How To Write an SEO-Friendly Blog Post

For many businesses, blogging is becoming a vital part of their ongoing SEO strategy — and for good reason! However, it can sometimes be difficult for business owners to know how to write an SEO-friendly blog post, which can often lead to wasted time and energy.

At Dandy, we’re experts in blogging, so we’re here to offer you our best SEO tips for creating a blog post that will rank highly and bring in organic traffic. Let’s get started.

What is an SEO-Friendly Blog?

Search engines are constantly looking for new content to add to their indexes, and a well-optimised blog post can provide them with exactly what they’re looking for. By following a few simple guidelines, you can make sure that your blog posts are being properly indexed and ranked by search engines — which will in turn lead to more traffic being driven to your website by engines like Google search.

Well-optimised blog posts will also tend to be more informative and user-friendly, which means that they’ll keep readers engaged for longer periods of time. Blogging is important for SEO purposes (longer engagement times can lead to higher rankings), but also because it will help to ensure that your readers are actually getting something out of your content!

How Do I Make My Content SEO-Friendly?

Writing blog posts that are both informative and optimised for search engines can be a bit of a balancing act — but it’s definitely one that’s worth striving for. 

A well-optimised blog post will typically be part of a wider SEO strategy, which will take into account the overall theme of your website as well as the individual keywords that you’re targeting. However, there are a few general things that you can do to make sure that each individual blog post is as search engine friendly as possible.

When writing a new blog post from scratch, try following our expert, step-by-step guide to see better results!

How To Write an SEO-Friendly Blog Post: Step-by-Step

Step 1: Keyword & SERP Analysis

First, you’ll want to check the search engine results pages. Head to Google and search for your idea. Pick out keywords and questions from the People Also Ask (PAA) box and related searches. 

You can also use SEO tools and extensions to help you choose the best keywords. These tools can help you assess the search volume of your target keywords, choose keywords with low competition and batch analyse PAA results to find the best opportunities for blog visibility. Some useful keyword research tools include:

• SEO Minion
• Keywords Everywhere
• Ahrefs

You can also target keywords with select schema in the SERPs, for example, a list, question or another featured snippet opportunity. By first analysing the SERPs and discovering what types of content already exist around your chosen keywords, you can better understand how to create a unique and valuable asset for your target audience. Some questions you can ask yourself at this stage in your blog writing process include:

• What keywords are your target customers searching for?
• What types of content are in the current SERPs for these keywords?
• What keywords are your competitors targeting?

Step 2: Structure Using Keywords

Once you have chosen your keywords, use them to structure your blog. This means including relevant keywords and questions in your:

• Metadata: including meta descriptions, title tags and URLs
• Headings & Subheadings: H1, H2 and H3 headings
• The first paragraph of your post. 
• Image alt text.

By creating a blog structure that includes your target keyword and related keywords, you are helping search engines to understand the topic of your blog post as well as where each section is located. This in turn can help improve your site’s SEO and Click-Through-Rate (CTR).

Make sure you avoid keyword stuffing by writing a relevant and informative blog post. A good rule of thumb is to use your target keyword a maximum of 3-5 times per blog post, but by creating relevant and targeted content, you may find that you can use your target keyword more than this without sounding repetitive.

How Do You Write an SEO-Friendly Title?

Blog post titles should include your main keyword and be less than 60 characters. This is because longer titles may be cut off in the SERPs, and including your main keyword at the beginning of your title will help to improve your CTR.

Your title should also accurately reflect the content of your blog post. A clickbait-y or misleading title will only result in a high bounce rate, as visitors will quickly leave your website after realising that your content doesn’t match up to their expectations. A good title should be:

• Accurate
• Informative
• Compelling
• Less than 60 characters
• SEO-friendly.

Step 3: Write! (Make it Valuable)

Now that you have a blog outline, it’s time to write! Remember to make your content relevant, valuable and engaging to the reader. Your blog should be both a very informative post and a user-friendly blog post. This will improve your chances of ranking in the search results.

Your content should also be well-researched and free of grammar or spelling errors. Not only will this make your post easier to read, but it will also help to improve your blog’s credibility and authority.

If you’re struggling to come up with ideas for your blog post, try looking at some of the most popular content in your industry. You can use tools like BuzzSumo to find the most shared content for your chosen keywords.

You can also look at the featured snippet results for your target keywords to get an idea of the type of content that is currently ranking in the search results.

Step 4: Add Valuable Internal and External Links

Well-placed links can help to improve the SEO of your blog post as well as provide your readers with additional resources.

Internal links are links that go to other pages or posts on your website. Internal linking is a great way to keep readers engaged with your content and can also help to improve your website’s architecture and crawling.

External links are links that go to other websites. These can be a great way to add credibility to your blog post as well as provide readers with additional resources.

When adding links to your blog post, make sure they are:

• Relevant to the content
• Targeting your keywords with the right anchor text
• High-quality and credible sources
• No followed if they are from an untrusted source.

Step 5: Include Open Source or Original Multimedia

We recommend always using open-source or original multimedia in your blog posts. Open-source images can be found on sites like Pixabay and Unsplash, while content creation sites like Canva can be used to create original graphics.

Not only is using open-source or original multimedia a great way to avoid copyright infringement, but it can also help to improve the overall quality and SEO performance of your blog post.

This is because search engines like Google place a high value on content that is relevant and engaging. By using open-source or original multimedia, you can be sure that your content is more likely to meet these criteria.

You can also use your target SERPs to guide your media choices. For example, if the SERP has video results, you could utilise the top current videos if they aren’t too competitive, or it might be worth creating your own to try and rank for that SERP feature! 

Top tip: If including a video in your content, you can embed the video within your post to improve engagement.

Step 6: Use Tools To Optimise

Once your post is written, you can use SEO tools to check that your blog is optimised for your target search engine results pages. Our favourite is SEOSurfer, which is a free online tool that allows you to check your blog post for common SEO mistakes.

You can also use the Yoast SEO plugin to set your metadata and ensure your post is ready to be found by search engines.

Digital marketing agencies, like us here at Dandy, have access to a range of SEO-friendly article writing tools and optimisation tools that we use for our clients.

Step 7: Upload & Let Google Do the Rest!

Finally, upload your blog to your site and let Google do the rest! Don’t forget to upload your meta description, title tag and images along with your blog post to make sure they are all optimised for your target keywords.

We recommend using Google’s Search Console to check that your blog post is being indexed properly and to identify any potential crawling or indexing issues.

You can also use tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs to track the performance of your blog post and see how it is performing in the search results. By monitoring your blog’s traffic and engagement, you can make additional changes to improve its ranking.

Looking For Regular, Expert SEO-Friendly Blog Posts?

So that’s it! How to write an SEO-friendly blog post in a few straightforward steps. We hope you found our guide useful and to the point, just like we try to be.

If you’re looking to improve your search rankings, traffic and engagement but don’t have the time or expertise to do it yourself, get in touch with Dandy today. We’re a full-service digital marketing agency with over 10 years’ experience in providing SEO-friendly blog posts for our clients.

We’ll work with you to understand your target audience and what they’re looking for, then produce high-quality, engaging content that is optimised for your target keywords. So why not give us a try? We even offer a free, no-obligation website SEO audit to get you started.

Check out our SEO packages or Book Your Free SEO Audit today!