With a blog, you can post ideas, thoughts, and stories on your website about any topic. They can help you increase brand awareness, credibility, conversions and revenue. Most importantly, they can help you drive traffic to your website.
Today, people and organizations from all walks of life run blogs to share analysis, how-tos, reviews, product information, industry findings, and more.
What makes a good blog post?
Before you blog, make sure you know the answers to these questions: “Why would someone keep reading this entire blog post?” and “What keeps our audience coming back for more?”
For starters, a good blog post is interesting and educational. Blogs should answer questions and help readers solve a challenge they are experiencing, and they should do it in an interesting way.
It’s not enough to just answer someone’s questions, you also need to provide actionable steps. For example, the introduction should hook the reader and make them want to continue reading your post. Then use examples to keep your readers interested in what you have to say.
How to write a blog post: the simple formula to follow
- Define a strategy.
- Select a main theme.
- Consider all your on-page SEO.
- Organise your content.
- Develop the content of your blog.
1. Define a strategy
Before even starting to write your blog, it is important that you define in which sector you want to position yourself, who you want to attract, what you want users and clients to achieve through your post and what are topics in which you hope to establish yourself as an opinion leader.
For this, it is also essential that you clearly know the guest article and the audience to which you are going to address. What information are you interested in knowing? What do you identify with? That is why it is useful to generate buyer personas (consumer profiles). Consider what you know about your buyer personas and their interests when defining the strategy for your publication.
For example, if you want to attract millennial readers who want to start a business, you probably don’t need to provide them with essential information about social media, since most of them know these platforms very well.
Even so, it would be advisable that you give them information on how to adjust their social media dissemination to move from a more informal and personal vision to one that is more business, professional and focused. That kind of tweak makes the difference between posting generic stuff on your blog and posting what your audience really wants (and needs) to hear .
2. Select a main theme
Before you unleash your creativity, you need to choose a topic for your post.
Depending on the topic you want to position yourself with, you should ask yourself how many more articles on the same topic you can write. A great way to represent this is to resort to the topic clustering strategy , as it will help you deconstruct your main theme into sub-themes and complementary themes .
This allows you to define the angles with the greatest organic potential and those most related to your product, even if they do not have as much search volume. In addition to the creation of different content, this strategy also helps you to have blogs ready for internal links and thus connect readers between articles in the same cluster.
We know that generating ideas for blog posts can be a bit exhausting, but with a little effort you can get a great list of alternatives to develop.
To get you on the right track, we recommend creating a search metrics report that revolves around the topic you want to address. This will be the best way to plan the content of your post to improve the organic traffic of your blog.
3. Consider all your on-page SEO
There is a step prior to writing your blog that you cannot leave last and this is the SEO of your post. We recommend thinking about SEO insights and then developing your content around that. This process will help you to know what aspects your user is interested in and then complement them with other more specific ones in which you are an expert; for example, something more related to the functions of your product or service.
Some of the aspects in which you should improve the SEO of your blog are the following:
meta description
Meta descriptions are the descriptions that follow the post title on Google search results pages. They provide searchers with a brief summary of the post before clicking on it.
They are usually between 150 and 160 characters long and start with a verb like “learn”, “read” or “discover”. While meta descriptions are no longer a determining factor in Google’s keyword ranking algorithm, they do give searchers an overview of what they’ll get by reading your post, which can help improve your clickthrough rate. in searches.
Page title and headers
Your post and page titles are the most important elements for on-page SEO. For this moment you can opt for a provisional title, which will help you naturally include interesting key words or phrases for the audience you are targeting.
If you’re a plumber, you might start with a working title about leaky faucets. Later, you could optimize your title with different provisional ideas; that is, different ways of approaching the subject to help you direct your writing. For example, you might decide to narrow your focus to something like “tools to fix leaky faucets” or “common causes of leaky faucets.” A working title is specific and will lay the foundation for your post so you can start writing.
Do you notice the evolution from the theme to the provisional title, and then to the final title? Even if the working title doesn’t end up being the final one, it provides enough information so that you can focus your post on a more specific topic, rather than a generic or overwhelming topic (more on that in a bit).
Remember that your title should contain keywords. Also, keep your headers short (preferably less than 65 characters) so they don’t get truncated in search engine results.
Anchor text (or anchor text)
The anchor text, or anchor text, is the word or words that link to another page, either on your site or on another website. Carefully select the keywords you want to link to from other pages on your site, as search engines consider this when ranking your page for certain keywords.
It is also important to check the pages you link to. Consider linking to pages that you want to rank well for that keyword. In the end, you could get a ranking on the first page of Google results, instead of the second, which is no small feat.
Mobile optimization
It is increasingly important to have a website that is responsive or designed for mobile technology. In addition to making sure that visitors to your website (including visitors to your blog) have the best possible experience, optimizing your technology for mobile devices will allow you to improve your website’s SEO.
Surely, you already have more than clear the importance of the mobile optimization of your website. From 2015 until the last updates of the Google algorithm in 2022, those sites that are not optimized for mobile devices are penalized.
Approximately 61% of organic visits to search engines are made via mobile phones. This makes it more than clear that mobile optimization is essential if you want your content to rank correctly for the search intentions you want to cover.
If you need help with on-page SEO, our free CMS has an SEO recommendation tool so you can improve both your overall site and your blog.
4. Organise your content
Sometimes posts can have an overwhelming amount of information for both the reader and the writer. The trick is to organize the information so that readers are not intimidated by the length or amount of content. You can organize the information in various ways: sections, lists, tips or whatever is most appropriate for you. But the post must be organized!
Let’s take a look at the « Guide on how to use Snapchat for your brand » post. There is a lot of content in this post, so we broke it down into different sections using the following headings: “How to set up your Snapchat account”, “How to use, send and view snaps”, and “How to use Snapchat for business”. The sections have been separated into subsections, which are more detailed and also make the content more dynamic.
To finish this step, all you need is to create a draft of your post. In this way, before you start writing, you will know what points you want to cover and what will be the best order to develop them.
5. Develop the content of your blog
The moment of truth has arrived: writing the content itself. We couldn’t forget about that, of course.
Now that you’ve covered the most important SEO points and the topic cluster you’re going to focus on, use the draft as a guide to make sure you detail all the points as needed. When writing about a topic you know, you can do a little more research to gather information, examples, and data to back up your points.
Don’t forget to provide proper attribution when incorporating external sources. For example, if you’re writing a digital marketing blog, you might want to incorporate some up-to-date , compelling marketing trend statistics to give more weight to what you say in your post.
If you find yourself having trouble linking sentences together, you’re not alone. Finding the way can be really challenging for many people. Fortunately, there are hundreds of blogging tools that you can take advantage of and improve your writing skills.
In the same way, you can take into account the essential characteristics of a blog so that, in addition to having good SEO optimization, it also has a better structure and the right tone for your target audience.
