Over 70 million blog posts are uploaded each month on WordPress alone. And WP accounts for only 43% of the overall web.
This means businesses publish blog posts on their websites or across different publishing platforms like Medium at an unprecedented rate.
There’s just too much information readily available on the world wide web for people to consume.
Say you’re planning to publish an article revolving around the keyword “what is seo”. Thousands (if not millions) of businesses have already done so and are consistently doing it.
Out of curiosity, let’s check how difficult it is to rank for the keyword “what is seo” on Ahrefs:
The keyword difficulty is 94 – which means it’s nearly impossible to rank at the top of Google search results for this keyword!
Producing an SEO-friendly blog post that ranks your website pages at the top of Google for relevant keywords is a strategic process.
If you operate a pest control business, you can’t just build a blog section and choose random topics out-of-the-blue to cover. You need to build a fool-proof strategy targeting the low-competition, high-volume keywords that’ll get you the results.
That’s precisely what we’re here to here to help you out with.
We’ll understand how to write SEO-friendly blog posts that’ll rank you on Page #1 of Google throughout this blog post.
Without further ado, let’s dive straight into it!
How to Write Results-Driven SEO Friendly Blog Posts in 2022
To write results-driven SEO-friendly blog posts in 2022, you should consider the following steps:
- Build a fool-proof blog posting strategy
- Build an outline/structure before you start writing the blog post
- Focus on internal & external linking
- Craft an SEO title, slug & meta-description
- Add alt-text to your images
Let’s dive into each of these points.
Build a Fool-Proof Blog Posting Strategy
As we mentioned above, there are thousands, if not millions, of your competitors covering the same exact topics you are.
So, let’s say you run a coaching business and decide to start publishing blog posts on your website.
Without a strategy, you’ll come up with some random topics out-of-the-blue. So if you are a weight loss coach, one topic you might think of covering is – “How to Lose Weight?”
Let’s see how many businesses or coaches are already covering this topic:
With a keyword difficulty of 85, it’s unlikely you’ll rank at the top of Google. Covering topics like these is often a waste of time and energy. But now, let’s do some keywords research and find low-competition & high-volume keywords.
In Ahrefs keyword explorer, we added the keyword “lose weight” and looked up “Questions” keywords with difficulty ranging between 0 and 25.
And here are the results we got:
Some interesting keywords include:
- How to lose weight fast in 2 weeks 10 kg
- How many skipping per day to lose weight
- How to lose weight in one month
- How to lose weight in 1 month
And more!
It’s a matter of strategic planning.
At the same time, you can also conduct competitive analysis and look for their top ranking pages – pages that are subject to the most traffic on their website.
And based on that, you can build a blogging strategy for your business.
Here’s our January’s blogging strategy. You can use this as a template and use the hack we shared above to build your own.
Build an Outline/Structure Before You Start Writing the Blog Post
To begin writing SEO-friendly blog posts, you should build the article’s structure before writing. This structure divides the article into different sections, making the navigation more accessible and helping users consume the information with ease.
All words and no structure will likely lead your readers nowhere. They could find it extremely hard to consume information. For example, we recently published an article titled “How to Hire the Right Web Design Agency for Your Idaho-Based Business in 2022.”
Before we start writing this article, we prepared an outline – which you can see here:
Here the H2 & H3 refer to the headers. It’s a good way of dividing our article into different sections – which makes it easy for readers to consume content and search engine crawlers to scan the page.
Focus on Internal & External Linking
Google considers internal and external linking as ranking signals and good SEO practices – which means it’s essential to add internal and external links while writing blog posts.
We back up our facts with relevant stats and claims by hyperlinking to relevant sources because it’s a good SEO practice. Adding external links to relevant sources says to Google that we are conducting thorough research and providing the most relevant piece of information to the readers.
We do a lot of internal linking to support our other pages. Not only does it help us to redirect Google crawlers to other websites, but it also helps us get our other pages ranked at the top of Google.
While writing blog posts, make sure that you add internal and external links. But make sure not to overdo it.
Craft an SEO Title, Slug & Meta-Description
Google considers SEO title, URL name, and meta-description factors when determining search engine rankings.
So, let’s say you have an article titled “How to Hire the Right Web Design Agency for Your Idaho-Based Business in 2022.”
This title is way too long to be displayed on Google SERPs.
Let’s try to add it to WordPress. Here’s what you’ll see:
It’s red.
And here’s what your blog post on SERPs will look like:
You aim to ensure that your blog post title hits the SERP limit. Let’s try to reduce the word count.
Before:
After:
Now, it’s green.
Here’s what it’ll look like on SERPs:
Similarly, we’d advise you to add your target keyword to the URL of your blog post. What do you think our URL should be for the blog post above? Here’s what we set it to:
Our slug is “how-to-hire-the-right-web-design-agency-for-your-idaho-based-business-in-2022”
Similarly, you must add keywords to your slug as well.
Lastly, you need to add a meta-description.
What’s a meta-description?
It’s the text you see below the image on Google SERPs. We fetched this image from here:
While writing the meta-description, make sure that you are going past the 160 character count or below 50 characters. Here’s what a good meta description looks like:
Not only is it optimized, but it also manages to catch the audience’s attention – which will make them click-through. Also, while writing a meta-description, don’t forget to naturally add your focus keyword once – which is a good SEO practice.
Add Alt-Text to Your Images & Videos
Just like you optimize your text with focus keywords, we’d advise you to add your target keyword(s) as your image’s alt-text.
Google has already made it clear that they can’t understand an image’s or video’s context. You need to let Google know what your image represents.
So for every image you post on your web pages, it’s advisable to have an alt-text that will help Google understand what the image represents. Make sure that you add in your target keywords. This will skyrocket your chances of ranking at the top.
But as we mentioned before, don’t overdo it; otherwise, Google will consider your web pages as spam.
Here’s what a good alt-text looks like:
Similarly, we’d advise you to write alt-text for all images and videos on your website.
Conclusion
While these are a few good SEO practices you can implement while writing this blog post, you should make sure that you are:
- Writing content with a keyword density between 0.5 and 3%.
- Updating your content pieces regularly
- Using headings correctly
- And more!
Ranking at the top of Google is hard. But with our strategic efforts and brilliant team, we’ve made it to the top for local keywords.
Keyword – “white hat seo boise”
Keyword – “web design checklist boise”
And we would love nothing more than to help you out!
What are you waiting for?
Reach out to us to get your blog posts ranked at the top of Google.
Also, don’t forget to read our “How to Write Content that Ranks at the Top of Google?” where we’ve mentioned practical steps that you should follow to build and write content that will help you achieve results.
