SEO Blog Writing Tips: Boost Traffic to Your Website

If one of your business resolutions for this year is to get your website ranking higher on SERPs, then you likely have creating blog content down on your to-do list. We’ve pulled this step-by-step guide together—scattering in some SEO-friendly blog tips to help guide you through the process of writing blog posts that should help boost traffic to your website.

Just by following the straightforward steps below, you will set your website up for success in a way that appeals to readers and search engines alike.

Step 1: Define Your Primary Keyword

You might have noticed that we said “keyword,” not “keywords.” That was not a typo but rather to encourage you to make you focus on the blog post you are writing. The keyword should be in conjunction with the theme of your blog post and ‘make sense’ to an audience, reader, or search bot. Your keyword should be popular with your target audience. The more people looking for that one keyword or phrase, the better your traffic will be to a site. We propose focusing on popular keywords and their variations so as to maximize the available growth potential.

Consider the competition. That is, if you’re researching a keyword or phrase that many, many websites are fighting for, skip it. Try a variation or take a different view altogether. Keep in mind that in order for your website to have any chance of ranking for a given search term, it must have more authority than competing websites. One of the tools you will love, and we do, is Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty Tool—used to pull a report that includes the top keywords within your industry, topic, or theme. It also offers popularity scores, which will indicate how often people look for a term, and competition scores that would give you an estimate of how difficult it will be to make your website rank through those keywords.

Step 2: Define Your Secondary Keywords

Now that you’ve determined your main keyword, it’s time to actually select two to four secondary keywords to use within your post. They should be made up of continuity with your main keyword since they come in to help the search engines further understand and rank the SEO of your blog post accordingly. First things first, head to Google and throw your primary keyword in the search bar. Check out the list of ‘related’ searches and select two to four ending words that best relate to the primary keyword. Among the different tools you can use, the SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant add-on for Google Docs will show relevant secondary keywords for your post.

Step 3: Begin Writing

That said, in order to maximize every write-up, make sure your content is useful and practical for your target audience and for search engines. You write your blog as if you were directly talking to your readers because, after all, you are writing for your readers and not for the search engines. Make sure to write at least 300 words per blog post, but strive to reach 1000 words when possible. In this way, you ensure that search engines get enough information to understand and rank your content in a corresponding manner.

Incorporate your keywords naturally. Never use forced-sounding set keyword phrases that may read to Google as if you’re trying to make its robot brain happy. Keyword density remains at about 2%, which translates to using the primary keyword once or twice in every 100 words. Using your keyword too many times leads to keyword stuffing, where the search engines might penalize your page. Great content first, then strategic keyword placement. Begin your blog post with the use of your primary keyword in the first paragraph to give the search engines an early indication of what your blog is about, but sound natural.

Subheadings are a wonderful place to insert your primary keyword, as this helps organize the content of your article into manageable chunks while providing the search engines with more context. Use secondary keywords very sparingly—the focus needs to be on the primary keyword. Conclude your article by once more using your primary keyword, if possible, as part of a call to action, to give the search engine the signal that you’ve comprehensively dealt with the topic.

Avoid copying others’ content, as this will not only raise a lot of problems with copyright but will also damage your SEO. Search engines will shrink duplicate content; hence, it is really necessary that you create original and valued content. Run your blog through tools like Grammarly to catch grammar mistakes so that it reads smoothly and professionally.

Step 4: Optimize Your Blog Post

Now, it’s time to optimize your content after you have created it. First, introduce your major keyword to the page title in a reader-friendly manner since readers are going to see this title in search engine results pages. Then introduce the keyword in the permalink—the unique URL of your blog post—and make sure the SEO title goes well with the page title and permalink.

Second, the meta description is significant for search engine visibility, so include the primary keyword therein, too. This short blurb does much to invite people to click on your post from the search results.

Categorize your contents and also put relevant tags, as it will help search engines to trace more about your site and serve to relevant audiences. Also, remember to add alt-text for each image you post, as the search engines aren’t able to “see” images. When you provide alt-text, that is descriptive and includes your main keyword, you enhance your images’ relevance in your general SEO strategy. Want to know more about how web design can complement your overall SEO? Take a closer look at some of our web design services.

Step 5: Internal and External Links

By adding internal links within your blog, you are allowing the search engines to crawl through your website while continuing to interact with readers of your content. You can refer to related content, such as pointing to our technical SEO guide for an in-depth view, and link to it. You can also link out to some relevant external authoritative sources; that will add credibility to your blog and add value to your audience.

Step 6: Check Your SEO Score

It’s why we love using Alexa’s On-Page SEO Checker. This will enable you to decide how your content fits best with the SEO best practices and whether or not it needs further improvement to keep the content search friendly.
If you want to level up your blog game and get your content to the next level—but just still aren’t quite sure where to start—Adffect is here to help. We will be able to help you build SEO-savvy blog posts every month to drive more traffic and grow your business. Reach out, and we can find a time that works best to chat about all the ways we can help create amazing content to drive traffic to your site and improve your bottom line.