SEO Writing: How To Write User First Blog Posts That Rank Higher

Blog posting in SEO is one of the most powerful and effective ways to reach your audience, build trust, and drive traffic to your website. 

But to get the most out of your blog posts, you need to show some SEO writing skills to make your blogs helpful for your users in finding the required information easily.

After all…

A well-drafted blog is a reason behind the conversion of 57% of cold leads into buying consumers and the 13-timer positive impact on a company’s ROI.

Just take a look at the graph below and notice how I acquired a massive 104,000 clicks on my website’s blog posts in a matter of a few months. 

The reason behind this incremental success? We focused on producing unique and informative content for my users. Period! 

So, if you like these hard-to-crunch numbers and would like to learn how to write SEO-friendly blog posts for your website, then just keep reading!

What Is SEO Writing?

SEO writing is a practice that involves the creation of search engine-friendly web content following the dynamic algorithms of search engines. 

For any writer who wants to gain the attention of a wider audience, it is necessary to optimize the content in such a manner that it ranks higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and receives more traffic.

This includes creating a well-researched, unique, informative, and useful piece of content that is of high quality. Perhaps the main objective of SEO writing is to deliver helpful content to your users that will keep them engaged and more likely to return to your website.

Moreover, it is found that websites that frequently publish SEO-friendly blogs that are search engine optimized drive 97% more links as compared to those that don’t. See the image below.

It is a fact that search engines such as Google hunt down content that is informative, entertaining, and enlightening, as well as content that helps consumers solve a problem. 

Therefore, the aim of writing SEO-friendly blog posts is to provide appropriate, elevated, keyphrase-concentrated material that thus performs well in Google searches to drive organic visitors to your website.

Tips For SEO Writing & How To Write SEO Friendly Blog Posts

Blog posts and articles demand your ability to write. You must consider the layout of the information that resides in your blogs and retain an appealing tone if you intend to keep your audience engaged. 

Readers will be significantly more likely to recommend your blog to their friends if they believe it to be intriguing and comprehensible, which will also improve your rankings. 

To know how to optimize blog posts for SEO, I have divided the whole process of writing blogs for SEO into 3 parts. Let us go through them one by one.

Pre-Phase Of SEO Content Writing

1. List A Few Niche Related Terms

Take out a copy and a pen, and just brainstorm. Understand the niche that your website revolves around and list out the topics related to it. 

It’s important to keep in mind that your website may offer material that is specialized, such as  skincare, beauty products, or it may be a compilation of various blogs covering various topics also.

For instance, if your website is all about Skincare and Beauty Products, your topics can include blogs about Daily Routines for Skincare, Best Skin Products For Daily Use, Simple Makeup Tips For Girls, etc. 

Understanding your niche and your expertise is a very personal process; therefore, these steps might help you.

• Establish your hobbies and fields that you are passionate about.
• Determine issues you can resolve 
• Research! Research! Research!
• Always pay attention to what your audience has to say.
• Test out
• Gather feedback
• Tweak your strategy for the content layout.

2. Understanding The Intent Of Your Audience

The next step is to understand the intent of your audience. As I always say, producing optimized content that resonates with your readers is a way to stand out from your competition. 

But, before you begin, let me briefly describe the types of intents that your content should cover in order to be appealing to the audience.

Broadly speaking, there are four different types of user intent that often determine the search patterns of your audience writing blogs for SEO. Your target market may fall under the:

1. Informational Intent: When a user is seeking out information about a particular subject, for example, “how to make apple pie at home?”

2. Navigational Intent: When a user is searching for a particular website or resource. For example, “Apple Pie recipes by Betty Crocker.”

3. Commercial Intent: Here, a user has already made up their mind to purchase but is researching a bit more before initiating a purchase. For example, “Best Apple Pies in (name of the place) or Natasha’s Apple Pie reviews,” etc.

4. Transactional Intent: This is the strongest user intent since it is service or product specific. Here, the user is determined to purchase a product or a service. For example, “Buy Frozen Apple Pie.”

Here’s a brief…

Here’s how to optimize your content for search intent

Now that you have a better understanding of how to target your audience based on the intent of their search patterns, here are a few important tips that will help you optimize your content: 

• You must recognize the search patterns of your audience and segregate the patterns that you relate to the most.
• You need to know the rationale behind why people look for such information.
• You have to realize the content that your audience is eager to learn revolves around your expertise.

But here you might ask, why should I consider the intent? Are the keywords not enough to create optimized content?

“Recently, Google rolled out a new update about user-first content, which is focused on providing user-first content that satisfies a visitor’s needs and provides more value, which would perform well as compared to content that does not meet the user’s expectations.”

Yes! You can use the keyword to create content, but make sure that the content is helpful for your audience. Indeed, they are enough to create optimized content, but single-handedly, are not enough to create optimized content that is worth reading.

Before jumping onto high-value keywords, perfectly embedded in your blogs, you need to thoroughly understand what your audience is seeking out. Understanding the problems that your audience still faces and trying to solve them, with the art of your writing will definitely boost your ability to rank higher.

I got you a complete guide to search intent that may help you understand what your audience is seeking out.

3. Do A Well Researched Competitor Analysis

Topics – Listed 👍, Intent – Understood 👍.

But still, this phase is incomplete…

To complete this, now comes the part where you have to analyze your competitors and later list out the keywords they are using to produce SEO content for their websites.

To do this, you can perform a simple Google search by running a keyword search related to your niche. Or, just simply go through one of my recent blog, “How To Do Competitor Analysis In SEO”

For instance, let’s bring back the “Skincare And Beauty Products” example. When you run a search term related to this, such as “Daily Skincare Routine” on Google, you get around 38,000,000 results.

So much content to write…
With this, the SERPs of the top 10 ranking websites are given below.

Looking at the search results, you could be able to tell what type of content your competitors or other websites are providing to their users.

Mostly, there are “how to” articles, and there are a few “Guide” forms of blog posts, such as step-by-step guides and beginner’s guides.

Look through these blog posts and see what information they are providing. Remember that you have to provide better and more optimized content than your competitors, including a few key terms or keywords (coming up next…).

But before we come to the keywords, here’s why analyzing your competitors and conducting research on them is important to deliver optimized content that is better and more effective. Look at the points listed below.

• You will get a thorough idea of the difference between the digital marketing efforts of your website compared to your rival’s. 

• It would also help in developing a better SEO content strategy that would later be helpful in creating SEO optimized content rich with competitive keywords.

• Analyzing your competitors would help you create better content that would definitely enhance your visibility in search engine rankings.

• If a competing website is better performing than yours for a particular keyword then all that you need is analysis techniques to identify those websites’ advantages so you can imitate them.

• Most importantly, analyzing the competition would help you list out the keywords that your competitors are using in their content to dominate the SERPs.

• Competitive analysis can assist you in identifying opportunities for improvement when your webpage is lagging behind in the SERPs and isn’t among the most prominent results.

Read More: 10+ SEO Competitor Analysis Tools To Enhance Traffic

4. Grab A Handful Of Worthy Keywords

The content you write and produce needs to be optimized using keywords and phrases. 

But the question is, how can you grab or list out these keywords? Well, I’ve got your back!

Remember those Google search results? Your Competitors! You just have to enter the URLs of those websites into the keyword research tools. 

Relevant: How To Perform Keyword Research For SEO: In-Depth Guide

Simply go to any of the keyword research tools and run the top 5-6 websites one by one. There are various keyword research tools available to grab a handful of worthy keywords that could possibly reach the top spot.

Let me show you how you can grab a few…

Go to any of the keyword research tools, here’s the list- 11 Best Keyword Research Tools In 2022– out of these, I prefer SEMrush.

Insert the URL of your competitors, select the location you want to target, and click “Search.”

Further, you will get to see the keywords that your competitors are using in their content. Based upon a few metrics such as Search Intent, SERP Position, KD, and Volume, you can list out the right keywords around which you can create SEO friendly blogs that are keyword optimized.

The image below shows the list of keywords that a single competitor has… It is not that you have to list all of them, just grab a few that you think can perform better. 

The reason to grab worthy keywords is that they are necessary to connect what users are looking for to the content that your website is producing to meet that demand.

The organic traffic you receive from search engine results pages is exactly what you need in order to rank well on search engines, and the type of traffic you get depends on the targeted keywords you select.  

Mid Phase of SEO Writing

By now, you must know how to select the topics to write on and what digital spices to add to make your blog posts shine out and eventually be on the #1 spot. So this was all about the pre-phase of SEO writing.

With this, we have reached the middle phase and can start writing SEO friendly blog posts.

1. Identify What Types Of Blog Posts Your Audience Is Interested In

The question here is, do you know the types of blogs you need to pen down for the most success? Or how will you get to know what types of blogs your audience is interested in?

It is true that, in addition to creating content that is worth reading, it is also critical to understand how a user’s mind works and to know the type of blog post your content should be classified in for a seamless user experience.

Let’s assume that if a user’s search query is: “Steps to make Dalgona coffee,” they are searching for a quick step-by-step recipe. Therefore, a short-form blog post containing simple steps will be better than a 2000-word post on coffee. 

For instance, if they search for “How to maintain a healthy lifestyle,”  they are more or less looking for a descriptive blog filled with flowy, long-form pointers starting from the basics. 

Or if they search for “How to create a skincare routine,” they are looking for a subjective experience described in detail. So, it will be beneficial to create a series of blog posts related to this topic, each linked to the other.

This is how you can identify, what your audience is searching for and what are their needs so that you can structure the layout of your blogs in the same manner. 

2. Prepare An Outline of Your SEO Content

A blog’s content outline serves as its framework. It is how you want to deliver each and every aspect of your content to your readers. After all, you just can’t start writing anything anywhere. 

Consider writing about “a daily routine of meditation.” You can structure it into sections like: “Introduction to Meditation,” ➡️, “Types of Meditation,” ➡️, “Benefits of Meditation,” and so on. This is what a basic and simple outline of your content should look like. 

But what if you start writing about types of meditation in the first paragraph and then get to the second paragraph to introduce meditation? You could end up writing a non structured piece of content that would frustrate your readers.

Not finding the information in an organized manner is one of the biggest reasons people stop reading a blog. Ultimately, they bounce back and look for other websites.

Read More: How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

A strong and engaging outline would definitely strengthen content marketing efforts. Therefore, it is an essential step that every SEO blog writer should take into account before beginning to create blogs and articles. 

Here’s a live example of well organized and easy to understand outline-

What Are SEO Content Strategies?   H2

Why There’s A Need To Have SEO Content? H2

Types Of Content You Can Go For In Content SEO Strategy  H2

• Product Pages     H3
• Blog Posts           H3
• Lists (Short Form Content)     H3
• Guides (Long Form Content) H3
• Infographics      H3

Best SEO Content Strategies To Rank Higher  H2 

• Identify Your Audience & Their Pain Points  H3
• Go For Keyword Research & List A Few Broad Terms  H3
• Go For Listing Long-Tailed Keywords  H3
• Write A Piece Of Content For Each Keyword Keeping Users In Mind  H3
• Optimize Each And Every Element  H3
• Develop A Link Building Strategy  H3
• Promote Your SEO Content On Social Media  H3
• Update Your SEO Content Regularly  H3
• Evaluate Your Performance  H3

Conclusion  H2

FAQs   H2

The steps that you can follow in creating an optimized content outline are as follows:

• Identifying your crowd
• Conducting surveys and strategizing
• Composing clickable headlines
• Drafting the intro and outro
• Including heading tags (H1, H2, H3…)
• Staying authentic
• Prioritizing quality over quantity
• Taking SEO methodologies into account
• End it with a good conclusion

Final Phase – Start Writing SEO Friendly Blog Posts

Now that you are armed with a handful of keywords, have determined the style of writing to be used for the content, and have created a framework for your blog articles, let’s frame an excellent piece of content that dominates the SERPs.

1. Write An Attention-Grabbing Headline

Creating a blog post with a great, attention-grabbing headline is more crucial than the content itself.

Considering that your readers will see this component immediately away when they search for something, it is a crucial one.

Furthermore, the consumers’ decision to click on the blue link and continue reading the content is entirely dependent on your title. This means that even if your content is worthwhile, a weak headline will not benefit you at all, as the reader will simply skip your website and move on. 

Keep your SEO text in demand. It doesn’t really matter where you land in the SERP because if your title is appealing and persuasive, you will still draw organic traffic to your website regardless of where you place. 

Below are some of the writing tips that you can follow to craft an attention-grabbing headline and get your audience hooked:

1. You must present a short and simple summary of your entire content in those 60 characters of your headline. For example, “Step By Step Guide To Perform Keyword Research For Local SEO”

2. Adding numbers or digits can definitely work for your headline. For example, “8 Ways On How To Do SEO On Your Own In 2023 Absolutely Free!”

3. Add hook terms to your headline, such as tips, reasons, guides, lessons, ways, strategies, secrets, etc. For example, “10 SEO Content Strategies To Boost Your Rankings In 2023“

4. Use at least one power word in your headline to make it actionable. For example, “The Ultimate Guide To A Korean Skincare Routine.”

And Voila! You have just created an effective headline and are through with the first step in your journey of SEO writing.

2. Focus On Writing For People Not For Search Engines

Focusing on SEO to improve the ranking of your webpage is an obvious and helpful strategy. But an SEO optimized content doesn’t always equate to content that is worth reading.

Impressing Google should be your second priority. The first one should be to write relevant content that your audience can relate to.

 Focus On Writing For People Not For Search Engines

In light of this, the two most typical issues that arise when you write for algorithms and bots as opposed to when you write for people are:

1. Keeping up with the Google algorithms: The algorithms are ever-changing and the rankings fluctuate too, so it requires lots and lots of effort to understand them and keep up with them on a regular basis.

2. Your readers will be lost: If your content caters more to the bots’ needs and less to the audience’s, your subscribers will become detached from your content over time.

Following that, let’s take a look at some of the pointers for producing content that readers would like.

• Let’s research first: Before writing anything down, perform proper research to gather appropriate data and use them in your write-ups.

• But, But, But: Use well-grounded and dependable sources to take the data from, else your article will be more of a hogwash.

• Know the why’s: Try to keep your audience’s demands in mind while you write by starting to ask yourself a series of general questions about them.

• You can’t skip editing: If a piece of material is riddled with mistakes, it will soon lose trust amongst its audience and might even harm the website’s reputation, so proofread.

The fact is, “Words have tremendous influence.” They are the elements that can generate a sense of taking action among the readers.  The intended audience will adore you and remain with you if you effectively compile words together to create a worthwhile content piece. 

You have to be a website that provides new content that is unique and compelling to help users acquire the required information and for search engines to better understand your first hand expertise to rank it higher on the SERPs. 

Keep in mind that poor, repetitious, and overstuffed material with keywords will not serve your core demographic in any way. It is important to stress that this is a poor SEO content tactic. 

Additionally, it will do nothing to raise your organic rating. Stick to the fundamentals that are appropriate for your audience first, and then cater to search engine algorithms.

3. Satisfy Your Reader’s Expectations And Requirements

Every user tends to return to your website once they have been fulfilled with what they were looking for. Indeed, providing a piece of content that is interesting and meets their needs is the first and foremost requirement.

For this, quite a few elements play a crucial role, such as keywords, structured data markup, internal linking, etc. Additionally, it all comes down to having an organized, easy-to-navigate website.

A proper outline of your blog posts can be a vital element for users to scan through and understand what your content is about, which informs the users of what they are looking for.

Providing facts, stats, and visuals in your content will surely satisfy their curiosity and make them want to stay longer. In addition, you may draw visitors to your website and sustain them there by providing a concise meta description and prologue. 

Loading time is one issue on which you need to focus to improve your site’s performance and lower your overall bounce rate pertaining to each and every webpage because a sluggish site may also be a factor in visitors departing straight away. So focus on what your readers need and what they want to read.

After all, the greatest strategy to draw and keep website visitors while meeting their expectations and meeting their requirements is to consistently strive to provide material that your audience will value and appreciate.

4. Make Your SEO Content Easy To Read With Supportive Images

It’s crucial to enrich your content using graphics because words are not enough. The addition of images improves the reading quality of the content and renders your material more engaging…

Here’s an example…What would you like to read, a blog like this (below image)

OR, A better one like this!

Hope that now you have got an idea about how important it is to include visuals and pictures in your SEO blog writing.

Here’s more, let’s understand the importance of adding high-quality content-focused images.

• Images are fantastic at drawing visitors in and increasing blog traffic.
• Visuals are a terrific way to elicit ideas and emotions that help readers retain knowledge longer.
• You may greatly improve the attractiveness of a product and boost conversions by using high-quality photos.
• Your directions may be clearly illustrated and over-explaining can be avoided by using simple screenshots.
• Moreover, it’s another chance to apply keywords to raise the rank of your site in the form of file names, alt tags, image captions, etc.

Now, let’s go through the best practices for including graphics and images in your content so as to improve your overall position.

1. You must add your graphics, especially in long–post content so as to create breaks from text and make it more user-friendly.

2. You must always use high-quality images. You wouldn’t want to confuse your audience with blurry pictures, would you?

3. As an extension of the previous point, you must use photos that are royalty-free, public domain or creative commons to avoid copyright infringement.

4. You must add any kind of visuals which suits the need of your content type, from the following:

• Screenshots (where a step-by-step or how-to is being explained)
• Infographics ( where an intricate topic is being discussed, usually in the form of a chart or graph)
• Memes (where you want to add a little humorous touch)
• Quote images (where your intention is to emphasize on one or two lines of your piece that are significantly important)
• Animated graphics (where you want to draw your audience’s attention)

5. You must always optimize your images so as to create an optimum loading time of your webpage.

If you desire to rank a little higher, you surely need to stand out in terms of the images… 

Here some more that you must keep in mind: Image Optimization For SEO: 10 Ways To Make Your Images More Appealing

5. Optimize The On-Page Elements Of Your Blog Posts

On-page SEO describes a collection of SEO methods that are explicitly applied to the layout of the webpages to improve their suitability for the evaluation milestones of the algorithms. 

The below image tells about a few on-page elements that have to be perfectly optimized to enhance the chance of ranking higher…

1. Meta Tags

2. Internal Linking

3. Image Alt Text

Let’s go through every element of an on-page SEO strategy one by one.

• You must optimize the heading of your webpage with proper keywords and unique tags.
• You must work on optimizing the meta description for each of your webpage.
• You must analyze your website ranking and performance on a frequent basis.
• You must optimize each of your webpage to incorporate sitelinks by Google.
• You must run for H1 tag optimization on each of the webpages.
• Apart from the main heading, the headings from H1 to H6 must be well written.
• You must input the target keyword in the commencing paragraph of your content. 
• You must add text alongside the non-text part of the content, to make it more user-friendly.
• You must optimize all of the images used on your webpage as well.
• You must optimize your internal linking strategy.
• Not mandatory, but it is a healthy digital habit to optimize each and every post for the featured snippet section of Google.   

You can also go through each of these checklist pointers in depth on our blog – The Ultimate On-Page SEO Checklist To Boost Rankings.

6. Ensure That You Follow E-E-A-T Guidelines

E-A-T, or expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, is a shorthand for three somewhat related but distinct characteristics that govern the SERP.

A considerable degree of proficiency or competence in a specific subject is what is meant by “expertise.” It is usually determined at the level of “content” rather than the institutional or website tier. Google is seeking articles and write-ups created by experts in the field.

Recognition is key to “authority,”  especially with other business contributors and specialists.  Simply stated, someone or a webpage has authority when other people view them as the premier resource of knowledge on a given subject.

The credibility, openness, and veracity of a webpage and, by extension, a website and its contents are key components of “trust.” When determining if a website is trustworthy, appraisers consider a variety of factors, including how well the site identifies the author of any public data.

Recently updated Google search quality rater guidelines have included an additional “E” that stands for “experience,” so our evergreen E-A-T has now become E-E-A-T.

The inclusion of this new “E” shows that one of the ways to assess the quality of a material is to consider the amount of “real-world experience” its author possesses in the subject matter.

7. Ensure That Your Content Is Informative Enough To Get Natural Backlinks

It all comes down to “Quality” over “Quantity,” to acquire high quality natural backlinks, because these links may be difficult to obtain but can have a lasting impact on your website’s visibility.

Getting links that are unnatural or paid could be concerning for your website and may lead to penalties in the future. The concept of “natural links” is that they are earned by creating quality content that is both informative and worthy of sharing and linking to.

But you might think, “How can you frame content to generate natural backlinks?” Well…

Let me make it easy for you with these simple SEO content writing tips:

1. You must write content that is full of information and value and yet intriguing enough for others to find it shareable.

2. You must create content that induces an emotional response from your audience.

3. You must create content that somehow offers a substantial response to a question that has been left unanswered for a while.

4. You can, through your content, seek a fresh angle on a certain subject.

5. Lastly, actively publicize your content on every social media platform. This is the best way for the audience to locate your content and connect to it. 

As more and more reliable sites start linking to your article, you will notice an increase in your site’s traffic, an abrupt followers’ increment and an enhanced social media presence.

To sum up, you need to understand that people are considerably more likely to connect with your website if your content avoids the cliched notions that have been expressed ad nauseam and instead offers fresh perspectives. 

8. Promote Your SEO Content On Various Platforms

While publishing a worthwhile blog is necessary, promoting is much more crucial. Once you’ve started a blog, you must be aware of various promotion strategies.

Allow me to provide some low-cost, high-impact strategies for getting your blog noticed by your audience.

1. Give priority to your already listed subscribers with the help of email marketing.

2. Social media marketing helps to promote various types of content.  Use hashtags relevant to your post to increase the visibility of your blog.

3. Use Quora! You can readily add your blog’s link and if your blog is valuable, your one time viewer might become your returning subscribers.

4.   Send the right type of outreach emails. It will help you to accomplish your adjective as well as build up a symbiotic relationship with the audience.

5. The easiest way to promote your blog is Blog Commenting. Comment something of value underneath a blog that relates to your niche and enjoy the traffic.

6. Lastly, reach out to the new audience on various Social Bookmarking Sites such as blogger, wattpad ,etc.

These days, writing an informative piece is not enough, you must also possess an arsenal of good-to-practice marketing techniques to promote your blog posts, invite new readers and build a community.

Here’s a video you can check out for these tried-and-true ways to promote your SEO friendly Blog Posts 👇

Conclusion

All in all…

One of the most crucial tweaks you can accomplish for and on your articles is optimise it for both humans and search engines. But it frequently necessitates time and effort to accomplish this goal. 

However, the above-listed SEO writing tips are categorized into three phases of writing a blog post and can definitely help you rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs). 

The ultimate result would be more traffic, more clicks, better engagement, and higher conversions

So, if you are serious about ranking higher on Google, you can Claim Your Free 30 Minute SEO Session to learn how to create SEO-friendly content for your website, which could result in better long-term performance.