Blog Search Engine Optimisation, or Blog SEO for short, is widely considered to be a successful marketing tactic that helps to drive traffic to a website. A well-written and fully optimised blog can significantly improve your rankings (in search engines) and can make your website more appealing to the general user.
But how do blogs help with SEO?
In a highly competitive market, where businesses are offering similar products/services, it can be harder to stand out from the crowd, but this is where SEO blog writing can come into play.
As such, we have formulated this article to highlight the following points to help improve your business’ blog SEO strategy:
- What is a blog?
- What is blog SEO?
- What to avoid when writing SEO-friendly blogs
- What we can do for your blog SEO strategy
- Final considerations
What is a blog?
Before we start to dive into the realms of SEO blog writing, we need to understand the very basics.
What is a blog?
A blog, or sometimes referred to as ‘news’ or ‘guides’ are discussion/informational literature that many websites publish on the Internet. Blogs can be both formal or informal depending on the context they are written in. More often than not, blogs are used to offer discussion points and aim to engage users on a website with new trends, facts or even opinions on a particular topic.
Because the Internet is a continuously growing network, it is getting significantly easier to generate interactions with users of similar interests worldwide. As a consequence of this, blogging has rapidly developed to become a highly-recognised SEO strategy that businesses are trying to perfect in order to increase traffic and in some cases, improve business performance.
What is Blog SEO?
Now that we have an understanding of what a blog is, you may be asking yourself, “So what and why are blogs important for SEO?”.
Simply put, blog SEO is the practice of writing and optimising blog content to rank in search engines, such as Google and Microsoft Bing. Optimised blogs have increased visibility in an organic search which is highly desirable for many businesses looking to nail their SEO campaign. Common methods associated with blog SEO include:
- Keyword research
Keyword research is one of the most significant factors to help attract users to your blog post and ultimately, your website. Without the correct keyword research, your blog post is likely to be lost into the archives of the Internet, never to be seen, meaning all your time and efforts will have been misallocated.
By performing keyword research, using the wide array of SEO tools available, you can establish how many searches your targeted keyphrase(s) get per month, as well as the difficulty when trying to rank for the selected term.
Those of you who have some knowledge of SEO will understand that by including/mentioning keywords in the content, it helps guide your search engine into what your written content is about and how relevant your copy is. By including the keywords, you stand a better chance of ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
- Long-tail keywords / Low-hanging fruit
Long tail keywords refer to keyphrases that are more specific and are generally longer to type out in search pages, more so than generic keywords.
They are often called ‘low-hanging fruit’ as they are keywords that your competitors have not targeted/missed which you can take full advantage of. Because of this, the competition to rank for the key term is significantly lower and will require less SEO efforts to achieve page one.
EXAMPLE:
Let’s say you are a supplier of football apparel and you are looking to rank for as many terms relating to football boots as possible.
If you were to type in ‘football boots,’ using an SEO search tool, you’d expect to return results of 100,000+ searches a month. This will require serious SEO resources and efforts to try and rank for this key term with no guarantee of ranking for the keyphrase.
However, if you refine your search and identify a long-tail keyword opportunity, you will have greater odds to rank for a more specific search term.
An example would be, if you were to write an informative and original blog using ‘Adidas f10 boots’ as the keyphrase. At the time of writing, this long-tail keyword has a search volume of 30 with few competitors writing blog content for this type of product.
This would be an ideal blog title to help drive traffic to your website and is effectively a ‘quick win’ you can achieve in a relatively short time frame.
- High quality and engaging content
With the new Google Algorithm September 2022 update, Google penalises websites that have a relatively high amount of “unsatisfying” or “unhelpful” content where the content is written strictly for search engine purposes. In essence, a blog that has all targeted keywords forced into the article will score poorly as the content will be deemed less ‘free-flowing’ and poorly comprehensible for the user.
Ultimately, the new update favours content that adds value, improves user experience and leaves the reader with new facts or insightful figures that they can dwell on.
- On-site SEO
On-site/on-page SEO is more of an umbrella term but essentially, it is the process of making your website search engine friendly to help you rank higher and drive more valuable traffic to your site. When applying this to blogs, here are three important factors to consider:
1. Optimise title tags
When users find your blog in the search results, the first thing they look at is the title. The title plays a crucial role in determining whether they click on your article or move on elsewhere.
With this in mind, it is highly recommended that the title of your blog is detailed yet concise. This is because users want to know precisely what to expect if they were to click on the link.
A title that is too long and includes an ellipsis (…) on the SERP page, will often get overlooked.
EXAMPLE:
Let’s say you’re a janitorial supplies business and have formulated an article about the ‘types of cleaning supplies to use to clean your windows’. Which article title would you be more inclined to click on:
“Cleaning Supplies You Should Use” or “Top 5 Cleaning Supplies to Help Clean Your Windows”.
More than likely, you would pick the second option.
As a user, you know that if you click on the second article title, you’re going to see five cleaning supplies to help clean your windows: whereas the first one is extremely vague, and could cover nearly anything related to cleaning – not helpful if you are strictly searching for items to help clean your windows.
2. Create SEO-friendly URLs
The URL helps determine the relevancy of a webpage by search engines. When search engines crawl your blog article, they read the URL to understand its content. If the URL isn’t clear, it won’t help search engines index your website.
EXAMPLE:
The URL: www.poddigital.co.uk/11098azba??az10 ( has a mix of letters, numbers and symbols which makes the search engine unclear on what the page is actually about and certainly not memorable for the user.
Conversely, a better URL will look like this:
www.poddigital.co.uk/blog/how-important-is-seo-blog-writing
This URL structure is clear and defined. Users have a much better chance of remembering it naturally and by creating a clear URL structure, it’ll help search engines properly index your pages.
3. Responsive designs
Your audience will access your website from a variety of devices, whether that be mobile device, desktop or tablet. Therefore, It is crucial that you create a positive experience to accommodate all browsing devices.
Imagine trying to access the desktop version of your blog on a mobile phone. You would have to zoom in and out to read content, everything would look disorganised and the images won’t be scaled correctly. This doesn’t provide your audience with a positive experience and discourages them from interacting with your blogs / website.
Responsive designs ensure that your website adapts to whatever device a user browses on and adjusts to fit the screen so that your audience can navigate freely without any interruptions.
- Relevant backlink / link-building practices.
The beauty about SEO blog writing is that it provides the opportunity for other websites to link to your article or vice versa. Having a backlink from a highly reputable source improves the overall trustworthiness of your website and will help to build its Domain Authority.
If you are looking to understand what backlinks are in greater detail, we have published an article on the importance of backlinks to your SEO campaign and highly recommend giving that a read to help widen your knowledge on the topic.
Furthermore, in-depth guides are also the holy grail when acquiring backlinks, as bloggers and journalists are always on the lookout for great pieces of content to link their work to. This is because relevant linking helps an article gain credibility and ultimately, the user experience.
Another important aspect to highlight, in relation to backlinks, is the quality of the backlink.
There has been much debate whether backlink quantity outweighs backlink quality, however, a single high-quality backlink can be as powerful as 1,000 low-quality backlinks.
This is because a link that comes from a highly authoritative site will have a lot of weight placed on it by Google and thus, will enhance the article’s relevance for the reader.
Common Mistakes When Writing SEO Friendly Blogs
Below, we have listed examples that you should avoid when writing your blog SEO copy:
1. Focussing too much on word count
An in-depth article doesn’t necessarily mean stuffing in as much content as possible into the copy: it’s about the quality of content you deliver. The aim should be providing the user with just the right content to solve their problem or question.
This does not mean drafting pages and pages of pointless content. Instead, be concise and informative as much as possible.
2. Overly long paragraphs
Long paragraphs can seriously harm the amount of time a user spends reading a blog. If too much text is on a page, readers will soon lose interest and look elsewhere. Furthermore, if readers are choosing to click off a blog soon after discovering it, it signals to Google that the copy isn’t high quality or engaging enough and will negatively impact your blog SEO strategy.
3. Keyword stuffing
It is important to note that you will not be penalised for having your target keyword(s) mentioned in your post, however, there is a limit. Forcing your keyword multiple times within your copy is what’s known as ‘keyword stuffing’. Keyword stuffing is considered an unethical SEO technique in an attempt to drive traffic to a website.
In the past, this has been done by matching font colour to the background, setting font size to zero or putting it behind an image.
Ultimately, do not add keywords in the text for the sake of doing so. Instead, do it only when it makes sense and is natural to read.
4. Spelling and grammatical errors
Importantly, incorrect spelling or grammar should never be published to the Internet. it immediately takes the attention away from the message you are trying to deliver and will degrade your company/brand. In terms of SEO, incorrect spelling or poor grammar actually hinders your ranking potential as site crawlers will not be able to determine what the page is about and thus, won’t be indexed appropriately on search engines. The solution? Take the time to place heavy efforts on your research and rigorously proofread when writing your content.
5. Link only when it makes sense
Some of you may already be familiar with the importance of linking when SEO blog writing. Linking your article to relevant sources is a great way to improve the quality of your copy. Referencing accepted facts within your content is a great way to improve user experience, however, if there are too many links that are linked across every single page, Google will not be able to comprehend the structure of the website correctly.
Linking too much can also be deemed as spammy in the eyes of Google and will harm your ranking potential. In essence, don’t link for the sake of linking:only link when it seems logical to do so, or, to further support your topic.
6. Plagiarised content
A final common mistake we would like to highlight relates to plagiarised content. Not only can you negatively impact your own SEO strategy with a plagiarism penalty, someone can, in effect, steal your work and you can be the one penalised as a result.
Furthermore, duplicated content confuses Google and forces the search engine to choose which identical page it should rank for. Google does not take into consideration who produced the content and there is a high possibility that your original page will not be chosen to rank.
What We Can Do For Your Blog SEO Strategy
We have our very own dedicated team of skilled and experienced content writers that work tirelessly on implementing successful blog SEO strategies for our clients.
With a clear structure that they adhere to, they have created a wide array of highly-ranking blogs which has ultimately led to large quantities of traffic to be directed to their clients websites.
Examples include:
If you are interested in SEO and the numerous benefits it can bring to your business, be sure to contact us today for your free SEO audit.
Final Considerations
Quite often, blogging and SEO is misunderstood. We have seen on countless occasions where businesses have not recognised the importance of blog SEO, however, those who have trusted the process and allow time for the marketing strategy to take effect, are also the ones who yield high levels of ROI, more than any other marketing channel.
Just think, would your competitors have achieved a strong website authority by neglecting the need for relevant, regular and high-quality content in the form of blog articles? Probably not.
We hope we have given you more of an insight into how blogging and SEO work hand in hand when trying to achieve organic online marketing success. If you would like to witness our expertise first hand, our SEO and content team can assist you.
Find out more about and get in touch with the team today to get your marketing campaign started.
