A Checklist for Writing An SEO-Friendly Blog Post

When it comes to writing blog posts, you want to make sure that you’re creating content that will rank as highly as possible. The higher it ranks, the more traffic it receives. In turn, this will increase engagement and encourage readers to spend more time on the site. 

If you’re using your website to sell products and services, then this is even more beneficial. An SEO-friendly blog post will enable you to plug everything you have to offer your customers, as well as provide informative and helpful information in the form of a blog post. But how can you create a blog post that is SEO-friendly? 

It’s fairly straightforward if you know how. In this article, we’ll be taking you through a checklist for writing SEO-friendly content, from keyword research to fact-checking. Here’s how to write an SEO-friendly blog post for your website: 

Do keyword research

The first thing you need to do when it comes to writing SEO-friendly content is to do your research beforehand. This is something that should be done before you even think about putting anything down on paper. In fact, keyword research should be done long before your idea generation. 

Often, this is the very first step in content creation, mainly because you need to know what people are searching for on the internet. If you’re writing an article about a topic that no one is looking for, then it won’t be seen and internet users won’t find your new blog post, let alone the website you’re wanting to expose. Keyword research is an imperative stage in the process of writing SEO-friendly blog posts. 

You can do your keyword research using a number of tools, including Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You should search for the words and terms related to the topic you want to write about and then weigh up the search volumes with the competition levels. Choose words and phrases with a medium-to-high search volume, but with a medium-to-low competition for the best balance.

Have a decent word count 

It’s well known in the marketing industry that long-form content drives more traffic to your website than a short-form piece of content. The longer your content is, the better, in the eyes of Google algorithm. Not only does it give Google more information to crawl, but it also allows you to scatter your keywords and phrases out more evenly. 

This will help to avoid keyword stuffing, which actually has a negative effect on SEO, therefore pushing your content further down in the search engine results pages (SERPs). There are many other benefits of having long-form content on your blog, and they include:

• SEO benefits
• Higher rankings in the SERPs
• Enhanced engagement, sharing and conversions
• Increased compatibility with short-form content, including micro-copy
• Ready-made, quality content can be broken down into smaller chunks to create other forms of content, including infographics

Focus on quality 

In order for your blog post to perform well in the SERPs, Google needs to see that you have a genuine purpose to help your audience. If your blog post is of high quality and is considered to have a people-first approach, then it’s far more likely to outperform lower-quality content. 

Not only does quality content read better, but it also demonstrates authority, expertise and trustworthiness, making it more likely that website visitors will stick around to read your content or follow through to other pages on your website. 

Part of generating quality content includes checking it for spelling and grammar errors and fact-checking information, making sure your content is as accurate and trustworthy as possible. We’ll touch on accuracy and relevancy later on in this blog post as part of your checklist for writing an SEO-friendly piece of content.

Create a captivating blog post title

Blog post titles are very important. They have the power to shape a reader’s first impression of your article, without even opening it. That’s the issue. Someone can develop an opinion of your content without clicking the link, so you need to make sure the title is captivating and engaging enough for someone to want to click on it. You also need to find the right balance. Don’t resort to clickbait. Make sure the title is relevant to the topic, but not boring or run of the mill. 

Add a meta description to your blog post before putting it live

A meta description is an HTML meta tag that can be added to a wide range of online content, from website pages to blog posts. It provides a short description of the content you’re writing to the search engines so that they know how relevant it is and where to rank it. It gives the algorithm a helping hand, so it’s always better to write a meta description for your blog post than to leave it blank. Some tips for writing a meta description are as follows:

• Keep it at 155 characters or less
• Use an active voice
• Make it actionable
• Include a ‘call to action’ (CTA)
• Use focus keywords
• Show specifications
• Make sure it matches the blog post content
• Make it unique

Include outbound and internal links

You might think that the inclusion of inbound and outbound links isn’t relevant to SEO, but they actually have more weighting and more of an impact on SEO than you might have otherwise thought. Internal and outbound links are essential for improving domain authority, alongside increasing organic visibility and establishing credibility. 

This is normally referred to, within the industry, as ‘link building’. Link building can mean one of two things, either the outbound or internal links I have just mentioned, or writing blog posts for placement on a blog that is relevant to your industry, but not placing them on your own blog. You don’t need to worry about the latter for now. Instead, shift your focus to building links within your own blog posts. Internal links will link to other pages or blog posts on your own website. 

External links, on the other hand, are links that go outside of your website, to other sources. The main reason for external or outbound linking is to reference sources, but you can weave them in and around your content for good measure, even when not referencing facts, statistics and other data pieces.

Add images to your blog post

According to Lumen SEO, blog posts that have a picture of some sort attached to them will get 94% more views than a blog post without any visuals at all. However, you need to approach the sourcing of images with caution, so as to prevent breaches of copyright law. The best way to get around this is to either take your own photos to accompany your blog posts or sign up to stock photo websites, for a small monthly fee. 

Alternatively, if you have the budget, you could even hire an illustrator to get the job done, but this can be expensive. The options are endless when it comes to adding images to your blog posts, without being hit with penalties for unintentional copyright breaches. Adding images to your blog post is a very quick and simple process. The blogging platform you’re on should make it as easy as possible to add photos and images, so follow the process and have some fun with it! There are some other benefits of adding images to articles, such as:

• Content will rank higher in the SERPs, compared to content without images
• It improves social sharing
• It increases clarity 
• It makes the content more memorable 
• Visitors skim-read, generally, so they’ll be more engaged by images

Categorise your blog posts when publishing

When publishing the content you have written, there is usually an option to add tags or categories to your blog post. Let’s say you have a blog about cars and you’ve written an article about how to check the tyre tread depth, you can categorise it as ‘domestic’, ‘tyres’, ‘information’ and ‘news’, for instance. You don’t have to stick to just one category. You can add multiple tags and categories, provided they’re relevant to the content you have created. 

It will also help your website visitors to find other relevant information. Going back to our previous example, if you added the ‘tyres’ category to the blog post, then a reader could click on the ‘tyres’ category and that would then show them all of the other blog posts you have that are relevant to car tyres. It will also help you to find specific content pieces you have written, to help avoid content duplication. 

Ensure the information is accurate & relevant

We’ve already mentioned the importance of writing quality blog posts if you want them to perform well in the SERPs, but part of that involves using information that is both relevant and accurate. To acquire up-to-date information you can trust, you need to do your research. 

This could end up taking you the same amount of time that it does to write the blog post, but it’s all worth it in the end. When researching the blog post topic, you will need to use trusted sources so as to ensure the facts and statistics you’re providing are accurate and true, to the best of your knowledge. 

Once you’ve found those quality sources, reference them in your blog post. You can either do this by adding outbound links, which is a great way of ticking off the external and internal links part of this checklist, or you could reference them in the footer, as you would an academic paper. We have provided a few research tips below for you:

• Choose academic and industry-specific sources
• Use online databases and libraries
• Evaluate source credibility to avoid misinformation
• Include in-text citations when you use direct quotes, paraphrased information or statistics and data
• Add end-of-post references or a ‘works cited’ section at the end of your content
• Check your content for plagiarism using tools like Grammarly and other content checkers

Kumo is a dedicated digital marketing agency with over two decades of experience in the industry. We have a specialist marketing team at the helm of our operations who are experienced in their respective fields. From SEO and PPC to content writing and website design, we can always be counted upon to propel your business into the spotlight and set you apart from your competitors. If you would like further information about our digital marketing services near you, then get in touch with a member of our friendly, professional team today – we’re always pleased to hear from you.