urge you to take a better look at who it is that you’re trying to reach. So, before you can begin choosing topics, you should ask yourself, “Who am I writing for?” (AKA: Buyer Persona!)

Once you can truly pinpoint your ideal client(s) or customer(s), you can start to brainstorm topics to blog that will be useful and relevant to your reader. 

You want to really narrow in on your topics. Rather than something general like “Blogging Tips” for the title of this article, we decided to get a little more specific with “5 Tips to Getting Your Blog to Rank Higher on Google.”

And thinking about what the best topics to write about should be, consider the most important questions or concerns that your target audience has and answer them. What can your product or service do to make their lives easier?

The most important thing to remember when choosing a topic is to choose something that provides value to your readers’ lives. As yourself, is my audience gaining valuable knowledge from reading my blog? Is there a takeaway? And if there is, great. You’ve got a winner. 

If you are looking for inspiration on what some of the most popular questions and concerns your audience is currently facing, check out Answer The Public. Answer The Public is a search listening tool for market and customer insights. Essentially, it will help you narrow down the most searched for questions about a particular product, topic, or service. 

By writing detailed content answering popular search queries, you can ensure that you are on  the right track to ranking in search results because we know for sure you’ve got one thing on your side, search intent.

2. Provide Thorough Content

When writing your blogs for SEO, you want to be sure that you give enough information to your readers. Your topic should be explored thoroughly enough that your readers can have a good understanding of your ideas and all information needs to be original.

After all, you don’t want your audience to have to look elsewhere for information because they feel yours is a regurgitated version of some of the most popular articles in search results!

What is a good length when writing a blog for SEO? A good rule of thumb is anywhere from 500-1000 words. But even articles that offer valuable information up to 2000 words are considered great for SEO. 

There are many different ways to add value and length to blogs for SEO such as including lists, instructions, tutorials, anecdotal evidence, and more.

3. Have an Fast, User-Friendly, and Accessible Website

Once someone selects your blog to read, they’ll be taken to your website. So, not only does your content need to be useful, relevant and thorough – your website needs to be fast and user friendly. 

The content should load quickly and be easy to consume. Pagespeed is a large component of the ultimate decision to whether a website is ranked high on search engines or if it falls on page 2, 3, 6, or even 68. You may have great content, but if your page loads slowly and is not optimized for mobile users, it is likely that your potential visitors will bounce and move on to another source with more accessible information. 

Oh and we feel this may go without saying, but if a reader is bombarded with pop-ups and ads, they’ll likely leave your page and move on! Make sure you have a clean, fast, accessible, and reliable website if you are looking to rank well in search engine results pages. 

4. Consider Voice Activated Search

With the advancement in voice-activated technology, like Alexa and Siri, the amount of voice search queries is on the rise. This means that voice search should be something you plan for in your content creation strategy. Consider how your ideal client or customer might utilize voice search to research topics related to your product/service when writing blogs for SEO. 

As Google is ever-evolving, bringing more natural language into your blog posts can help get your content to the top of Google search by playing to their current algorithm. 

If you have questions about voice search, drop them in the comments below and our team will get back to you! 🙂

5. Bring New Life to Old Content

Google loves fresh content. If your ideal client or customer is looking for tips on blogging, an article written three years ago will not be as relevant as an article written last month. 

The good news is that your old content can still be useful. It is much easier to edit an old blog post than to start from square one. Just take some time to update the old information and make it relevant to the current year! 

Add a note indicating the date the article was updated to make it obvious to readers that what they are reading is up to date. Search engine crawlers will also pick up on the update.

Repurposing old content is also a great way to continue to build value and more information as your business learns about audience needs and grows. As time goes on, continue to integrate new relevant information, photos, videos, and tutorials to continue to add value to your clients and customers lives.

And don’t forget to continue writing new content too!! Search engine crawlers love to see sites come out with fresh new content. 

With these five tips, we can’t wait to see your blogs start to crawl closer to the top of our Google searches! Happy writing!

If you have any additional questions related to blogging and SEO, please feel free to reach out to our team here at The Mug!

Happy blogging, friends!