- 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.
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- 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.