When you were at school, your teacher probably repeatedly said “quality over quantity” before ironically slapping you with a minimum-word-length essay. When it comes to writing content for your website, however, this stands true.
If you’ve done any research into SEO, you’ll most likely have come across the phrase, “Content is King”. While not incorrect, it doesn’t quite do the whole process justice. Google doesn’t actually like content that’s been written for the sake of it. In fact, part of its Panda update was to penalize sites that presented thin, irrelevant, or repetitive content.
In that case, “Content is King” should probably be changed to “Relevant Content is King”. Google is fundamentally about giving web users what they want – if they’re searching for specific information, it needs to make that information easy to find. Your website can have 10,000 pages of content, but if they aren’t relevant, you won’t make it into the results.
One of the best ways to add new, relevant content to your website involves writing blogs that relate to your business. These blogs can offer advice, FAQs, and guides (like this one).
Of course, it’s not always as simple as just writing some blogs. Planning is crucial to an effective blog campaign, which is why we’re presenting you with a guide on how you should approach writing SEO-friendly blog content.
HOW TO PLAN BLOG WRITING
So you’ve decided to write a blog. You’re sitting at your computer rearing to go. Before you know it, you’ve spent half an hour thinking of a topic. You spend the next half hour searching for some inspiration. Your phone rings. It’s time for a cup of tea. You get an email. A colleague has a question. You forget about the blog. The blog doesn’t get written. You promise yourself you’ll do it tomorrow. You don’t.
This is incredibly common, particularly if you’re not a seasoned writer. This can be prevented, however, through careful planning and goal setting. Start off with a simple question: how many blogs do I want to write?
Let’s say the answer to this question is twelve. You should then ask yourself across what time period should you write your blogs? Let’s then say the answer to that is twelve months. Do the math and you’ll find this means you should be writing one blog every month for the next year. Sounds simple enough, right?
Next, we need to think of twelve topics. For inspiration, you can consider several things:
- What do your customers regularly ask you?
- What do you find yourself repeatedly having to explain?
- Do you have any new services coming up or already launched?
- Do you have an opinion on something relevant?
- Is there a misconception about a certain product or service?
- What do you feel your customers need to know before choosing a provider?
Once you’ve done this twelve times, you’ve got your blog schedule for the next year. Suddenly, you don’t need to spend half an hour thinking of topics anymore.
This has the added benefit of giving you time to think about what you’ll be writing. Carry on with your day-to-day business and you’ll find you come across inspiration for your upcoming blog content.
Hot Tip! Due to the rise in voice searches from smartphones, the way users search is changing. More and more question-based queries are being searched such as “How Do I”, “What Does”, or “Who is”. Because of this, blogs that use questions as titles tend to perform better in search results. Don’t be scared of using questions as blog titles, but just make sure your blog actually answers the question.
FINDING GOOD SEO KEYWORDS FOR BLOGS
To get the most out of your blogs, you should consider optimizing them with SEO keywords. How you find SEO keywords can differ depending on your level of technical knowledge. Tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner/Search Console, AhRefs, SEMRush can spit out keyword search volume for a given set of search terms with little input, and most of these tools offer a limited free service.
Let’s suggest you want to write an article about “how to write blogs”. You could sign up for a free keyword planner tool and try to find out how many people search how to write blogs each month. If there is a good amount of search volume behind this term, then consider working into your article topic, and main titles.
Hot Tip! Some people actually do this before thinking of topics, and let the keywords they choose guide the subject of their blogs. Try both ways to find which works for you.
GET WRITING YOUR BLOGS
You should now have enough to start writing your blog, so how do you actually write your blog? The key is in remembering that it’s your blog. It acts as a representation of your attitude and your expertise in your industry, so let your knowledge flow.
Keep in mind the audience for your blogs. If your customers tend to be quite casual, then avoid overly formal language and keep the tone cheerful. If you’re writing for lawyers, however, in most cases formality is key and your writing style should respond to that.
Above all, keep your content true. If you’re going to use stats, figures, or quotations to support your topic, don’t make it up and make sure to reference the source of third-party information.
Get Started with Blogs Today
Once you’ve taken the time to structure and plan your campaign, you’ll suddenly find blog writing becomes much more enjoyable and easier to finish. Remember to share your blogs on your social media, and if you have one, your Google My Business listing. For more advanced webmasters, you can also submit the blog’s URL to Google Search Console to have Google index the article faster. We also suggest you follow a few blogs to gather ideas on how to communicate your topics in different ways (try these top blog feeds).
If you’ve tried this over and over again and find you simply can’t get it done, you can always opt for a blog writing service such as the one offered by Impressive. If you’d like to learn more about what this involves, reach out to your Account Manager.