How to write successful and SEO optimized blog posts

Nowadays having a blog and writing interesting articles is not enough to bring traffic and a lot of engagement to your website. To have a lead-generating blog you should have a complex strategy for each communication channel of your brand in order to get in front of the numerous competitors online.

This complex strategy includes - The Content Marketing Strategy of your company, the posting plan you will create, and the SEO elements you include in each article. You need to be mindful of these components when writing for your blog, so your articles will have interesting content for each segment, will be visible for the search engines, and will convert your visitors into customers.

Communication strategies to implement

There are a number of different communication strategies that you can choose to implement when it comes to your overall marketing efforts.

Content Marketing Strategy

In simple words, this strategy describes the company's communication style and future content for all its channels. It is built on components that are extremely important and the decisions about them must be made at the very beginning of any business.

A good strategy will help you increase the popularity of the company among your customers and will possibly increase their loyalty. This strategy aims to increase ROI and to improve your overall marketing performance.

Marketing Funnels 

Every profitable digital marketing strategy is built on the marketing funnel concept. This is the communication model companies adopt and apply in their online presence.

There is a lot to talk about when it comes to this concept and what the best ways to create one for your business are. The following is a basic summary of how you can use marketing funnels to promote your content.

The main job of a Marketing funnel is to segment the content your brand publishes in a few stages. Its main goal is to lead to sales.

The 3 segments of the Marketing Funnel

Generally speaking, there are 3 main segments when it comes to the marketing funnel concept. Here is a basic rundown of what each one aims to accomplish.

TOFU

TOFU stands for ‘Top of the Funnel’. This is basically the start of the journey for new customers. During this stage, people hear about your brand and start learning about your products or services and how they might help them. Simply said, customers get to know the brand.

MOFU

MOFU, Middle of the funnel, is a segment where people have already heard about your services and have started to develop the idea of why your product can be beneficial for them as well as why they actually need it.

BOFU

BOFU is the ‘Bottom of The Funnel’ and it basically refers to people making a purchase. During this stage, people know the value of your product or services and are willing to invest.

Optimize your brand’s voice

The brand voice is basically the personality a brand takes in its communication with the public. Having a strong brand voice will help you stand out from the crowd and attract customers' attention because of the company's values, sound and attitude.

You should set up rules on what your brand should sound like and what kind of information and images you will be publishing online.

There should be a guide that will let all of your employees, the marketing team, and the graphic design team know how to express the company’s ideas and views online.

In this guide, you have to define words which your brand will be associated with, choosing to express certain emotions as well as what the tone of the company will be in different situations. This will allow you to establish a personality for your company regardless of who is creating the content. Additionally, this will ensure that the tone will persist and remain uniform across the different departments.

Create a marketing calendar

Planning your posting activities will keep you organized and well-informed about future online events around your brand. It will also save you time and will increase efficiency.

Your posting calendar should include all of your social networks and your blog. It may be organized on a weekly, monthly, or on six-month basis. No matter which posting schedule you choose to implement, a posting calendar will help you keep focus and remain consistent by posting relevant and timely content. Posting calendars will result in a more productive environment and easier collaboration, whether in-house or on a freelance basis.

When creating your marketing calendar make sure you include:

• Upcoming blog posts
• International holidays
• Important news for the sector you operate in
• Related events
• Planned promotional events
• Case studies
• Updates of existing content

SEO Optimized content

Having a lot of content is not the only thing that can guarantee you a better visibility in Search and more clients. You also need to focus a lot on optimizing your older and new content as well, as that is crucial when it comes to performing well in the SERPs.

Use relative keywords

Whether you are defining keywords for an advertising campaign, a page on a site, or a blog article, the keywords you will use are very important, because they are utilized by search engines to recognize what the content on a particular page is about.

Such crawlers use these keywords as singlans to identify for which terms your page should be ranking and whether your content is informative and useful enough to be present in Search.

There are different ways you can do research for appropriate keywords. The most effective one is to use some SEO tools that are available on the market. Some of them are paid and highly sophisticated while others are free and a part of Google’s products such as Google Trends or the Keyword planner that can be found in Google Ads.

When doing such research, check the number of monthly searches and the public interest for a topic and keyword you’d like to be shown for and decide if you want to compete with others for visibility.

No matter which keyword research tool you choose to use, don't forget that you are writing for people! Try answering the consumer’s questions and measure the search amounts of a particular keyword you’d like to be listed for, so you can implement it in your text, meta description, and heading of the article or page you want to be indexed for in the SERP. Other good tools you can use are Serpstat and SEMrush, but they might be pricey.

Keyword density

Keyword density is another important element of your content. It is the number of times a targeted word is presented in your text. Even though there is no official statement about how many times a given keyword should be repeated in a text the SEO community believes that around 1-2 % is ideal.

Length of the articles

Article length is specific for each industry, but the general trends are showing that longer texts are more favorable not only for Google, but also for social media channels. However, each year, these statistics change, as new technology such as voice search and user queries come about.
Different styles of writing and content have their separate purposes:

• Super short articles between 75-300 words are best for generating discussions.
• The standard length of most articles is 300-600 words. This is the format for social media shares and comments.
• Professional journalism uses the format of 750 words per article.
• 1000-1500 words are used for articles that include a lot of information and try to answer in-depth interesting questions. These articles get fewer comments but a lot more shares on social media.
• Long articles with more than 2450 words are quite favorable for search engines, but they are time-consuming and need to be well planned and written while also being on a popular topic so they can reach more people and help your website’s SEO performance.

Using keywords in the URL

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. URLs are designed to be human-readable and friendly and to replace the numbered IP addresses that machines use to communicate with servers, and basically they show where a page is located. The URL has 3 main benefits for SEO:

• Improved user experience
• Ranking - keywords used in a URL can be a ranking factor
• Links - having a well-written URL and posting it as a link in forums and social media can work as good anchor text

Title tag

It is very important to add a title tag to your pages. The title tag should be with a length of under 70 characters and be kept relative to the viewport of the user. They should be precise while also explaining what the page is about. Such tags are important for SEO, usability, accessibility and social media sharing and they are also used to display your page and its content in the search engine results pages.

Image titles and alt tags

Image titles are often ignored, but many searches are made for images. Because of this, you need to start adding ‘alt’ tags to your images not only for accessibility but for better discoverability.

Use internal linking

Users of your website and search engines are both using links to navigate to and from your website. This is why it’s a good practice to put internal links between your content if relevant, which will result in better topical coverage.

Write meta descriptions 

Even though the meta description isn’t a ranking signal it is important to have one for each page of your website for better optimization including the articles published on the blog. It has a big influence on your future customers because it is shown under the result for your website in the search engine results. The ideal length for the meta description is 120-150 characters.

Avoid plagiarism

Even when writing any texts yourself you might write a sentence that is already published. In order to avoid penalties by Google for plagiarism make sure that your text is unique. You can use some of the free plagiarism checkers on the market.

Overall, writing a good article is a complicated and complex process that needs to be well planned and executed. It requires a lot of mental energy, focus and good knowledge or deep research on the topic on which the article is written - it is definitely not easy but it will pay off in the end.

Having a good content marketing strategy will help you deliver content that is relevant, helpful and engaging. Using the funnel strategies will convert your visitors into customers and optimizing the text on your pages and your content will help your website climb higher on the organic SERP results which is the best way to drive traffic to your website without paying for advertising.