SEO Writing: How To Write Blog Posts That Rank

Do you have everything else in your business set up but aren’t quite sure how to get started with digital marketing, particularly SEO writing?

SEO writing is an often misunderstood facet of digital marketing. Some think SEO is a spammy marketing strategy no matter how you go about doing it while others know of its importance but implement it incorrectly, anyway.

In this post, you will learn what SEO writing is and how you can use it to optimize your posts well enough for them to rank.

What is SEO writing?

To understand SEO writing, you first need to understand search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of designing your web pages in a way that helps them rank in search engines, particularly Google.

SEO writing refers to a subset of SEO in which you use it to optimize things like blog content and product pages for search engines.

When you optimize your blog for SEO, you use techniques like keyword research and matching search intent to help your content rank for keywords related to your niche.

Why is SEO writing important?

SEO writing is important because of what it helps you earn: organic traffic.

Organic traffic is traffic you don’t need to pay for or source from social media. You earn it by ranking on search engines for relevant keywords in your niche.

SEO writing gives you a specific strategy to follow to help your blog posts rank rather than throwing content at the wall and hoping it sticks.

What SEO writing isn’t

Here’s where the confusion lies: because SEO is often used incorrectly by many marketers, it’s gotten a bad rep over the years.

This has caused some marketers and the general public alike to think of SEO as a spammy marketing tactic an SEO writer uses to artificially rank thin generic content.

Misusing SEO is called “blackhat SEO.”

Blackhat SEO techniques include overusing your target keyword (a practice known as “keyword stuffing”), using too many keywords, including too many keywords that don’t relate to the topic you’re writing about and buying backlinks.

Fortunately, there are ways to do SEO correctly. That’s what we’re going to focus on for the rest of this post.

12 steps for improving SEO content writing

1. Find the right keyword to target

Some blog posts are topics you want to write about and need to find a keyword for. Others target keywords you found through keyword research.

If you have a topic you want to cover, think of keywords that describe it.

For example, when we wanted to write this post, we found the keyword data for “how to write blog posts that rank” to be pretty non-existent. So, we found “SEO writing” instead, which is a much more concise keyword that actually returns keyword data.

If the most popular keyword for a particular topic is too competitive, try to think of a few synonyms, and input those into your keyword tool instead.

For example, a synonym for “SEO writing” would be “SEO content.”

If you don’t have a topic in mind, input a seed keyword into a keyword research tool, and look for keywords that relate to your seed keyword.

To improve your odds of ranking for your chosen keyword, use your tool’s filter options to only show keywords that have a maximum SEO/keyword difficulty score of 40.

For example, in SE Ranking we would run our keyword search, click the Filters button and then enter 40 in the second column under Difficulty.

SE Ranking filter buttons – https://share.zight.com/E0uNPv48

Each keyword tool is different, but generally, a keyword with a difficulty score between 0 and 30 is easy to rank for while a keyword with a score between 30 and 70 is fairly difficult to rank for.

A keyword with a score over 70 is very difficult to rank for.

Choose a keyword that:

Can be turned into an article
Relates to content you’ve already written, unless you’re trying to find a keyword for a pillar page
Has a difficulty score that’s compatible with your domain authority
Has at least a couple hundred monthly searches, which means it gains some traction on Google

For the purposes of this guide, we’re going to choose the keyword “how to prune succulents.”

2. Determine the search intent of the keyword

Search intent is the type of results users are expecting to find when they enter a particular keyword into Google.

For instance, a keyword synonym for our example keyword would be “pruning succulents.” If we were to target that keyword, we might make the mistake of writing a guide that focuses more on whether or not succulents need to be pruned and when to prune them and less on how to prune them.

In reality, when most users enter “pruning succulents” into Google, they’re probably looking for tutorials.

This is why it’s crucial to enter your chosen keyword into Google to see what type of articles are ranking for it. They’ll give you an idea about the type of article you should write if you want to compete.

Enter your keyword into Google, and analyze the first search engine results page (SERP) to determine its search intent. Then, come up with a few working titles that demonstrate the angle you’re going for.

Our chosen keyword, “how to prune succulents,” has its angle and title built in. Yours might as well.

For “pruning succulents,” a few angles we could work with include:

The Beginner’s Guide to Pruning Succulents
X Ways of Pruning Succulents
Pruning Succulents, and How to Maintain Them

3. Analyze the first SERP for your keyword

You’re not just looking for search intent when you analyze the first SERP for your chosen keyword. You’re also checking out your competition.

It’s best to enter your keyword into Google in a browser where you’re not logged into your Google account and whose history and cookies have been freshly cleared.

Google manipulates search results based on your search history, so working with a clean slate will give you a better understanding of what’s actually ranking for your keyword.

Make note of a few things on that first SERP:

The titles your competition uses for your keyword
How your competition approach their articles
Whether or not videos appear on the first SERP. This indicates a need for your brand to expand into video content
Questions that appear in the “People Also Ask” section. These are questions you should address in your article
Which types of sites and rank. For example, are you seeing blog posts ranking or product pages from ecommerce sites?
Whether or not forums appear on the first SERP. Make note of any questions you see here. These are additional questions you should address in your article

google people also ask pruning succulents

4. Run the keyword through a content optimization tool

Also known as an “on-page SEO tool,” a content optimization tool is a specialized keyword tool that helps you optimize articles for a specific keyword.

Scalenut and Surfer are both popular tools to use, but we’re using Frase in our screenshots below.

Click here to try Frase for free.

It’s very easy to use and has a fantastic price range for small blogs. And it’s surprisingly affordable even if you need to optimize a lot of content.

These tools analyze the top results for your keyword and let you know the average number of words, headings and images they use.

Frase even lets you know the average number of links the top pages use in their articles.

They also give you a list of related keywords the top pages use and suggest the number of times you should use them in your article.

This is why we recommend running your keyword through one of these tools before you write it. It lets you know how many words to aim for, the minimum number of images you need and which related topics you should cover.

When you’re done with your article, you can paste it into your chosen tool to receive a grade (on a scale from 0 to 100) on how well you optimized your post.

It’s best to aim for a score between 70 to 90. This ensures your article is optimized enough to compete but not over optimized.

However, the tool should tell you the average score out of the top pages that rank for your keyword, so you really only need to beat this number to compete.

5. Write an outline

You should know exactly how you want to approach your blog post by now.

Open Google Docs or whatever tool you use to plan your articles with, and come up with a basic outline that includes every section you need to add to your article to thoroughly cover the topic and compete.

Read through your competitors’ articles again as well as Reddit and forum posts related to your keyword for more ideas.

The list of related keywords your keyword and content optimization tools provided should help as well.

Make sure your outline includes the following:

Your chosen keyword in a single H2 heading. Use keyword synonyms for additional H2 headings to avoid over optimizing your post
Important related topics as headings
Bullet points under headings filled with facts and information to include in each section and subsection

Your outline can be as thin or as thorough as you want it to be, but the more research you do before you start writing, the faster the writing process will be.

This is actually something Frase can help with. The tool uses generative AI to create outlines on the fly.

This video from Adam Connell explains the process in more detail:

6. Write and optimize your blog post

The next step is simple but time consuming.

Write your blog post, and use the content optimization tool (Frase) to ensure you’re not overusing your target keyword and that you’re using enough related keywords.

One thing that will affect your total score is the number of images you use.

Images are very important for SEO. While it’s okay to add stock images to some pages, don’t rely on stock photography for your blog posts.

Create relevant, unique images instead.

Take screenshots, create infographics with Canva, and take real-life photos with your smartphone or a proper DSLR camera.

Optimize images by reducing their resolution and compressing them.

7. Improve your post’s readability

A post’s readability is two things: it’s a score (the Flesch readability score), but it’s also as simple as how well your visitors are able to read your content.

Here are a few tips on how to improve the readability of your articles:

Add a table of contents to every article
Make your paragraphs shorter. This improves readability on mobile devices
Use short sentences
Use simple phrasing
Break up long H2 sections into H3 sections, and long H3 sections into H4 sections
Break up long series of paragraphs with relevant images. Even better, summarize information and data with graphics and infographics

You can use a tool like the Hemingway App to improve your article’s readability score, but as long as you use short sentences and simple phrasing, you should be good.

8. Create an SEO-friendly title

An SEO-friendly title is a title that contains your target keyword or a close keyword synonym.

It should be around 60 characters and contain power words, which are words that amplify the purpose of your article, such as “ultimate,” “amazing,” “extraordinary,” etc.

Try to avoid using “best” too much. It’s far overused at this point.

You can also use emotional words and add numbers to make your titles more enticing.

A headline analyzer, such as the one from IsItWP, can help you optimize your title.

For instance, this tool helped us turn “How to Prune Succulents” into “How to Prune Succulents the Easy Way in 5 Steps”.

If you use WordPress, your SEO plugin might have a headline analyzer. It’ll also let you set an SEO title and meta description.

Meta descriptions aren’t as important as they used to be since Google started using relevant text snippets on SERPs, but you should still create one for each blog post.

Use it to summarize the point or solution of your topic, and be sure to use your target keyword within it.

9. Create an SEO-friendly permalink

Warning: Do not change the permalink structure of your site on a whim. If you want to change your site’s permalink structure, you need to set up 301 redirects to ensure you don’t create broken links.

Your CMS should allow you to create what’s known as a “pretty permalink.”

A permalink is the text that appears after your domain name. For instance, your permalink for your About page is probably “about,” or “yourdomain.com/about.”

By default, your WordPress permalink will usually be the post number assigned to your post. Consider changing your permalink structure to Post Name instead (again, do not do this without setting up 301 redirects first), then use your target keyword as your permalink.

This would mean our example keyword’s permalink would be “domain.com/how-to-prune-succulents”.

10. Add internal links

Internal links are crucial for SEO and user experience.

Not only do they encourage your readers to learn more about a topic, they help search engine bots find more pages to crawl on your website.

However, you shouldn’t simply link to every page on your website. Only create internal links for relevant pages. This reduces your risk of appearing as spam to humans and bots alike.

If you don’t have many internal links for your article, consider taking a bit of time to come up with related topics to write about so you can strengthen your internal link structure.

11. Add external links

External links are important for SEO as well. They demonstrate that the information within your content is backed by trusted sources.

For this reason, you should only create external links for authoritative websites, and only create them for pages that relate to your topic.

12. Promote your post

Long gone are the days of publishing blog post after blog post and waiting for traffic from Google to come.

You now need to actively promote your post in order to increase traffic to it, which will boost the SEO of your site overall.

Promote your post through your email list and social media channels.

Consider promoting it through link-building strategies as well. You could write blog posts for other sites in exchange for links, or suggest your article to other sites as a recommended resource.

There are plenty of other outreach tactics you can use but you’ll always need to offer something in return to make it worth people’s time.