6 steps to creating SEO optimized blog posts

Producing quality content can help your brand’s reputation. But you should already know this! However, there’s no point in producing content if it doesn’t attract an audience to your site. Optimizing your content for SEO, in order to increase its organic reach, is fundamental.

Below, check out 6 steps for creating SEO optimized blog posts. But first, it is worth mentioning two fundamental points for any content on your site: loading speed and responsive content. To learn more, click here.

Step 1: Plan

Personas

To create assertive content to reach prospects interested in the products or services that your company offers, the first point to be taken into account is the definition of personas, which are fictional characters that represent your ideal customer. With the definition of the personas for each text, it is possible to outline the language and content to be worked on.

Stages of the purchase journey in the texts

Before writing any content, it is also important to remember for which stage of the purchase journey it will serve the consumer. Usually, when we choose a theme to be worked on, we create content for the top, middle and bottom of the funnel. For each funnel stage the style of content is different, ranging from more comprehensive – general knowledge about the topic -, through problem solving for potential customers, to more specific information about products and/or services.

Scope the content

Brainstorm with your team so that all content ideas can be shared, and thus define the most relevant ones. The analysis of the competition and contact with the sales team are also interesting in this phase.

Frequency

How to define the frequency of publication of content on your blog? The more the better! Research shows that blogs that post articles twice a week gain more relevance than those that post only once. So the important thing is to adapt a frequency that is consistent with the production capacity of your team. Many companies usually publish one blog post per week. And remember, there is no point in having a large number of blog posts if the content is not relevant.

Keywords

Your audience will come to your solution when searching for ways to solve a problem. So, how do they do google searches to get to your company? There are tools that help us in this keyword research, and some are free, such as Google’s Word Planner.

For example, a content whose keyword is “name of your product” will reach far fewer users organically than “its functionality”. For example, the term “Vision Agency” has a much lower search doctor per month in Google than “sp communication agency”, of course. Therefore, this keyword needs to be worked on more than that one. You can work a main keyword and some secondary ones in each text.

Another interesting platform, which has a free version, and can help you define keywords for creating SEO-optimized blog posts (with daily search limitation) is Ubersuggest.

Step 2: Write the text

With the keywords defined, begin to structure the outline of your text. Define the topics and what you will talk about in each one.

Be clear and objective

Even if the content is more technical and dense, it is important that technical terms, whenever possible, are easy to understand. Always think that the text has to solve a problem for the reader.

Remember that the reader’s behavior on the Internet is not the same as off the Internet, being much more subject to interruptions, requiring a more dynamic reading.

Create a good title

The title guides the content and attracts visits to the site, especially if you are competing with other sites that have similar content. It should be the summary of the content as a whole.

To be considered a good title, you need it to be attractive, to arouse curiosity, to have the keyword, to meet the demand of people, and to be 55 to 67 characters long (to appear in full in search results).

Also think about possible subtitles, as they help the reader understand the structure of your text, and help with SEO when they contain keywords.

Write an Introduction

The introduction should make the reader identify with the topic. You can start your text using statistics, questions to the reader, analogies, historical background, etc.

And continue…

Present the scenario and the solution to the problem presented by the Title. Remember that short paragraphs and bullet points always help to make the text more objective and lighter.

Word count for SEO-optimized blog posts

Over the years and with the increase in quality content offered on the Internet, the ideal number of words in a text for a good SEO ranking has also grown, varying for each market and country. What matters is to understand the average number of words used by your company’s industry and stay above it. For example, if your company is in the food industry, the average number of words is between 1,400 and 1,900. Thus, texts over 2,000 words will certainly catch Google’s attention. That is why it is also important to pay attention to what your competitors are producing.

We, from Agência Vision, use Neil Patel’s reference numbers a lot.

Keyword Density

For a good ranking in Google, blog posts optimized for SEO usually have between 1% and 2% of keywords inserted in their content. That is, for a text of 1,500 words, between 15 and 30 keywords are recommended. Remember that we are not only talking about the main keyword, the one in the title, but also its variants (secondary).

Step 3 – Adding links

Internal links

Any landing page will benefit from possible quality links to them. Thus, don’t forget to add links that lead to pages on your website. These can be links that lead to your website homepage, your social networks or your product pages. Link building is an important factor for SEO. A blog with a good quantity and periodicity of texts is important not only for building a content provider brand and market specialist, but also for the network of internal links.

It is worth noting the importance also in choosing the appropriate anchor texts for the links in your blog posts. In this example blog post from Agência Vision, about B2B digital strategies, you can see examples of how to add links in the text to other pages of the agency itself,

Note that the color of the links has been softened so as not to generate contrast in the user’s reading. The internal links are mainly for SEO purposes, not having the click as the main objective.

External Links

If possible, add at least 1 external link (that comes from the domain of your page) in your text.

Step 4 – Add the alt texts of the images

Alt texts, or alternative texts, are those that describe the content and context of an image and are displayed when the image does not load.

When creating alternative texts for images, remember to:

• Be as objective as possible when describing the image;
• Avoid phrases such as “photo of” or “image of”;
• Give context to the image and use your keywords.

Step 5 – Create meta title and meta description

These are the title and description about your article that will appear in Google search results. They should serve as a brief explanation of what the user will find and encourage clicking.

It is important that your main keyword is contained in both.

Step 6 – Proofread and Publish

Now just revise and post your text, which includes:

• Titles and subheadings containing keywords;
• Word count and keyword density;
• Main keyword in URL, alt texts, title, meta title and meta description;
• Spell checking;
• Proofreading of links.

Do you need a partnership that will help your brand produce quality content that will rank well and reach your target audience? Count on the expertise of Agência Vision. Get in touch with us!