When you’re running a small business, you need to invest a lot of effort into making it successful. Regardless of your niche or industry, your competition isn’t wasting any time. Everyone’s got strong content marketing strategies and they’re fighting hard for their spot on the market. You need to do the same to stand shoulder to shoulder with your biggest competitors. An inevitable part of your strategy is your small business blog.
To make your blog successful and effective, you need to publish SEO friendly content. Without recognition from Google algorithms, your content won’t be ranking high. That means you won’t be able to raise brand awareness or make your audience bigger. If you’re curious to learn how to write an SEO friendly blog post for your small business log, just keep reading.
Let’s break it down together.
Table of Contents
Topics And Keyword Research:
The preparation phase takes place before you start writing the blog post. You need to do proper research to be able to decide what to write about.
To make sure your blog post is a success, you need to:
- identify trending topics
Find out what your target audience is interested in and what are the buzzing topics in your niche. You can do it by keeping up with the news, reading prominent articles, or using a tool such as Google Trends to identify the right topics. - identify keywords
Once you settle for a topic, you need to make a list of keywords you plan on using. You can use a keyword finder online and decide which keywords to use.
Make sure you avoid keyword stuffing and cannibalization.
Once you’ve got your blog post topic, a focus keyword, and other keywords, you can move on to a more detailed blog post outline.
Outline & Structure
Now it’s time to make a plan. You need to create a detailed outline of your article before you start writing.
Every quality blog post needs to have:
- the introduction
- use the focus keyword
- make it two paragraphs long
- tell the readers why they need to read the post
- the body
- decide what the main points will be
- the conclusion
- repeat what you’ve covered in the article
- finish with a powerful CTA
This outline will provide guidance and ensure you’re writing SEO friendly content that’s going to rank high. And, once your outline is finished, you can search for SEO tools which can help you write your blog post.
Write The Article:
Now it’s time to use your research information and your outline to write the blog post for your small business blog.
Apart from following the points covered in the outline, there are a couple more things you should cover:
- link building
Link building is a successful strategy for boosting SEO and creating articles that rank high. There are two types of links you can include in the article: - inbound links which link the readers to your previous blog posts
- outbound links will direct your readers to a different website or blog post
The outbound or external links must lead to trustful sources with valuable content.
Also, make sure the links have proper anchors and don’t make your content any less valuable.
Finally, you can send out the link to your blog post to other blogs and see if they’d consider placing a link to it in their content.
This way, your content would have improved SEO.
- headings
Headings enable you to break down your article into smaller pieces of text and add proper keywords to make them more visible. Google will use headings to understand better what the blog post is about. Also, your readers will find it easier to read. - paragraphs
You should break down each section into smaller paragraphs. Don’t make them longer than 2-3 sentences. Use bullet points, bold and italic to emphasize the most important parts of the text.
Make sure you follow the structure you defined in the outline. Write a blog post that is easy to understand, follow, and read.
This will improve your SEO, maybe get you listed in the PAA box, and make your readers happier.
Add Images:
The visual aspect of your blog post can make a difference for your SEO. Also, readers prefer content that is rich in visuals.
When adding images to your blog post, here’s what to think about:
- source
If you don’t have images of your own, you can use royalty-free images that you find online. - purpose
Make sure the image responds to the content. - file name
Before you upload, change the image name from “IMG343943793.jpg” to a more specific name. You can even have it contain a keyword like “content marketing strategy”. - file size
Reduce the size of your images to increase your page loading time. - responsiveness
Make sure the images can be displayed properly on various devices.
Google will recognize the above efforts and give you extra credit if you add images according to the steps above. This will bring you an advantage in your Google ranking.
Meta Description:
The final step in writing and publishing SEO friendly content is taking care of the meta description.
The meta description is the text that will be displayed under the headline of your blog post in search engines. You must write it properly:
- 150-160 characters
- intriguing and attention-grabbing
- inviting
- containing the focus keyword
This will improve your ranking and increase your audience.
Final Thoughts:
There are a lot of steps you need to cover when writing a post for your small business blog. It may seem complicated to build an SEO strategy at first, but it’s quite simple. All you have to do is follow the right guidelines.
Use the steps above to guide you through the process of writing SEO friendly content. Make sure you cover all the points and you’ll have nothing to worry about.
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