This Blog has Been Written to Drive SEO
The Buzz share our top tips on how to optimise your blog and web content for SEO to drive more relevant traffic to your website.
How to write SEO driven content to increase your website traffic
So, you’ve heard about SEO and you know it’s important for your website, but do you really know why? We like to think we’re a plain-speaking team at The Buzz, so read on to discover more about how SEO works and how it can help increase relevant, organic traffic to your website.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which simply means adapting your website copy and structure so that a search Engine, such as Google or Bing, understands your content and presents it within their search engine page results (SERP) whenever a user submits a search query that matches it. Therefore, a good place to start is to understand what search terms, or ‘keywords’, potential customers are using to find your website.
Keyword Research
Often overlooked but knowing what keywords and search terms will bring the right visitors to your website is one of the most important considerations in writing website and blog content.
You probably already know what some of your keywords are, but have you actually put them into a search engine lately? The results may surprise you, especially if there are competitors. The Buzz can help you uncover all the keywords that bring traffic to your website (and your competitor’s website) with our SEO audits.
At The Buzz, our own SEO audit revealed our brand name brought a lot of traffic to our website as well as more generic terms, such as ‘flexible marketing’ and ‘marketing agency resources’, so you may see us mention these keywords a few times in this article!
Worldwide, Google has around 90% market share of internet searches, so it makes sense to tailor your SEO content to the search engine used by the majority. This in turn will also help your content perform well for other search engines, such as Bing, Duck Duck Go and Yahoo.
When performing a search on Google, often you will see a ‘People also ask’ section within the search results which presents related searches. Using these queries for your future blog posts is a great opportunity to help reach more people with your content and uncover additional relevant keywords to target.
Writing an SEO-Optimised Blog
When it comes to writing a blog post (or any website content for that matter), always write for your audience first. A blog post is, first and foremost, an opportunity to share your knowledge and brand personality with your intended audience. This is also what Google wants you to do!
Google’s ultimate aim is to serve its users with helpful, high quality and relevant information related to the search query submitted. Therefore, you should write your content with consideration to the four pillars Google uses to identify quality content: Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). In following these guidelines, Google will ‘rank’ your content higher in the search engine results for that keyword search, so your blog post will be more visible and attract more traffic.
Structuring for Driving SEO
The structure and layout of your blog post is also very important for SEO, as search engines read blog posts just like a human would do. Afterall, no-one really enjoys reading a massive block of text, especially on a website.
Think about your audience and what will help them get to the end of your blog. Adding a title, an introduction and breaking up long text into paragraphs is a good start. Even better is to add sub-headings to bring related paragraphs together and include images to make the content more appealing to read. If you have lists within your copy, change these to bullet points or numbered lists to make them easier to read. By spreading out content and adding more ‘white space’, your content will be much easier and more desirable to read.
Finally, ensure to include your keywords within the title, introduction and sub-headings – this will help search engines understand what search terms the blog post should appear for.
Transitioning Words
Everything has a beginning, a middle and an end, right? So should your blog content! Readability is another important consideration when writing for SEO.
Ensure you use signalling to help guide your readers to understand the relationships between phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, ensuring they continue to read all the way to the end. The introduction should explain the premise of the post and lead the reader to discover more. The middle of your post should follow from one idea to another related idea and so on, until your present your solution at the end.
Not sure what transition words to use? Here’s some ideas:
| Beginning | Middle | End |
| Firstly | Secondly | Finally |
| First of all | However | In summary |
| Similarly | In conclusion | |
| For example | To sum up |
Related Keywords
Search engines are much smarter than you may realise when it comes to keywords – because they learn from the way people use its search functionality (both text and voice commands).
Google reports that every day 15% of searches are entirely new. As a consequence of all these new, unpredictable searches, the search engines have been working harder to determine what the context of our online searches actually mean. Therefore, search engines now understand much better how some keywords are related to their synonyms.
So, the good news is – you don’t need to stuff your content with the same keywords over and over for it to be SEO-optimised; you can use variations of your keywords and it will still rank for your desired search terms (and it will also read a lot better!).
A regular SEO audit from The Buzz will help keep your website keywords up to date and relevant, as well as uncover opportunities for new keywords to target. At The Buzz, our latest SEO audit identified new keyword growth opportunities for ‘property marketing agency UK’ and ‘marketing for real estate agents’.
Best Length for SEO
The length of your article will depend on the subject matter, but a good rule of thumb is more than 300 words is enough for a search engine to understand the keyword intent of your article.
However, for many reasons, search engines prefer longer content so if you can regularly create blog posts of 500 to 1000 words that should be a happy medium for your audience to get to the end of the articles and take your desired action, whether that’s to read more articles, book an appointment or purchase your product.
Not sure you can find the time to create new content? At The Buzz, we offer a wide variety of SEO services to support your business online and increase traffic to your website.
Add Links for SEO
Another important aspect of SEO blog writing is to help visitors (and search engines) discover more related content on your website by adding ‘internal linking’ to your blog posts. Try to think about natural opportunities to expand your content by linking to other relevant pages on your website. Search engines use these links to understand the purpose of your website better and help it to rank for more search terms.
Google has recently launched an update to their advice on how to format your internal links, highlighting just how important they think it is for SEO.
Update Regularly
It’s so easy to think that once a blog post is published, that’s it – Job done! But what about the next blog post, what will that be about?
Search engines love websites that regularly update their content as it shows the website is active. However, the quality of that content matters, not the quantity. Therefore, it pays to plan and build a content plan around themes and keywords to ensure well-written SEO-optimised content is published regularly.
It is also important to review and update your blog and website copy regularly; you may find that your SEO-optimised content is turning up for search terms that are no longer relevant for your business, or the content doesn’t representative your brand anymore.
The Buzz – SEO Content Marketing Services
Here at The Buzz, we can help you with all your SEO needs, whether it’s an SEO Audits to understand how to make improvements across your whole website or designing and implementing an SEO-optimised Content Marketing Plan. Give us a Buzz!
