How to Write a Blog Post? 5 Steps to Know About

What Is a Blog?

You can cover a wide range of subjects, including personal narratives, educational content, news analysis, product reviews, and more.

Also, remember, your purpose in writing;

A blog is to help your business or client’s website gain more visitors by producing valuable blogs with accurate information, the latest trends, etc.

However, most blog writers may write the best content with high-quality images but unknowingly hurt a business.

This guide will ensure that your content marketing efforts with blogs do not go to waste. After reading this blog, you will be able to produce blogs that not only rank on search engines but also convert.

How to Write a Blog Post for Content Writers?

If the search engine doesn’t understand the intent and content of your blog, it will not rank it.

Result?

Your target audience will not be able to see or read your blog.

Before putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), it’s crucial to define the purpose of your blog. Are you aiming to educate, entertain, or inspire your readers? Determining your purpose will guide your content creation process and ensure consistency in your messaging.

Additionally, understanding your target audience’s demographics, interests, and pain points will help tailor your content to their needs, increasing the likelihood of engagement.

Pro Tip: Conduct surveys, analyze social media interactions, and use analytics tools to gain insights into your audience’s preferences and behaviors.

Familiarize Yourself with SPAM Policies and Best Practices by Google

As a content writer, you must go through SPAM policies and key best practices used by Google to stay on top of writing a blog. Three of the primary and most important areas you must learn include:

5 Steps to Write a Good Blog Post

If you want to know how to write a blog post, you must offer value to your readers. Therefore, writing a blog include the following five steps.

Step #1 – Topic Selection

Selecting a topic is the most critical factor when writing a blog post. If the topic selection is not good – not only could you lose business, but your content may harm your website’s search engine ranking.

In simpler terms, while you intend to help, you end up hurting your company or client’s business due to bad blog topic selection.

Avoid the Conflict

“Your blog topic must never conflict with web page URL or target keywords.” Remember this golden rule as the stepping stone for your blog writing ritual.

For example, you want to write a blog on “custom drinkware,” a product you sell on your website. Now, it is very possible that you will write a blog on custom drinkware and end up hurting your website’s ranking or web page selling custom drinkware.

How?

You do so by using the term “custom drinkware” in the topic of your blog, such as “Custom Drinkware for Your Business.”

You must consider that any search query for custom drinkware on Google must show your custom drinkware product page in a search result for the customer to click on.

Suppose you apply Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your custom drinkware product page so that it can appear among the top search results on Google, Bing, etc. Simultaneously, you also publish a blog with “custom drinkware” in its title as well as a URL.

In this case, your blog page will directly conflict with your own product page for custom drinkware creating competition between both pages with the same keyword.

When a user searches “custom drinkware,” Google or Bing will read your website and get confused between these two pages and which one to display, i.e., whether to show your “custom drinkware product page” or “custom drinkware blog.”

Result?

The search engine will assume that you do not know what you are doing, and it will abandon your website immediately and drop your SERP ranking due to confusing or conflicting URLs. This is how you end up hurting your or your client’s business and website, even when you publish a very well-researched and well-written article with absolutely stunning banners, images, and videos.

Always remember – topic selection is of utmost importance when writing a blog.

Blog topic conflicting with your webpage or URL not only hurts your website but also costs your company additional losses due to all those work hours by yourself and the graphics team going down the drain.

Step #2 – How to Write a Good Blog Post Topic?

When creating a valuable blog, remember the following steps.

• If you want to write a blog about a product or service, it is ok not to use its name in the topic directly. Instead of using the blog title “Custom Drinkware for Your Business,” you write “Purchase Guide for Drinkware in 2023.” This will be a useful topic that will not conflict with any web page on your website.
• You must also remember never to create two blog topics with synonyms. For instance, you must not create a “Purchase Guide for Drinkware” and a “Shopping Guide for Drinkware.”

Purchasing and shopping are synonymous terms, and both blogs will start competing against each other for SERP rankings, and both will end up hurting each other.

• Avoid duplication of keywords within the blogs as well, and never use the same keyword for two blogs to prevent conflict.
• It is always a good blog topic selection strategy to use synonyms for the products you want to talk about in your blog.
• You MUST avoid conflict between blog pages, website pages, and URLs. The keyword or phrase you use for the blog to rank MUST NOT be present on your website pages, especially in website page URLs and titles.
• Always create a blog with keywords and phrases not present on your website pages in URLs, titles, or product categories. For instance, using a blog titled “Custom drinkware for your business in 2023,” where custom drinkware is a product page, will hurt your page.
• However, the “Top 10 Most Popular Custom Bottles in 2023” is a good blog topic because your website has no product category, page, or URL with the word “custom bottle” in it.

An Example Scenario

Suppose you sell custom drinkware on your website, have a product page for it, and wish to write a blog on this product. In this case, you can create a blog topic/title “Top 10 Most Popular Custom Bottles in 2023.” The term “custom bottle” will not conflict with your product page for custom drinkware.

For this blog, your URL will be “top-10-most-popular-custom-bottles”. Refrain from mentioning the year in your URL; otherwise, you will lose your blog’s ranking as soon as the year changes to 2024. All you will have to do is change 2023 in your title to 2024 and beyond with every passing year and still maintain the ranking of your blog on Search engines.

Some Examples of good Topics Include

• Guide to Purchase (products such as bottles, t-shirts, or any service)
• (t-shirt, bottle, or any product/service) Purchase Guide
• What Factors to Consider When Buying
• Top 10 Custom T-shirt Ideas
• Custom T-Shirt Ideas for 2023
• How to Customize Your Hoodies in 2023?

A quick top: Google and search engines love blog titles starting with “Top 10,” “10 Best,” and “How to.”

Step#3- Learning from Competition

As a blog writer, it is extremely important and mandatory for you to learn from the competition. Always research and look at the websites or sources that write blogs better than you or your company. Here is why learning from the competition is important when writing a blog.

Benchmarking and Goal Setting

Competitor analysis allows you to benchmark your own blog’s performance against competitors. You can compare factors such as traffic, engagement metrics, social media presence, and backlink profiles.

Step #4 – Keywords: The Secret Sauce for a Successful Blog

Your blog must use or target a long-tail keyword to rank at. This is important because without a ranking, your blog will not appear amongst the top search results, and no one will see your blog let alone read it.

Relevant keywords used on your website must be incorporated within your blog. However, you must use applicable links for each keyword and title text. The relevance of the URL linked to each keyword is important.

For instance, using a custom t-shirt link on custom drinkware (a keyword on your website) will be irrelevant. Google will consider it clickbait by taking it as a sign of deception or keyword stuffing just to gain traffic.

Therefore, you must always use the link to the webpage relevant to the keyword you use within the blog’s content.

Use of Keywords When Writing a Blog Content

You can use any keyword on your website within any blog’s content as long as you link it with the relevant product or page on your website.

The rule of thumb is to use a keyword at least five times within the content, each with a link. However, use keyword/s as many times as you want. Make sure that the use of the keyword is logical with coherent use of the English language with the right concept.

Tips to Choose Keywords Where the Blog Will Rank

Remember the following tips when choosing the keyword to rank your blog.

• If your blog mentions a keyword used on any other webpage or URL, you will link it to the relevant/applicable page.
• The keyword you wish your blog to rank at becomes your key phrase. Therefore, it is best to use long-tail key phrases such as “Guide to Purchase T-Shirts” or “Guide to Purchase Custom Bottles,” etc. In this case, you want to rank your blog for t-shirts or custom bottles; therefore, Guide to purchase T-shirt or Guide to purchase custom bottles becomes your key phrase.
• Images names for your blog must not conflict with images used on your website pages. Images names must be relevant to the keywords you want your blogs to rank on.

Step #5 – Practice Blog Interlinking

Make it a standard practice to add relevant blogs on your website at the bottom of your blog. This will help users to navigate to other relevant blogs on your website.

For instance, if you have written a blog on a purchase guide for t-shirts, add links to the purchase guide for caps, purchase guide for hoodies, etc., at the bottom of your blog.

This is also known as “blog topic cross-selling.” Simply write the heading “Other Blogs You May Find Useful” and add the links and images of the relevant blogs under it. This practice will increase your chances of retaining visitors to your website for longer and converting them into paying customers.

As an SEO team and digital marketing expert, you play a pivotal role in blog writing by carrying out the following tasks.

1. Keyword research
2. Identifying high-impact keywords
3. Optimizing blog content to improve search engine visibility

You collaborate with content creators to ensure each blog is strategically optimized with relevant keywords, headings, and meta tags. This helps drive organized traffic and increase your blog’s rankings in search engine results.

Furthermore, you must also analyze metrics and data to monitor the performance of blog posts, identify areas for improvement, and implement SEO strategies to enhance the overall effectiveness and reach of the blog content.

 

Writing a Blog: Requirements from SEO Team

Here is a quick breakdown of what information you (the SEO person) must provide to a content writer. Make sure that the guidelines and instructions you provide to the blog writers/content team are extremely clear and must include the following:

1. Rank the blog keywords/key phrases/ statements
2. Keywords a content writer must use in the blog
3. Number of FAQs required for a blog
4. You must provide complete SE Meta information for the blog.

A Scenario

For example, you wish to rank a blog for a custom basketball jersey. In this case, the information you provide will be as follows.

1. Rank the blog keywords/key phrases/ statements

• Create Custom Basketball Jersey at Home

2. Keywords a content writer must use in the blog

• The Keyword itself: custom basketball jersey
• The alt-title used for each keyword: custom basketball jersey
• The URL for each keyword: xyz.com/custom-basketball-jersey
• Number of times a writer must use each keyword, alt-title, and URL in the blog: 5+

3. Number of FAQs required for a blog

• You must write and create five frequently asked questions related to the topic.
• When researching for FAQs, always best to avoid the top 3 to 5 FAQs appearing on Google search results.
• To increase the uniqueness of your blog, it is best to use high-value FAQs.

4. You must provide complete SE Meta information for the blog

As a complete set of SE meta-information, you must provide the following information to the writers.

• Key phrase: phrase/statement you want your blog to rank on
• SE Title: Make sure this does not conflict with the SE keywords for your website
• SE Description: make sure not to use any website keyword here
• SE Keywords: all the keywords you select

Using the same example of a custom basketball jersey, this is what your SE meta will look like.

• Key phrase: Create Custom Basketball Jersey at Home
• SE Title: Easy to Follow Steps to Create Custom Basketball Jersey at Home in 2023
• SE Description: This blog gives you easy to follow a 12-step process to create a custom basketball jersey in less than 60 minutes (This is similar to your punchline for the blog). However, the content writer must improve this description where necessary.
• SE Keywords: custom basketball jersey and others

Remember, when writing your SE Title, DO NOT use a question such as “How to create a custom basketball jersey at home?”

Using Keywords as Long-tail Keywords

You can use a keyword from other web pages and URLs within a long-tail keyword.

For example, a custom basketball jersey is a title or within a URL of your webpage. However, if there is a search volume for “create custom basketball jersey at home” in search results, Google will consider this entire term as a long-tail keyword instead of confusing it with a custom basketball web page or URL.

Therefore, you will be able to use a custom basketball jersey as a long-tail key phrase by adding “create” and “at home” at the beginning and end. This long-tail key phrase will not conflict with other pages or URLs on your website.

Creatives for blogs include images, videos, and animations. As a graphics team member, you must use new formats such as Webp and Webm in addition to JPG, PNG, GIF, and other formats to boost the performance of the blogs.

The creatives’ names must not use meaningless words like temp, min, etc. The name of the images you create must resonate with the subject or topic of the blog, as this is important for blog SEO.

Fulfill the Requirements

Make sure to pay attention to the blog template and its requirement, such as

Tips for Naming the Creatives

The pattern to name each image is as follows.

Formats Required for Each Creative Category