How To Write An SEO Optimized Blog Post To Drives Traffic To Your Site
– Are you blogging for your business, but still failing to get
the traffic you need? SEO optimizing every post
on your website is essential for driving organic views to your content. What's up, it's Jamal from HubSpot and welcome back to the channel. In this video, I'm gonna
give you a simple process of how to write an SEO-optimized blog post to help ensure that every article
you post is doing its best to bring in traffic to your site and eyes…
To your business. And to make it even easier, I have a bunch of blog post templates that you can download from
the description below. And while you're down there, yeah, you know, you
might as well subscribe, I'm just saying, and hit
the notification bell so you never miss a video. Blogging is a key component of any inbound marketing strategy, and if you're looking to
engage current customers or bring in new customers, you need to make sure you're focusing on search engine optimization or SEO.
If your content doesn't rank
well on Google's search page, there's very little chance that a potential customer who's looking for a solution you offer can actually find one. Seriously, how many times
have you ever gone past the first results page? I can tell you personally
that for me, it's never, except for that one time. That's why you need to make
sure all of your blog posts are built from the beginning
to succeed with SEO. And with that, the first
thing you need to do is keyword research. Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines, then matching those keywords with topics relevant to your business. I could literally make an entire video just about keyword research, in fact, I did. So the goal of your keyword research will be able to create a list of best keywords you could
use in your online content to help your blog rank
high in search results.
Now that you have your keywords down, it's time to begin prepping
to write an actual blog post. The best blogs are carefully planned out. So instead of just typing the actual post, you wanna start by creating an outline. To knock out a quick outline, open up those free blog
templates I told you about in the description. There, you'll find templates for some of the most
common blog post types, including how-to articles, lists, what is articles, and more. Use these templates to sketch out the key points of your blog, organize them in a logical fashion, and plan out any additional content like images or videos you
wanna include in the article.
And if you've been
watching me for a while, you know that I'm very partial to memes, so be sure sprinkle a
couple of those in there if you can, tastefully,
don't be cringe, thank you. This is the time to conduct
any additional research you'll want to include in your post. Be sure to keep track of
any URLs you'll wanna link so you don't have to go
back and find 'em later. Now that you have all your
information organized, it's finally time to
do some actual writing. Most professional bloggers start off by writing the headline. The headline is key because it's the primary
thing a potential reader sees when they come across your content, either on search engines or social media. A good headline checks
the following boxes. It contains the keyword, preferably at the beginning of the title. It highlights the benefit
the reader will get if they click on your article. It includes a clear call-to-action. It leverages positive or negative emotions to incite the reader to react. And five, it does all this
around 60 characters of less so that the title displays
fully on all screens.
You can use tools like Headline Studio to score each possible headline in terms of its effectiveness on readers, in addition to how well
it will perform in SEO And if you want even
more detailed assistance, you can use HubSpot's free
headline writing templates to get word by word guidance for writing impactful headlines. There's a link to the template down in the video description. (lighthearted hip hop music) – Our software is the worst.
– Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a
cobbled together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt
and actually looks gorgeous. – I think I love our new CRM. – Our software is the best. – [Narrator] HubSpot. Grow better. – With your title on lock, it's time to start writing
the actual body copy of your post. Blogs can take a lot of different forms, but each one starts an introduction. The key to an effective blog introduction is to address the follow concerns.
Why is the subject of your
blog important to the reader? You wanna be sure to include your keyword in the first sentence or two, which confirms to the reader
that the page they've landed on does in fact relate to the search query that brought them there. It also reassures the algorithms that your content matches the query when assigning search ranking. Next, write a sentence or two
about the audience or industry the blog is meant to address and include the benefit for the reader like you did in the title. And finally, summarize what you'll be
covering in the article so that readers are enticed to keep scrolling down your article. Next comes the meat of the article itself, which is called body copy. The actual body copy of
a blog can vary greatly.
It could be a list, a step by step how-to, or a more article like
you find in magazines. But there are a few rules
that apply to any blog format when it comes to SEO First, write out each
thought you wanna convey in discreet two to three sentence pieces. This makes it easy for
readers to skim the article and get the info they need without pouring over dense paragraphs. It will also help you keep your
writing clear and succinct, which will in turn, help search
engines parse the content. When writing out these pieces, be sure to include the links
to the information you found while writing your outline. Search engines like to see links that direct to other webpages, as well as links that go
to other relevant pages on your own site. This gives your site
authority and credibility, or as I like to call it in
the business, the good stuff, you know what I'm saying? Body copy is also the place to start inserting secondary keywords, meaning those that are not
central to the blog post, but are still relevant to the topic. You don't wanna jam a bunch
of keywords in haphazardly.
Google is too smart to
fall for that in 2020. I know, I've tried multiple times, my business suffers because of it. But, by organically working
in relevant keywords around the main topic, your site can end up ranking for hundreds, if not thousands of secondary keywords, each with the potential to create a small stream
of additional readers you wouldn't get otherwise. An amazing example is this Wirecutter blog about vacuum cleaners that ranks for over
13,000 secondary keywords that help it achieve over 80,000
organic monthly page views. As you're writing your
keyword-rich sentences, you wanna group them into topical segments that are divided by subhead. Treat these subheads
like you would a headline because not only do they help convey the information to the reader, they also are road
signs for search engines to check that your
content is still relevant. And be sure to format the
subheads in H2 or H3 font so that readers and web crawlers
can easily identify them. At this point in the process, your blog post is basically written, but it's not finished, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
There are several additional
actions you can take to optimize the post for SEO. Let's start with adding images. Adding visual elements
like photos, illustrations, charts, and memes break up your text and can help further convey your message visually to readers. It can also help with SEO by creating another place
where you can insert keywords. So be sure to fill out
the alt-image text field when adding an image to your blog post. Treat the alt text with the care you would
a title or subhead, effectively describing the image to help the algorithm rank it whenever a user conducts an image search. Mastering alt-image text to get more information
on your blog posts, Instagram photos, or even Pinterest photos is a whole nother beast to handle.
Be sure to let us know if
you want a video on that in the comments below. And speaking of alternative search results like alt-image text, you can level up your SEO by optimizing blog posts for
Google's featured snippets. These are expanded results
for a specific blog post that appears at the top or
side of a search results page. These snippets are
usually a single paragraph that answers a specific
question or a list or table, depending on the query.
Google can pull the snippet
from anywhere, like this, boop, just pulls it outta there. But to increase your odds,
write your content out as if you're directly answering a question or defining a term. For example, if you have a cooking blog, adding the images, SEO-optimized copy, and step by step recipe instructions is a great way to try to get
featured in Google's snippets. And now there's only one step left in writing an SEO-optimized blog post, and that's getting your
meta tags in order. Meta tags are additional backend code that help search engines index, rank, and display your content. Most meta tags are done in the development phase of your blog, but there are a few tags that you can customize for each post. A title meta tag lets you
change the title of your article as it appears only in
the search results page.
This is useful if you want the
title in the search results to be different than on the page itself or different from how it
appears on social media. You can also change the meta description if you want something to appear
on the search results page other than the first few
lines of your blog posts. And don't forget to think
about your blog post URL, which you may wanna strip
down to the basic keywords. Now that you're ready to write
an SEO-optimized blog post, you can dive even deeper into planning a complete
business-wide SEO strategy. You can get started by signing
up for HubSpot Academy's free online SEO training course using the link in the description.
If you have any questions
or want a part two, make sure to comment below. Until then, I'll see you next time. There, you'll find templates for more… (sighs) There you won't find anything because apparently I
can't tell you about it..
