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. Welcome back to the channel. In this video, I'm going to 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 free description below. And while you're down there, 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 Search page, there's very little chance that a potential customer who's looking for a solution you offer can actually find two. 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 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 can 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 want to 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'll want to include in the article. If you've been watching me for a while. You know I'm very partial 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 want a link so you don't have to go back and find them 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 5 it does all this around 60 characters or 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.

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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 with an introduction. The key to an effective blog introduction is to address the following concerns. Why is the subject of your blog important to the reader? You want to be sure to include your keyword in the first sentence or two, which confirms for 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 conventional 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 want to convey in discrete two to three sentence pieces. This makes it easy for readers to skim the article and get the info they need without poring 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 web pages, 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 Maintenance, meaning those that are not central to the blog post but are still relevant to the topic. You don't want to 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 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 want to 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 callers can easily identify them. At this point in the process, your blog post is basically written, but it's not finished sucking 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 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 out of 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 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 to 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 if want to you. And don't forget to think about your blog post URL which you may want to 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. There you won't find anything because apparently I can't tell you about it.