Blogging is a powerful marketing tool. You can use your blog to share press releases, provide product information and share your thoughts on industry topics. Blogging offers a little bit of PR, SEO and marketing all in one.
Blogging to broadcast your company information is helpful, but if you want your blogs to generate traffic from search engines, you need to be mindful of SEO.
Writing SEO-friendly blog posts is as much about the user experience as it is about the technical requirements. A blog can tick all the right boxes from a technical standpoint, but if it is so poorly written users can’t extract the information they need from it, you could be wasting your time.
In this blog, we’re going to look at some of the steps you can take to make sure your blogs are SEO-friendly and ready to rank.
Does blogging still work in 2020?
Absolutely! While there might be more blogs than ever before, if you’re providing valuable content, you don’t need to worry about what anyone else is doing. As with any marketing activity, you’ll see better results if you’re a leader instead of a follower. So instead of copying what others in your industry are doing, you should aim to carve your own path.
What is SEO friendly writing?
When we talk about writing for SEO, we’re not saying you should write purely for search engines. Instead, you should consider writing for your ideal target customer, and providing signposts for search engines.
Search engines are more sophisticated than they used to be. In the early days of blogging, it was possible to get your content noticed by simply stuffing it with keywords. You could try this today and you might have short-term success, but if the end-user doesn’t have a positive experience, you won’t see long-term results.
SEO friendly writing is people-friendly writing. This means you should consider the following while you are writing:
- Structure your writing so that it’s easy to skim and read. This means creating an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. You should also add subheadings (H3 and H3 tags) which include your target keywords. Using informative headings helps to break up the text and make it easier for readers to find the information they need.
- Use transition words to make your writing flow. This helps to carry the reader along and keep them interested. Phrases like “in short” and “to sum up” let readers know that they have reached a conclusion, which might be all they are looking for.
- Link to additional information. Sometimes you can’t communicate everything you need to in a single post. In this instance, you would need to provide links to further reading to give the reader additional context. Linking to other pages on your website also helps to boost SEO signals.
How long should blog posts be for SEO?
There is no fixed length for the ideal blog post. Some sites say you should aim for 500 words, while others say that anything shorter than 2,500+ words doesn’t stand a chance. This all depends on the keywords you are targeting and user expectations. Stretching a blog that could have been 400 words to 1,500 words will only annoy your readers.
Go back to your keyword research and see what websites are currently ranking highest for your target keywords. You obviously want to provide the most informative version of this article, so make sure you provide more detail and insight than everything already available. As a general rule, you should aim to exceed 350 words for every blog. When the subject matter calls for it, aiming for 1,000+ words will help.
If you’re looking for blogging support, the Auburn copywriting team can help. Get in touch to find out more about our content writing services.