How To Start A Blog And Make Money In Canada [FREE Course]
Chapter 3
How to Create SEO Blog Posts
Overview
Irrespective of whether you create a paid or free blog, you need to be good at one thing to stand out from the competition. That thing is writing content that suits humans and search engines. In other words, writing an SEO blog post. In this chapter, you will learn what SEO blog posts entail and how to create them.
What is an SEO Blog Post?
SEO is an abbreviation for “search engine optimization“. It is the act of designing websites, blogs, and content to meet search engines’ guidelines.
So an SEO blog post refers to content that is published on a blog to meet the intent of users on search engines.
This definition contains four key terms that you need to understand:
- Search engines: This refers to a web machine where people go to ask questions or inquire about something. Examples of search engines include Google, Bing, Yahoo, and so on. Google is the world’s largest search engine and it is our focus in this guide.
- Users: These are the people that visit search engines to look for answers or information about something.
- Search intent: This refers to the purpose behind a user query on search engines.
- Content: This is the answer or solution provided to meet the intent of search engine users.
Let us look at it this way, search engines exist to provide users with the exact information they need.
However, search engines do not produce the information themselves. Instead, they rely on web pages and blog posts.
But not every blog provides helpful and reliable content. As such, search engines constantly search for existing blogs/websites, categorize them, and rate their content according to their quality.
When a user searches for a particular thing on a search engine, search engines can provide the perfect results from the lists of sites rated.
So if you want to generate traffic to your blog from search engines, you need to write content that meet the standards of search engines. This is where SEO blog posts come in.
In the following section, you will learn the basic elements of SEO blog posts you can implement to write content that appeal to humans and search engines.
Elements of SEO Blog Posts
SEO blog posts differ from other types of content based on their elements. By understanding these elements, you can write blog posts that boost your ranking on search engines, thereby generating more traffic.
That being said, below we shall look at some of the basic elements of SEO blog posts.
1. Keyword research
Keyword research is the process of identifying and evaluating what your target audiences are searching for on search engines.
To identify what your target audiences are searching on search engines, you need to use a keyword research tool such as Ahrefs, Ubersugguest, or Semrush.
These tools will help you identify the terms/queries used by your target audiences on search engines. Keyword research tools also help you know the potential of those queries and the possibility of ranking with them on search engine results pages (SERPs).
When conducting keyword research, there are five key factors to consider:
- Keyword type: There are two basic types of keywords. Short-tail and long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords usually contain 1 to 3 keywords and they are often difficult to rank on new blogs. Long-tail keywords contain 3 to 5+ words and are usually easier to rank. As a beginner, you need to focus on long-tail keywords to generate fast traffic.
- Search volume: This indicates the average number of times people search for a particular keyword per month.
- Keyword difficulty: This indicates the level of difficulty of ranking a particular keyword on the first 10 search results that constitute the first page of SERP. You want your blog posts to rank within the first 10 search results because most people do not scroll beyond the first page of Google SERP.
- Backlink requirement: A backlink is a link from another website/blog pointing to your blog. Search engines see each backlink as a vote of confidence for your blog. So backlink requirement means the number of external links your blog post needs to rank a particular keyword on the first page of SERP. The higher the backlinks, the better.
- Search intent: As noted earlier, search intent means the reason behind a user query on a search engine. There are four major types of search intent — informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional intent. Keyword research helps you determine the exact search intent of a given keyword.
Keyword research example
Assuming your blog niche is real estate and you are targeting a Canadian audience. To find what Canadians are searching about real estate, you need to follow the steps below:
- Sign up with a keyword research tool
You should sign up with a free plan on Ubersuggest or a paid plan on Ahrefs. A paid plan will provide you with more features and research metrics.
A single monthly subscription is enough to research hundreds of keywords that will serve you for a year or more.
But if you are on a low budget, Ubersugguest is a great start.
- Login to your keyword research tool
If you signed up with Ahrefs, you will need to log in to your account and click on “Keywords Explorer”.
After that, the following page will appear. You can then type the name of your niche (real estate) in the search box, choose your country (Canada) on the right section, and click on the search bar:
- Evaluate the keyword metrics
The following results will appear. This is the result of the short-tail keyword (seed term) “real estate”.
As you can see in the attached image, it would be very difficult to rank with such a keyword because it has high SEO difficulty and requires a high number of backlinks to rank in the top 10 of Google SERP.
But you can see that there are over 320,000 terms and over 18,000 questions related to “real estate”. All you need is to click on any of them and evaluate their potential.
For example, the related question, “how to become real estate agent in ontario” has the following results:
Considering the low keyword difficulty and backlink requirements of this keyword, you can easily rank by writing on it against writing on “real estate”.
2. Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is another element of SEO blog posts. This involves analyzing the content of the first 10 search results of search engines against a given keyword.
Running a competitor analysis before writing about a keyword will help you understand the type of content that Google loves about a given keyword.
By analyzing your competitors critically, you will also identify gaps to fill to make your content better.
To find the competitors of a particular keyword, all you need is to search the term on Google and view the first page or top 10 results.
If you subscribed to Ahrefs, you will find the competitors under the Keywords Explorer data. See below:
When conducting competitor analysis, below are the key factors to consider for each competitor’s content:
- Content type: Is it a guide, listicle, comparison, review, case study or what?
- Word usage: What common words were used to explain the keyword? What are the related keywords?
- Tone: Is it positive, negative, or neutral?
- Structure: How was the title written? What are the common headings? What is the average word count? How many images are there?
- Links: How many backlinks are there? What internal posts were linked to? What websites/blogs were linked to?
- Gaps: What can you add? Is there anything to update or remove?
3. High-Quality Content
The third important element of an SEO blog post is high-quality content. High-quality content is at the heart of SEO blog posts.
Without writing high-quality content, it will be very difficult (if not impossible) to rank on the top pages of Google and other search engines.
This may eventually discourage you from continuing blogging, having wasted your time and resources.
So how do you write high-quality content?
Let us first understand what high-quality content means before learning how to write it.
What is high-quality content?
In the context of SEO, high-quality content means content that provides a helpful and reliable solution to search queries.
Because the word “high-quality” can be subjective, each search engine uses different factors to determine if a piece of content is high-quality or not.
Among other factors, Google uses Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) to evaluate high-quality content.
You can self-assess the quality of your content by answering the following questions:
Other relevant questions you need to answer to evaluate the quality of your content can be found here.
In addition to high-quality content, Google also considers other factors in ranking your blog posts high on SERPs.
Some of the important factors include backlinks (external links) pointing to your blog posts and the age of your blog.
An in-depth explanation of Google rating factors is provided under the Google search rater guidelines (PDF).
How to write high-quality content
Bearing Google search rater guidelines in mind, there are certain factors you need to consider when writing high-quality SEO content.
Below is a step-by-step guide on how to write and upload high-quality content to your blog:
- Optimize your topic: Your topic should be concise. It should contain your target keyword and at least one suitable power word.
- Use heading tags: Use H1 for your post title; H2 for subheadings; H3 for the subsequent subheadings and so on. Note: Your block editor will automatically set the H1 tag when you write your post title in the title section.
- Write in simple terms: Always communicate your message to your readers as if you are talking to grade 5 students by using short sentences and short paragraphs and avoiding jargon.
- Edit and optimize your content: Edit your content using Grammarly and optimize it using Yoast SEO plugin. Here is a YouTube video on how to use the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize your content.
- Link your content: Include at least one internal link pointing to your other content and one external link pointing to a different website. The links should be contextual and relevant to your post.
- Image: Include a featured image with ALT text. Avoid Copyrighted images. Use Canva to design unique free images.
- Write meta description: Summarize the content of your blog post to potential visitors.
- Optimize your URL: Your blog post URL or link should contain your main keyword. The URL should be as short as possible and it should not contain numbers except they are part of your keyword.
- Category: If you have multiple categories, choose the category that fits your post.
What next?
It is time to double-check your content to ensure it ticks all the above metrics.
Once you tick all the boxes, you can hit the publish button.
After publishing every blog post, you should complete the following tasks:
- Link back: Check to see if there are existing posts that need to be linked with your new post.
- Share: Share the post across different social media platforms for wider visibility.
- Request indexing: Log in to your Google Search Console account and submit the URL of the new blog post for indexing under “URL” Inspection“.
- Set up Google Analytics to start analyzing the performance of your content. Here is a YouTube guide on how to do so.
Summary of Chapter 3
Without writing high-quality content that drive traffic, you will be far from achieving the benefits of blogging we discussed in chapter one. You have just learned what it takes to write blog posts that not only appeal to Google but resonate with your target audience.
