So, your SEO team have asked you to write a blog?
It can feel like a lot, and be quite overwhelming if it’s new to you. What are you actually supposed to write about? How do you write a blog? What makes a good blog? Luckily for you, the Gumpo Guide to Good Blogs is here.
What Is A Blog?
A blog can be many things. Back in the days of Tumblr (yes, we are that old), a blog was almost like a social media feed. Some people might have a personal blog where they ramble through all their problems or share insights into their daily life. But, if your company has a blog, it’s more than likely a place to share unique insights, articles and sprinkle in some SEO magic.
There’s no set structure that a blog has to take. Some blogs can be thousands of words long, while others might be like a quick news flash that only covers key points. From How To Guides, to listicles, there’s a wide range of forms that a blog can take.
What’s the Difference Between a Blog and an SEO Blog?
Fundamentally, the goal of a regular blog and a blog for SEO is a little different. Your regular blogs might be designed to provide particular insights to your readers, to update them on something or simply to push your thoughts into the world.
An SEO blog, however, is often written to appeal to both users and search engines. The general principles of SEO mean that keyword research and a strategic approach to the content you’re writing are essential. You need to consider not just the intentions of your audience, but also the purpose it will serve on your website or to crawlers and bots.
If you’re writing a blog for SEO reasons, there’s no need to be bamboozled by technological terms – we’ll delve into the how’s and the why’s.
Understanding Your Audience and Google
When you’re looking at SEO, each bit of content has two primary audiences: the user, and the search engine. How you juggle the two is essential for making sure that your content performs and is seen by either one.
Your Target Audience and Their Needs
Before we even start to think about search engines, we’re going to think about the real people who are behind them. Sometimes, if you’re ingrained in the SEO space, it can become easy to get swept away in a world of keyword research and forget the user, who ultimately, should be the focus of your content.
Typically, on a site where SEO is a focus, you’ll be offering a product or a service that you’re trying to promote. So the end goal of your copy is either to direct a user towards your offerings, or to offer helpful supporting content that surrounds what you sell. But how do you get there?
There are 4 main types of content that people search for:
Transactional
Sort of like it sounds, a transactional search query is what a user will be faced with when they’re making a purchase. While a blog wouldn’t necessarily target this search function – that’s what product and service pages are for – a blog can be used as a support mechanism.
On average, a consumer looks at three different products before making a purchase. So, in this instance, a blog might be used to nudge a consumer towards your product over another, or to be the final discussion of the benefits that convinces them to make a purchase.
Transactional blog content might consist of comparison articles, things to know before you buy, the best X for Y, or a pricing breakdown. There’s plenty of opportunity to use your blog as a support to your key sales drivers, just make sure that your copy links to product and category pages with clear CTA’s and great links.
Informational
Slightly different than a transactional query, if someone makes an informational driven search, they aren’t necessarily looking to buy anything, they’re looking for information. Statistics state that on average, 52% of all searches on Google are informational. Some businesses choose to ignore informational searches purely because the intention isn’t to sell something, but in doing so they are missing out on reaching a huge proportion of searchers.
Informational search queries are where your blog really gets to strut through the search landscape.
Here’s where your how to articles, what is content, step-by-step guides, come in. In producing this content, your site becomes a trusted source for information. Users see you as trying to do something more than sell them things, and in turn will trust your site more when the time comes that they are ready to make a purchase.
Plus, informational content is a great way to target AI Overviews, Featured Snippets and low-competition, high value keywords.
Navigational
Your navigational search queries are again, not usually targeted with your blog. They’re used when a user wants to find a specific website or page (you know, the whole searching for Google on Google debacle). However, your blog can be used to support overall navigational query SEO goals by supporting your brand.
If your blog supports brand and allows users to easily navigate to where they want to go, it can be used to support these searches. Think of blogs like brand+pricing, brand+reviews, your brand vs another brand, how to use brand tool. All of these little pieces of content are designed to improve brand awareness, boost site authority and make navigating the site a little bit easier.
Commercial
Your commercial queries are another sweet spot for blog content. They sit right between an informational and navigational query. When a user is debating making a purchase and is researching, that’s where you’re targeting.
Your blog is a great place here to have comparison guides, extra information that might not have made the cut on your product page, pros and cons, listicles with your products featured, data and expert examples that build trust and even a cheeky review.
Writing blogs to target these commercial browsers is where the art of subtlety lies. You can draw in and define your target audience with content that is designed to not only promote your services, but also gain visibility and engagement from your audience.
What Does Google Want to See?
Now we know what type of humans might be trawling your site, what about the SE of SEO, how do we write for them?
The problem with optimising for search engines is that what they want to see changes frequently. With the rise of AI, you’re not just considering Google and Bing (or even Jeeves), you now have to think about search as a whole and include ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. The good thing about all this is the fundamentals remain the same, so there are some things we know for sure:
Write for Humans First
Search engines present content to humans, so they prefer content that is aimed at humans. Shoving keywords everywhere in the hopes of hitting position 1 just isn’t going to fly – if your content isn’t useful to a web user, the browsers aren’t going to like it either.
Write as a Human
Oh I know, having to use your own brain, ew. That’s what ChatGPT is for, right?
Wrong.
AI can be a wonderful tool. It can help with idea generation, research and a quick sense check, but you can’t rely on it for everything. Mistrust has a major impact on many sites, and the fact of the matter is that when users see that dreaded em dash, they don’t trust your content. If your users don’t trust your content, neither do the browsers that present your content to the users in the first instance.
Structure for the Bots
Unfortunately, as much as we might need to aim some things towards humans, we do need to keep crawlers happy. How we do that is making the crawling as easy as humanly possible.
While there will be considerably more schema on your product pages, making sure that it is in place on your blogs is essential. From your author, to the date published, there’s lots of data that you can make easily accessible for bots.
Having a clear heading structure in place also makes it considerably easier for bots to crawl and understand your content. While keywords still play a part and it’s important to have them in place, if you’ve got that many of them in a heading that it becomes unclear what the text below is about, then you have a problem.
How to Write a Blog?
Okay, so you know why we write blogs, and what we need to consider prior to sitting down with a pen (or keyboard, we’re not in the 1800’s anymore), but how do you approach the writing part?
Keyword Research
If your SEO team have requested a blog of you, they might have provided you with a few keywords to have in mind – but if they’re lazy, or you are the SEO team, you might have to find them for yourself.
There are many tools out there that can show you keywords, tell you the search volume, suggest others that might link to the ones you’re looking into. There are long ones, short ones, obscure ones and sometimes even good ones – but how do you know which ones you need?
The simple answer is you analyse where your business priorities are. As much as there might be really good high volume, low competition keywords about the molecular structure of monopoly money, if your website sells plants, the keyword is irrelevant. However, if you’ve sat down and thought about all the things above, know exactly who your audience is, you know what they’re asking and what your content needs to do, then you’re halfway there.
Use the basis of what you want the results of your content to be to form the backbone of your keyword research. Make sure they somewhat link together, if you found a good keyword that doesn’t necessarily fit the content you’re writing, make a note and use it for another piece of content. If you have 3-5 keywords that work well with the topic you have in mind, then you probably have enough.
Headings and Structure
The unfortunate thing about writing copy is that people only half read it most of the time. That’s where your headings come in. They should make it easy for skim readers to understand what’s happening, while also making it easier for users who might just want a fast answer or a little snippet of information from the copy (we all know that when you’re looking for a recipe, you scroll past all of the text above).
Headings are typically numbered from 1-6, forming almost a hierarchy of headings. Your H1 would be the title of your blog, ideally your priority keyword will be in there somewhere, and most importantly there will only be one H1 on a page.
When it comes to H2’s, H3’s, H4’s, H5’s and H6’s (thankfully, you don’t have to use them all), you can use as many of each as you need to make your copy make sense and flow correctly. Headings are used to provide direction to articles, blogs and pages, to break up what otherwise might be a wall of text and make your content easier to read by bots.
A clear heading structure makes content more digestible, improves user engagement and is generally good SEO practice.
Images
Adding an image into a blog can increase the visibility of your article by up to 94%. Typically, it is recommended to include at least 3 high quality images throughout blog content to increase the visual appeal and break up larger text blocks. This can vary depending on the length of your content/if you have several relevant images to use.
Alt text and captions are also a great way to sneak in an extra keyword here and there in a way that will be visible to a crawler but not necessarily every user (obviously, it still has to make sense). Alt text and captions are also essential for making your site accessible for those who might have additional accessibility needs.
Links
When you think about your user journey, you likely don’t want it to end on a blog. That’s where internal links are so important, they can be used to direct your users where you want them to go. If you sell swimming pool supplies and have written a blog about the benefits of pool noodles, and you’re not linking through to the pool noodle product page to make it easy for your user, they’re not going to be able to easily follow through.
You want a consistent flow of link juice (yes, that is a real term) throughout your entire site. They help to ease navigation and improve user experience across your website.
If you have data collected from an outside source, link through to that, especially if the site you’re linking from has a higher authority score than your own website. It adds to your own credibility to cite your sources (a bit like writing an essay in school).
In Summary
When it comes to writing an SEO friendly blog, there are a few steps to follow which should help your content rank and make websites easier to navigate for users.
What it really comes down to is:
- Considering your audience and putting them first
- Strategic keyword optimisation
- Thoughtful structure
- Good links
- Accurate, useful information
Put all these things together, and you have a good, SEO friendly blog post. Mash it together with an overarching SEO strategy, a flawless website that has all the technical things right, and a smidge of good luck, and boom, you’re driving loads of traffic, have 200 backlinks and are ranking at the top of all the search results.
