Insights | Sam Agusti-Nuernberger

Best practices for writing a blog with SEO in mind

When writing a blog post, the holy grail end result is to be that beautiful google featured snippet result for a commonly searched question. Though it seems near impossible, it’s not. However, you do have to be really focused on writing a blog with a great SEO strategy, and positioning your site among your audience as a legitimate resource.

Trust me, I know, writing a blog post takes so much work; it’s exhausting and somehow that’s just the beginning. Once it’s written, you have to get it out there so that your audiences can find it, consume it and reference it over and over again. Making sure your audience finds your blog post doesn’t have to be so hard, so long as you build a solid SEO Strategy to help write your blog post with SEO in mind.

In order to write a good blog post, there’s some things you need to know about how Google indexes SEO: 
  1. The internet reads at a 6th-grade reading level. Make it accessible: avoid industry jargon; Avoid complex words and phrases.  
  2. Google prioritizes your headlines in order from H1 down to H6, and THEN paragraph text. So as much as you can, put your keywords into those higher-level headlines since Google will care about it more. Use subheads and section headlines to help break up your content and build in more high-level headlines to include those essential keywords. 
  3. Google does not like passive voice. It prefers an active voice that gives clear and exact definitions or directions to the user. When writing blog posts, site metadata, or SEM ad copy, aim to use more active words. (I.e. “Learn how to write a blog post.” “Prioritize specific keywords for good SEO practice.”)
  4. Tools like Yoast SEO are awesome to use on the backend of your site. They’re typically a free plugin and can help you tell Google which keywords you want it to scan for. Sites that use (and maintain) these types of plugins tend to have more success than those sites without it.  
What’s a Good Blog Post SEO Strategy

Before you sit down to write, you should identify some main components of what you’re trying to achieve by publishing the blog post. This means thinking though who your primary audience is; what the post objective and correlating CTAs are; and how you’ll ultimately measure your success.

After that, it’s time to do a little SEO strategy research. When you come up with a topic idea, you make some assumptions that people out in the world care about what you want to talk about. SEO research will confirm that for you. We suggest using a tool like Google Keyword Planner or SEMRush to do a little keyword to see what is actually trending in the search world. Incorporating those keywords that people are actually searching are the most important part of writing a good blog post.

After you’ve done all that… once you know who you’re talking to, and the right keywords to pepper into your work, then you can start writing your GREAT blog post that rooted in SEO strategy.

Sound a little tough? No worries.

We’ve got your back! Check out our download.

Here you’ll find a handy worksheet that we recommend filling out before you start writing your blog post. We’ve included some descriptions of each component that you’ll need to think about for a successful, SEO-driven blog post.