How to Write Effective Blog Content to Boost SEO

A business blog is a powerful content marketing tool that offers many benefits, among these are the following:

• A business blog allows you to share relevant content that your audience is interested in, therefore establishing your authority and boosting your credentials.
• It’s also a good tool for lead generation. By including an email subscription option in your blog, you enable more touchpoints with your clients.
• It can help you build your network. A blog gives you a platform to collaborate with guest bloggers and other content creators, thus expanding your network even further.
• Most importantly, a blog with a regular stream of content helps drive traffic to your website and thus boosting SEO.

7 Ways to Write Effective Blog Content to Boost SEO

Not all blog content, however, can strengthen your SEO ranking. Your content must be valuable, relevant, and technically well-formatted so that it can be an effective tool for boosting SEO. Here’s how you do it:

1. Choose relevant topics

First and foremost, write about topics that your target audience are interested in. Your blog content should be relevant to your intended readers and valuable enough to fulfill their needs.

At the very least, ask yourself:

• What are their pain points?
• What is most helpful for them?
• What would make their life easier?

2. Mind your focus keyphrase

When doing keyword research, it’s also important to be more specific — that is, use long-tail keywords or those that are composed of two to four words.

For example, compare “snacks” with “best healthy snacks.” It’s more than likely that web users would get better and more valuable results when using the latter keywords.

Additionally, while keyword research is important for SEO, the placement of your focus keyphrase is often overlooked.

The focus keyphrase, as the term suggests, is your primary target keyword. Its placement should be:

• On your blog post title
• In the first sentence of the first paragraph
• Once or twice in the middle paragraphs
• In the last sentence

In our article Introducing: AMP Stories and How to Optimize Them for SEO, the focus keyphrase “AMP Stories” is placed in strategic placements — with some sprinkled in the body of the article wherever it just sounds naturally and is necessary.

3. Optimize your headline

The headline is the first thing that readers see. It also greatly contributes to a content’s conversion rate. That’s why it’s essential to phrase it well so that it conveys succinctly what the content is about.

A few ways to make your headline more effective:

• Make it a listicle. This gives readers an idea of how long it will take to read the article. For example, “5 Best Healthy Snacks to Help You Lose Weight.” It has also been found that odd numbers are more appealing to readers.
• Include a benefit to give more context and value to the content. In the example above, “to help you lose weight” serves as the benefit.
• Mind the length. Make sure that the title is neither too short nor too long. Make it too short, the readers won’t understand the full value of your content. Make it too long, it will get truncated in search results. Aim for a length between 8 and 12 words for your headline.

In this particular blog post, 5 Brilliant Branded Video Ideas to Promote Your Business, notice how we used all three tips provided above. However, your headline does not need to be always in a listicle.

You can also use non-list titles such as How to Boost Your SEO with White-Hat Link Building Techniques. The important thing is that it’s phrased in a way that your target audience understands and will likely use when searching online.

4. Use visual breaks

Formatting is important for online content. Break up your content so that it’s easier for your audience to read.

Internet users are also known to be skimmers — meaning that they tend to move past a web page and only look for specific keywords and focus on what catches their eyes.

Utilize visual breaks to facilitate web user’s skim-reading habit such as the following:

• Subheadings (consider these as your mini headlines)
• Bullet points
• Numbered lists

In this example, 3-Stage Checklist for Onboarding New SEO Clients, we used subheadings and sub-subheadings, as well as bullet points, to keep the article organized and easy to read.

5. Make your content easily readable

Adding to the previous point, it’s recommended to keep your sentences short and to chunk your paragraphs to make your content easily readable.

This means that it’s best to keep paragraphs short, containing only 1 to 3 sentences, than to use the “traditional” way of writing long blocks of paragraphs.

It’s also best to phrase your sentences simply so that the “average” reader can easily understand. Of course, you also need to take into account the knowledge level of your target audience.

The essential consideration here is that, if a simpler word can be used over a more complex or technical one, then use it.

6. Don’t focus too much on word count

Statistics seem to be divided on what the “most effective” word count for online content is.

Some would attest to long-form content (at least 1,000 words) being the ideal length, while others recommend short-form content (less than 1,000 words).

The thing is, there’s no specific number that’s considered as the “ideal” word count. The key here is to find your sweet spot. That is, the length of your post should depend on the needs of your audience.

If the message can be conveyed in less than a thousand words, great. If more in-depth content is needed (for example, comprehensive guides or technical articles), go for it.

However, for SEO purposes, it’s best to target at least 300 words. Google’s search engine algorithm, in particular, tends to ignore “thin content” that’s less than 200 words long.

7. Don’t forget on-page SEO

On-page SEO makes it easier for search engine crawlers to “read” and understand your content and therefore show it on search results.

At the very least, be sure to take care of the following essential on-page SEO elements for each of your blog posts:

• Meta description — This gives a summary of what the content is about. Be sure to keep the length between 70 and 160 characters.
• Image ALT text — This is sometimes termed as “ALT tags” or “ALT descriptions,” serving to (1) give crawlers more context to the image, (2) display in place of an image if it can’t be immediately loaded, and (3) aids in UI accessibility for visually impaired web visitors.
• Page URL — Make it short and concise, and it must also include keywords from your title. Avoid lengthy page URLs or those that are only numerical. For example, it’s better to use https://www.example.com/healthy-snacks-lose-weight versus https://www.example.com/12345.

Content truly is king, and knowing how to write effective blog content can help you make the most out of your business blog. Learn more about content marketing and digital marketing in general at https://www.ilfusion.com/blog.