How to Write SEO-Friendly Blog Posts and Get Them Ranking

WordCamp Niagara 2019Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries

Hello!

Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries@natasha_bd

• Aspiring teacher/social worker turned digital marketer

• Living the agency life as anSEO + Digital Marketing Specialist

• Proud Western University and George Brown College graduate

• Offline hobbies include soccer, sailing, playing trombone, hiking and cheering on Toronto FC

Write. Content.Good.

1. Writing

3. Promoting

2. Publishing

Writing

Step 1: Choose a Great Topic

• Write about questions that readers are asking

• Choose topics that address different stages of the marketing funnel

Step 1: Choose a Great Topic

• What is SEO and Why Your Business Needs It

• 7 Questions to Ask Your SEO Agency

• Guide to Generating Business Leads Through Your Blog

• How Our Blog Increased Our E-Commerce Sales by 14%

• Can’t go wrong with a question

• Embrace emotion, excitement and mystery

• Use numbers and lists

• Incorporate your targeted keywords

• Aim for a length of ~50 characters

Step 2: Craft an Attention Grabbing Title

• WordCamp Niagara 2019

• Blog Writing Tips

• Toronto FC Team Profile

Step 2: Craft an Attention Grabbing Title

• 4 Things I Learned at WordCamp Niagara 2019

• The Beginner’s Guide to Writing Fantastic Blog Posts

• Why Toronto FC is the Greatest Soccer Team in the World

• Make use of simple, natural language

• Incorporate the phrases people are actually searching for

• Write shorter sentences and paragraphs

Step 3: Write for Humans

• Use keyword stuffing

• Plagiarize

• Obsess over algorithms, length or any rule or best practice anybody claims to be true

Do NOT…

• It depends!

• Quality and comprehensiveness > quantity

• Moz Whiteboard Friday – Content Comprehensivenesshttps://moz.com/blog/content-comprehensiveness

• My personal opinion? No less than 500, aim for 700-1200

What’s the Best Length for a Blog?

• The average blog post length is 1,050 words (Source: Orbit Media)

• The average word count of top ranked content in Google is between 1,140-1285 words (Source: SearchMetrics)

• On average, only 18% of companies’ blog posts are over 750 words (Source: Curata)

• Longer, in-depth blog posts generate 9x more leads than short ones (Source: Curata)

• Source and More Blogging Statistics: https://getcodeless.com/blogging-statistics/

What’s the Best Length for a Blog?

About the tool: https://yoast.com/use-content-analysis-yoast-seo/

Full list of factors they analyze: https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-readability-analysis/

Yoast SEO Content Analysis

Publishing

Step 1: Heading Structure

• Make use of headings, don’t just post a bunch of paragraphs

• Google has recently said having more than H1 is okay...I’m still sticking with one

Step 2: Format for Mobile

• Shorten your paragraphs to avoid the scary wall of text

Step 2: Format for Mobile

Step 3: Create Internal Links

• Link to other blog posts and pages on your website

• Provides additional information for readers

• Helps Google crawl your site

• Consider the Topic Cluster approach and focus on linking to specific Pillar Pageshttps://blog.hubspot.com/news-trends/topic-clusters-seo

Step 4: Fill Out the Meta Info

• Set the alt text for images

• Optimize and properly size your images

• Consider adding schema markup

• Set your canonical URL

Step 5: Other On-Page Tasks

Promoting

Step 1: Submit for Indexing

Step 2: Post to Social

Step 2: Post to Social

Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-seo-experiment/

“As you can see from the results above, there appears to be a strong correlation between social activity and

rankings.”-Hootsuite

Step 2: Post to Social

Yoast can help customize the look of your social post

Step 2: Post to Social

See the difference?

Step 3: Other Promotion Strategies

• E-Newsletter

• RSS Feed

• Link outreach

• Guest posting

Step 3: Refresh and Re-Share

• Keep it fresh

• Tweak titles, update internal linking, expand on your topic, update stats, numbers and dates

• Don’t share it only when it’s new

Make the Most of WordPress Plugins

• Automatically post to social media

• Send new blog posts to subscribers via e-mail

• Schema markup

• Redirects

• Analytics

• Speed optimizations

• SSL

Some of My Favourite Plugins

So, In a Nutshell…

• Write good content

• Don’t forget on-page optimizations while publishing

• Write good content

• Promote your post for an extra boost

• Make the most of WordPress plugins

• Write good content

Questions?

Don’t Be a Stranger

• Slides and Resources: https://natashabd.ca/wordcamp-niagara-2019

• E-Mail: nburtenshawdevries@gmail.com

• Twitter: @natasha_bd

• LinkedIn: Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries