A good blog post can, and should, take time. Choosing the right topic, doing the research and finally drafting up a copy often takes hours. So if your post doesn’t bring in the traffic you hoped; it can be a real let down. 

Thankfully with the right planning and techniques, you can bring in the traffic you deserve! Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is key to ranking well on google. The higher you rank the more traffic you will receive. 

In 2020 a Search Engine Journal study found that the first organic result on google had a click-through rate of 28.5%, the second drops to 15.7% and the tenth only 2.5% As you move to the second results page these numbers drop lower.

What this means then, is that if your results aren’t on the first page, very few people are going to find your traffic organically. Fewer site visits mean few opportunities to generate leads and fewer leads means lower revenue. 

So what should you do? You could look into Google Ads, but those can get expensive and if you’re on a tight budget they are out of the question. This is where SEO writing comes in. It’s free and will likely bring in traffic for much longer than an Ads campaign would.

How Do You Use SEO in Your Writing?

Do Your Research

So you’ve picked a topic? Now take a look at some relevant keywords. You’ll find that some keywords find their way into your blog organically, but finding one or two long-tail keywords can help drive in some traffic. 

Long-tail keywords are usually question based keywords and keep your blog focused on the goals of your audience. If someone searching for a long tail keyword finds the answer they are looking for in your blog, chances they are going to stick around. 

It is important to keep in mind not to ‘stuff’ keywords into your content either. So while it is important to have relevant keywords, just putting them anywhere and everywhere can hurt your SEO.

Keyword stuffing also makes your content awful to read, for example, “if you are looking for the best dog toys, we have you covered. We offer the best dog toys your dog could ever want! From ropes to chews, these are the best dog toys you could want”. That example goes overboard with the use of keywords. As a rule of thumb with keywords, if they don’t read organically, don’t put them in.

How your content reads is a key factor that search engines consider. So make sure your keywords fit organically into your content and don’t sound forced. 

Choose A Great Title

The title you choose for your blog is absolutely key for search rankings. A good blog post has to start with a good title. The title makes your post more relevant to the search query and is what motivates people to click on your content on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). 

You can make your posts more SEO friendly by using your main keywords in the title. You should also try and make your title catchy. Is it something that would grab your attention? If not, it might need some improvement. 

There are countless formulas for writing effective headlines. One you’ll see often is emotional marketing value (EMV). EMV recommends using power words that trigger specific emotional responses in your audience. 

Creating a great title can help drive traffic to your site that might have otherwise scrolled straight past. 

Add Images to Your Content 

Engaging content often ranks higher in search results. Images are far more engaging than just text. So between paragraphs of your blog add in some relevant images. 

Finding these images might seem easy but if you don’t have the rights to the images you use you can land yourself in trouble. There are plenty of websites where you can get royalty-free images or use free graphic design sites to make your own. 

It’s also key to optimise your images. Images increase your pages load speed, another factor that can poorly affect your SEO performance. Make sure your images are in the right file format to improve your load speed.

Alt text is an HTML attribute added to images that describes the image. The main purpose of alt text is to improve accessibility by allowing screen readers to read out the alt text for the visually impaired. 

Alt-text is also a key factor for SEO as it allows search engines to understand what the image is. Modern search engines can understand an image and its content through artificial intelligence but still rely on alt text too. 

How to Optimise Your Page

Optimise Your Meta Description

Meta descriptions are an HTML tag that you add to pages. It provides a short description of your page for search engines and other site crawlers. 

Some SEO experts believe meta descriptions have become irrelevant. Others would disagree. 

A great meta description should explain what the page contains. Social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook also show your meta description when your articles are shared on their site. So it is important to get it right. 

You want your meta description to be helpful since people are going to be reading it. Your focus keyword should be mentioned at least once and the description should be no longer than 155 characters.

It is no longer guaranteed that your meta description is going to be shown on the SERP. Google might pull in other parts of your blog that include relevant keywords. There’s not much you can do to influence what gets pulled in, but you should still optimise your metadata as well as your post to make sure nothing but the best content is displayed. 

Helpful URL Structure

The structure of your URL should make it easy for your audience to understand the structure of your website and the content they are about to see. Search engines prefer web page URLs that are easy to understand for both them and the visitor. 

You’ll notice the structure of URLs across the internet. If you decided to visit the SEO section of a sites blog chances are it would take you to something along the lines of ‘Fakesite.com/blog/seo’ or something similar. 

Now if you were to view a blog on SEO content creation on that site its URL structure would be ‘Fakesite.com/blog/seo/seo-content-creation’ this tells you that you are reading a blog from the SEO section. 

URL structure, in this form, acts as a way of categorizing things for the readers, showing them where they are on the website and how to access new pages. This reflects well for the search engines as it makes it easier for them to see what information searchers will access on different parts of your site. 

Key Points

If you execute all this your blog is sure to do well. Optimise your blog as best you can and the results will shine through, your traffic and engagement will grow as you climb your way up the search rankings. 

SEO is a difficult technique to master, but as long as you push through, persevere and implement these techniques as best you can you will see consistent results.