For blogs to be successful, not only must they be well-written, conversational yet authoritative, and address key concerns or questions for their audience, but they must also be optimized so they rank high enough in people’s internet searches that they get read in the first place! You’ve probably got the writing part and topics covered, but we’re here to help with the tech. Use our 4-step guide to prep and publish your blog for best SEO, and your blogs will reach far more of the right people every time.
From there, you can watch your business soar.
As a small business owner or writer, you’re well-versed in why and how blogs are essential for audience growth, visibility, sales, and being held in high esteem in your field.
On the emotional/intellectual side, a wide range of continuous blog content illustrates to your audience that you are current, invested, and engaged in issues they care about. This helps them feel warm toward you and your business, which ultimately translates into loyalty, sharing of your services and products, and increased sales.
There’s a strong technical aspect to blogs, however, that’s critical to their landing in people’s laps in the first place: SEO.
SEO is Search Engine Optimization, or in lay-language, the technical trickery you implement in the content and back-end of your blog to indicate to Google that your blog is “valuable” and worth being shown over content written by your competitors.
Google scans every page on the web and ranks them based on 200 criteria. If you post regularly, you’re giving Google a lot to scan, which is great, but if you post blogs that are optimized for SEO? Whoa, boy, look out! That’s the best situation to be in.
Fine-tuning every blog to meet 200 different criteria sounds like a headache. And it kind of is. But the reality is this: You can prep and publish your blogs until the end of time, but without SEO, those beautiful ideas you spent so much time creating will languish on your site, unread.
If you want to grow and scale your business, sell more services or products, or simply make a greater mark on the world you occupy, blogs are a highly useful way of doing it.
1) Research keywords for topic, title, and excerpt, then write your first draft in full
2) Revise the blog so it is clear, scannable, and includes outside resources
3) Implement SEO tactics
4) Format your blog for web reading and maximum engagement
You can write on topics that appeal to you or that you know your audience would enjoy/find helpful, but to go for the SEO jugular, meaning to write on topics people search for most, start by doing some keyword research.
AnswerthePublic or Moz (free) or Semrush (paid) will give you a list of long-tail keywords and their ranking, which is based on how often people search for those exact terms.
Long tail keywords are the word groupings or phrases a person enters into the Google search bar, such as “adopt rescue dog in San Jose California” or “how to make fried chicken without a deep fryer.”
Your long-tail keyword will serve as the basis for your blog.
Use a plugin on your website (AIOSEO or Yoast for WordPress), your website’s SEO title feature, or follow best practices for a high-ranking SEO title to find one that checks all the boxes.
You want to make sure your title has the keywords, skews toward the right emotion, is under 50 characters, and clearly indicates the blog’s purpose is.
The blog excerpt is the short summary or introductory paragraph at the top of the blog. Readers will skim this text to gauge whether they’d like to keep reading. Google will also crawl this text for keywords and overall “value” (so it needs to be bright, focused, and clearly presented. No typos!)
Note: if you write the blog first then write the excerpt, that may be easier (it’s challenging to summarize or distill something to its essence if it doesn’t exist yet).
There are many ways to reach a destination, but the fastest way for you to get a complete first draft of your blog—and the best way for you to get to the heart of your topic—is to write it in full without stopping and starting to edit.
That said, to write without editing at the same time is a challenge for many people, namely business owners or perfectionists who are accustomed to seeing their writing perform at a high level straight out of the gate.
Some blogs may emerge from you more easily than others.
Other blogs may take a little longer. For these, you may need to figure out what you want to say through the act of writing.
Tip: write your blog title at the top of your page. Refer to it often to ensure you’re remaining on track, while allowing yourself to write freely to get to your best ideas.
The more give yourself permission to get into a “flow” and write without stopping or looking backwards to edit, critique, or judge, the more you will arrive at your destination: a messy but complete first draft.
*Feeling nervous about this process? Check out “How to Stop Being a Perfectionist and Just Write Your First Draft.“
After you’ve let some air in so you can see your draft through “new eyes,” read through the draft and add subheaders every few hundred words. This directs the material and keeps it lean and tight to its topic. (Google also rewards a blog that’s chunked into sections and includes subheaders).
Look at the length. A longer blog is better for SEO:
Aim for a minimum 750 words, but a blog that’s over 1,000 words is best.
According to Neil Patel, blog posts that are over 1,500 words don't necessarily rank better, but they are much more likely to be tweeted about and liked on Facebook.
Neil Patel, “How Long Should a Blog Be.”
What sets you as a writer or business apart from your competitors is your brand “voice” or the persona you take on when writing on behalf of your business or author-self.
This persona is what people fall in love and develop a relationship with, so you want it to be the best aspects of your brand: warm, charming, funny, smart, etc.
The more engaging and human-voiced your blog, the more people will remain on the page to read it, so your voice and tone are key.
Tip: Tempting though it is, AI will never be able to encapsulate your authentic voice and authority and is not advised.
Your audience also has specific concerns that you’re in the unique position to solve in a way no one else can.
Know your audience, and you’ll be able to tap into their “pain points” enough to gain their trust over anyone else.
(This street crossing is in a neighborhood zoned for horses. Now that’s knowing your audience!)
Enhance your ideas with others’ ideas. Add quotes, research, and facts and stats from other credible sources.
Any time you wish to bolster, back up, or broaden your ideas, use outside sources to validate your own. This additional material also lends weight and gravitas and provides a good counterpoint to the abundance of AI-generated “fake news” and misinformation.
Note: Google crawls sites looking for false, regurgitated, or AI-generated blogs and penalizes them while rewarding blogs that are authentic, innovative, and clearly written by a person.
Referencing others’ materials adeptly and with care is a wonderful SEO strategy.
There is a variety of blog types you can choose from for any given blog (problem-solution-call to action; list structure; review or round-up/best-of, interview, etc.). Confirm your blog follows its specific structure and logically progresses without any tangents or extraneous information.
Now that the bones of the blog are in place, you can do a last revision and edit before you hit “publish.”
There are two ways to smooth out the blog and ready it for prime time: Rewrite it or edit it (and/or then rewrite it).
Rewriting will typically yield a more fluid reading experience because you can edit as you write the second draft. Because you’re not cutting, pasting, and bridging between existing content, you’re best able to make sure the ideas and sentences are evenly paced and tonally consistent.
Editing means adding, cutting, and moving things around. Afterwards, if you find some sections choppy, you can rewrite as needed.
This is the last “fine-toothed comb” touch you’ll make as you prep & publish your blog for best SEO results.
Copy edit for musicality and correctness. Each sentence should be clear, not too long or wending, and lean. Plus, it should be pleasant to read.
Not to be dramatic, but proofreading is a critical last step. As you know, competition for readers’ attention is fierce. If you have errors, your reader may think you’re as sloppy in your work as you are in your text and move on. And that’s it; you will have lost them forever.
The number one way to lose your credibility, even if you have 3 PhDs and are the dean of a university is typos.
Go back and refine your long-tail keyword and make sure you’ve used it in all the right places:
Use short-tail or focus keyphrases at other points in the blog.
Note: While keyphrases should be used throughout, they need to feel natural. If they’re chunkily dropped in or you do “keyword stuffing” (which content farms are famous for), Google will penalize the site.
Some folks try to get around having to use the keywords so many times by plugging them into white spaces throughout the blog in a white font. This is a serious no-no. (Google can read all colors of the rainbow!)
*See what I did there? The image + subscribe field above is a classic example of a CTA.
Blogs provide you with the opportunity to invite your reader to do something: buy, read on, subscribe to your newsletter, etc.
If you have a newsletter (and if you do not, go get one!), include a subscribe field about 1/3 of the way down the blog.
Repeat your subscribe field or add a second call to action relating to the blog’s content at the bottom: what action do you want your reader to take once they’ve finished reading?
The second CTA could be a link to:
Link to other websites. An easy and useful SEO strategy is to link to other websites.
If you’ve taken information from other webpages, such as a quote, a statistic, or borrowed their original ideas, linking respectfully gives credit where it’s due.
Linking also enables readers to check out the linked source material to do a deeper dive on the subject.
One of the original reasons for blogs, as deemed by Google, was to share and distribute information as part of an online community. When a blog illustrates that it’s a team player by linking to other sites, Google rewards it with higher rankings.
Be sure to link only to reputable sites with updated content; you do not want to associate with out-of-date or unkempt sites that could lower your ranking by association.
The links should also be spread organically throughout your copy; listing them in bulk is a no-no (Google penalizes this as “link stuffing”).
Tip: Offer to write guest posts for others’ websites, which is a great way to get backlinks.
NOTE: You can’t do link trades with other businesses as the links will cancel each other out.
*(You can however do “off-page” SEO and trade Google reviews if you’re business owners or Amazon and Goodreads reviews if you’re an author).
Add Alt data for your images and include your business name and website in the image title and description.
(Example: journal writing as a form of self care at One Lit Place for onelitplace.com).
Make your blog easy to scan. Web reading is hard on the eyes. Format your blog to make it easy to “scan” and to keep your readers’ eyes engaged:
And that’s it. You did it!
The more you use this 4-step process to prep and publish your blogs for best SEO results, the easier it will get.
Keep this blog handy for reference so you can implement as many SEO strategies as possible. And if you run into issues or have questions, please comment on the blog, and we’ll help you through them so you soon feel confident and comfortable that you’re doing the right thing for your business.
Your audience, your reputation, and your bottom line will thank you!
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