How’s your website ranking these days? Are your blogs still appearing high in Google search results? If you think they should be doing better and ranking higher in search results, use these four simple tips on how to write a good blog to give you higher-ranking blogs and drive more traffic to your site.
If you’re running any type of business, maintaining a regular blog on your website should be pretty high on your list of priorities. As luck would have it, one of the biggest and best marketing tools you could want is at your fingertips. Yes – it’s your own website. And publishing blogs to it should be as regular as your mortgage payments. Only way more often, because consistency is key.
Better blog content is king
Posting regular content onto your site is the key to getting a good boost up the rankings. But don’t think you can get away with posting any old content. Nope. Google’s a highly intelligent beast these days. It knows when you’ve posted something that’s copied, irrelevant, or just plain bad. It doesn’t like it and won’t put any effort into making it appear in anyone’s search results. Top of the tree is where you need to be – or at least on the first page – to have any effect on your web traffic at all.
These days, Google uses its E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) guidelines to rank web pages and blogs. So if you’re creating high-quality, helpful content that showcases your E-E-A-T credentials, you’re off to a good start. When people search Google for stuff, they only look at the first page of results (with rare peeks into pages 2 or 3). No one really bothers with any more than that. So if you’re not there, no one’s going to see your content or your website. The E-E-A-T guidelines are crucial to ranking higher.
How to write a good blog
Simple SEO tips and rules
There are only a handful of ‘rules’ you need to stick to when it comes to producing good content for your website, and they’re pretty simple:
- Stick to one topic or subject
- Make it specific to your customers
- Make it helpful and informative
- Make it easy to read
- Share the hell out of it
That’s about it. Oh, and getting some good SEO keywords in there along the way will help too.
Every piece of content and every blog is different, but key areas for SEO in blogs should include the tips below. Following them will explain how to write a good blog and make it more visible in Google search results. And if you’re using WordPress, the Yoast plug-in is really helpful here.
Anyway, enough of the intro, let’s get down to these four simple tips to help you write higher-ranking blogs:
1. Your blog title
Along with every other title out there, this is Google’s first glimpse of your content. A keyword or phrase relevant to your blog subject is essential to writing a good blog, so try and include it within the first few words. Google will then match part of the search with part of your title, so it needs to be search-focused.
As it’s the first thing both Google and your reader will see, make the title no longer than 55 characters or roughly 6 words. This is the best length of title that earns the highest number of click-throughs, so get creative.
If you’ve got a long, boring title, chances are you’ll get passed over. Try injecting some humour if the subject calls for it, or making your title helpful (How to…) or list-based (Top 5 tips…) will help too. It’s all about grabbing people’s interest and getting them to click that link.
2. Your body copy
This is the main body of your blog and the bit that people are going to want to read. Whatever your subject, writing a good blog will keep it specific to your business, helpful, and informative.
You should add in keywords and phrases that are accurate to the topic and your business here too. But don’t go overboard. The keyword(s) or phrase in your title should appear in your first paragraph. Then, no more than 3 or 4 times throughout the blog.
Keyword stuffing (or, the act of shoehorning keyword phrases into every other line) is not cool. In fact, Google hates it and will penalise you if you do it, so just avoid it.
The other thing to remember here is to write naturally. Keep sentences and paragraphs short and break them up with sub-headings. And add images for some eye candy too (quick tip: rename your image file to include your business name – it’s better for SEO). No one wants to see a solid block of text on the screen in front of them. It looks awful and people will get bored. And if they get bored, guess what? They move on to another website – probably your competitor’s. A good blog always keeps it simple.
3. Your page URL
When you hit send on any search, Google crawls the web at a super fast rate to return the most relevant results for you. One of the first things it looks at is the page URL. So, it’s essential you optimise the URL and get one or two keywords in there before you publish any content.
An SEO-friendly URL should be relevant to your blog topic so it tells people exactly what the page is all about. Try and keep it to around 75 characters for the best results. If people can’t tell from the page URL straight away what the page is offering, they’ll ignore it and move on. Sometimes you’ll see a random configuration of letters and numbers in search result URLs. This is not a good look. You just can’t tell if it’s relevant to what you’re looking for.
4. Your meta description
Sounds a bit technical, but what’s in a name? If you do any Google search, any results you see will show the main link as well as a couple of lines of text underneath. That’s your meta description (AKA a snippet).
The meta description is a short summary of the blog or web page that includes your target keyword(s). 150 characters is the limit here, including spaces, so again, you need to get creative when writing it. You can have more, but Google will only display that amount. Any more and it gets cut off mid-sentence. Remember to keep it search-focused. And try and get your keywords in at the beginning of your meta description.
It’s worth noting that a meta description isn’t a direct ranking factor for Google and it doesn’t take it into consideration when deciding search result rankings. But they’re still SEO gold because they tell the searcher immediately what the page is all about. Plus you can help yourself to stand out and increase your click-through rate.
Share and share alike
So that’s kind of it. There’s lots more to go into, but these four tips should be the basic good stuff you need to include to write a good blog that works hard. And once you’ve written and posted it on your site (checking for grammar and typos, of course), share it. Get your social media mojo going and share it on Twitter (X?!), Facebook, and Instagram.
Once the content has been on your site for a day or two, Google will have indexed it, so it knows you’re the author of the content. At that point, you can even do a straight copy and paste into LinkedIn to widen your audience even further. If you do this, it can help to alter the title of the blog slightly and add a note at the end saying that the content is also published on your website.
Once it’s out there, people will read it. And if you’ve written a good blog, they’ll share it too. More people sharing means more people reading.
And that means you’ll rank higher on Google search results.
Which means more traffic to your website.
And that helps you become an authority in your subject.
Which means you gain people’s trust.
And that means more sales of your product or service.
Which means… well, you get the idea.
Writing a good blog and posting content that’s helpful, informative, and natural pays dividends in the end.
Happy blogging!
If you need more help with writing your blogs or don’t even have time to think about them, let alone write them, contact me today. I’ll help you come up with a realistic schedule and write helpful, original content for you.
