Elements to a quality blog post

As part of any good search engine optimization or SEO technique is to provide consistent content to your audience. Consistency comes in many forms when it comes to blog posts When we are sitting in our downtown Valparaiso Indiana office looking out the window and hear the cars drive by in the early morning there are periods of silence. This silence allows us to reflect on the past traffic and think about the traffic that is about to come. Your blog post is similar in that you write a post, publish the post, and then think of the next one. You'll then repeat the process. But what all goes into a quality blog post and how can it help you with your search engine optimization? Well, let's read on and find out.

Deciding on your topic

The first step in any great post is deciding on what you will be writing about. This should be something you are passionate about, want to learn about, or want to educate others on. You want your information to come from your heart and should flow to your readers answering what they are expecting to learn.

Research your topic information

People want to read your blog for accurate and honest information. Whether you are a subject matter expert or writing the blog to learn something new you want your information to be accurate. Do your research and realize that in most cases the research will take longer than writing the actual post.

Knowing your audience

In many ways this happens at the exact same time as when you decide on your blog topic. You need to know who you are writing too. Knowing the demographics (age, gender, nationality, etc.), their marital status, education and income level, personality, employment, and more. The more you know about your audience the better it will ring with them.

Deciding on a title

For any given blog post, we will come up with a dozen titles to use. We end up using just one (duh!) but the other eleven are not wasted. We save those for ideas for future blog posts.

Writing your introduction

Your introduction sets the tone as well as the objectives you want people to learn. You are setting the expectations to your audience. A blog is a short story that is concise, to the point, and avoids a lot of "fluff" that exist in books.

Write your post – 1st draft

As we write we have a list of core objectives we want to cover next to us. As we write and cover each one we cross it off. This allows us to make certain we hit our core items that we said we were going to cover. This way we know we've fully covered everything we want. The order might not be right from the get go but that is what cut/paste is for to rearrange our content.

Review your post

After we feel we have what we feel is a good first draft we start reading it and seeing if we've truly met all the objectives, the tone we are trying to get across, and are reaching the demographic we've targeted for the post.

SEO optimization begins

We never want to keyword stuff a post but we do want to cover certain words in a post a few times (3-4 times). What we don't want is for the information to be changed to try and trick the search engines as any good SEO today is written for the reader and not a computer. When we do the optimization, we look that we do cover our targeted keyword, that the article reads well, that all images used have ALT (alternate) text, the page is mobile friendly, and the site loads fast.

Image and video choices

Every blog article should have at least one image. This is the feature image that defines what the blog is about. You can think of this featured image as the cover to a book. The image should be representative of the blog article and convey what you want to your targeted demographic. If your post needs additional images or video make certain that they work with what you are writing. Often images are added just to add and do not add value.

Your sales pitch

Not always required but at the end of every blog is a perfect time to provide your "sales pitch" or "call-to-action" (CTA). This CTA could be asking them to read another related article, think about what they've read, sharing the content, buying your product, or calling to learn more.

Final adjustments

With all the above put together take a step back, ask someone else to read. Are the objectives being clearly met, are your points concise, and did you provide the value you were hoping to get out of the article.

Conclusion

Blog posts are scary to many as they don't feel they are writers, that they don't have time, or no one will read their post. Those were all our concerns when we started back in 2013 writing blog posts. We were lucky to get a few readers a day. Today we knock out a blog post in 1-2 hours and have over 100 readers per day reading all our 247+ blog articles. By writing articles consistently, a minimum of monthly your SEO will start to improve. If you are going for what we call the holy grail of blog articles you will post at least once per week. The more you post the more the search engines will see you as the expert in your field.

We know you can do it and if you are too busy (we hope you are) you can always hire our team to help you out. You can always contact us at 219-229-1633, email at sales@jm2marketing.com, or through our online contact form.