How to Write a Great Blog Post

Have you ever wondered what makes a blog post great? Several elements go into writing a great blog post. Sometimes, you read a post and learn a lot; other times, you read one and wish you had the time back because you got nothing new. Right? You don't want to do that on your blog or your ideal customer, and Google won't be happy. You have to have helpful content that provides value to win with Google's algorithm in 2023.

What Makes a Great Blog Post?

Let’s get to the point: what makes some blog posts great? It starts with an idea, followed by research, solid writing, good information, and images that help tell the story. It provides value, insights, data, personal experiences, or other elements that help tell the story and connect with the audience. It's not just a regurgitation of facts that are boring to read. It's also not something you've copied and pasted from a tool like ChatGPT because the content it creates isn't what I'd call great (at least not yet).

A Great Blog Post Starts with an Idea

A good blog post needs to have a good foundational idea. If you don't have a strong topic, you will struggle to write a great post. Strong topics may vary by field, but the general concept is that they are topics that your audience wants. You want to focus on an idea that matters to your audience and one where you have experience, input, and something to add to the conversation. Don't just choose a topic because it sounds fun. Choose a topic where you have background and can provide new information or a personal anecdote to help illustrate the story.

Do Your SEO Keyword Research

Once your topic is determined, it’s important to do some research. See what’s been shared before; a great blog post doesn’t just reiterate what someone else has said; it brings new information to the consumer. The research phase should include keyword research because if you’re not doing a bit of SEO on your blog post, you’re missing a critical element.

Starting with keyword research also lets you verify interest in the topic you want to blog about. If you choose a blog topic that no one is searching for, it's not going to be read by very many people. You'll have a better chance of growing your audience and your business if you choose topics with search demand and keywords your website has a better chance of ranking for.

Start Writing Your Blog Post Now

Great writing takes time and effort. If you sit down at your laptop and develop your blog post in 15 minutes, it will probably show. Once you've done your homework and have a solid idea, targeted keywords, and influencers identified, it's time to get to work. Think of your blog post as a story; you must include a beginning, middle, and end. There should be a hook to get the reader interested and engaged. Ensure the blog post provides useful information and is easy to read and understand.

How Many Words Make a Great Blog Post?

The #1 question I get about blog writing is, "How long should my blog post be?" While you'll hear different answers, the bottom line is it needs to tell a great story. I've always told my writers to focus on telling the story, not the word count. A simple, one-subject, straightforward blog post normally runs around 500 words.

An in-depth piece will run 1,000-1,500 words, and we're starting to see 1,500-word and up pieces. When you start writing, you may not know how many words you'll have, and that's OK. Outline your story and tell it completely – beginning, middle, and end and it will come together.

Don't use filler words because you want more words on the page. Don't be like my little brother circa 1987, who used the word very 27 times to fill the page in elementary school English – true story! It was very, very, very, very, very…. You get the point. Don't do it.

We tend to see that longer, more in-depth blog posts rank higher on Google, but you need to focus on your ideal customer and what information they need on this subject more than the word count when you're writing.

Listen to the podcast episode here.

Include Helpful Information for your Ideal Customer

Be sure your blog post provides helpful information; don’t just scratch the surface; dig deep. If there are tools or resources you use when working on X subject, share them. Link to the websites that might be useful to your readers and tell them why it might help. By providing actionable information, you’ll help cement yourself as a resource in the field. Hopefully, they’ll go directly to your blog or website the next time they have a question. Even better, they might tell a friend about your site or share your blog post because it has great information.

Choose Images That Help Tell the Story

Pictures tell stories better than words in many cases. And in content, the photo is what your audience will see first on social media. It may even be what grabs their attention on your blog. The pictures you choose need to help tell the story. A good rule of thumb is one image for every 500 words of copy. If you explain something and screenshots would help tell the story, include them where applicable. You’ll also want to use images when distributing your blog post on social media. Ensure you note the correct sizes and have images that won’t lose their impact because they’ve been cropped.

Tips with Related Blog Posts -

If you follow the guidelines above and write blog posts that are well thought out, researched, and written, with images that align and help tell the story, you will write great blog posts. And great blog posts are what your readers want and will respond to. Provide helpful information, dig deep, and become a resource. That’s how content marketing is supposed to work.

Podcast Episode Transcript

Hi there. Welcome back to this week's episode of the Simple SEO Content podcast. Today, we're going to talk all about blogging, but more importantly, how to write a really great blog post, and a really great blog post does a couple of things for us. One, it ranks high in the search engine results so that people see it and we get a lot of traffic from it. And number two, it converts like crazy, and so it helps our business make more money. It helps us book sales calls. It helps us book our services. It helps us sell our products. It's a really great blog post, and it's one that you're looking at your results two or three years in the future, and you're looking back at that. You're like, wow, that was a good blog post because I wrote that thing five years ago, and it still ranks in position one, and I still get traffic from it every single day, and that, my friend, is what I want for you.

So, let's jump right in and talk about what makes a great blog post because a great blog post is going to change things for your business. A great blog post. Has a series of items that you take a series of steps that you take during the development process. It starts. With a fantastic idea. That ties to a product or service or your business because when we tie to a potential revenue stream, we have a better chance of converting. So, I want you to make sure the blog posts that you're creating tie to your business and help your ideal customer.

Creating blog posts on 27 million different subjects will not help you. Google wants to see that you are an expert and your website is authoritative on this particular subject, whatever your subject is. So, you need to make sure that your content makes sense from that perspective. Basically, stay in your own lane and determine what your lane is. Choose four content pillars that all tie to your core products or services and create really great content on those core subject areas and really spread out from there.

So we talked about the hub and spoke model. So you're going to have a keyword in the center. That's your hub, that's your topic or your pillar. And then from there, you're going to have spokes that go all around it. That is your actual content plan. So those are all the different blog posts or all the different social media. All the different topics that fit within your hub, your central pillar.

That's what I want you really to think about and make sure that you're doing so; you're going to want to do some research. You're going to want to brainstorm and come up with an idea that, you know, ties well to your products or services that fit within one of your content pillars.

Okay, then I want you to research and identify an SEO keyword that your website can rank for, that your ideal customer is using, that is tied to this topic. And the reason I want you to look twofold. Is my ideal customer using this keyword? And can I rank for it? If your ideal customer is not using that keyword, they're not searching it. Nobody's looking for it. There's no traffic to get. You won't get traffic to a keyword that nobody's searching for. If you write a blog post and you choose a keyword that you can't rank for, you can do everything right. You could have a fantastic blog post. But nobody's ever going to see it, which means you'll get no traffic to it. Because your website's not ranking at the top of Google for that keyword. So you're not going to get the traffic. And I don't want you to create content that's not going to generate traffic because what the heck is the point in that? You need to know that the content you're creating will help drive traffic to your website. Otherwise, why are you spending time creating content? Right. Let's just be real. We want to make sure we're going to get traffic to it.

So now you've got a good idea. You've done some keyword research. Then I want you to write, and I want you to really think about your ideal customer. Who are they? What information do they need? What questions do they have? How am I going to help them? How does my product solve their problem? How does my service help them? We really focus on them.

Google's latest, big algorithm update is actually referred to as the helpful content algorithm. And Google is continuing to evolve and change and add to the helpful content algorithm. It came out in the fall of 2022, so it is relatively new. Their main focus is, does this content help? Is this content written for a person, or is it written for a search engine? Is this content written by an AI tool? You and I can both tell if something is written by an AI tool, the same as Google, the same as your potential customer. A really great blog post is not written by an AI tool.

This morning, I was reading a digest that I got from Medium, and I like to stay on top of what people are talking about on Medium and what's happening over there. And so it was on SEO, and it was actually on keyword density score. And it was very curious because Google says don't use, you've heard me talk about it before Google says don't use a keyword density score. Don't don't write with keyword density in mind. We don't want it. There is no perfect one, et cetera. So, I'm reading this blog post. And it was awful. And I'm like, this is not written by a person. This is AI one hundred percent. This is a copy-paste straight out of AI. I know it has to be. So, just out of curiosity, I copied and pasted 1500 words, and I plugged it into an AI content detector just to see. And sure enough, it told me there was only a 13% chance that a human wrote it. It was AI content and it should be edited significantly to make it sound more like a human. We can identify the difference in content created by a human. Versus content created by chat GPT and some of the other AI tools. It is not the same quality.

So right for your ideal customer, Google does not want and is not going to reward sites that have a bunch of AI content because it's not going to benefit the end user. It's not going to benefit the reader. So, just write your own content. You can use Chat GPT for some brainstorming. I've talked about it. I've given you some ideas, some things you can do, but do not write it. Write it in air quotes; do not just tell it to write me a blog post on X and let it populate and be like copy-paste. I'm done. No. Cheaters don't win. In SEO. Uh, cheaters haven't won in over a decade. Google's not going to let them start winning. Now. We've had all sorts of algorithm updates over the last 12 to 15 years to address cheater tactics, things that worked at one point that no longer work. Google does not reward easy answers, and Google does not reward buying links. They do not reward AI content. They do not work to reward content that is only created to rank. They're just really, really, really focused on great content.

I remember being at the SMX East search marketing expo in Manhattan in the fall of probably 2012. And they were maybe in 2013. So, at least a decade ago. And the whole push and the whole focus back then was to hire someone with a journalism degree, hire someone with a communications background. They can learn the SEO side of it and hire a journalist to figure out how to really create great content for you. I was ahead of my time. You guys. So, make sure you're focusing on great content. At that time in 2012, my journalism degree was suddenly super in demand and it was something that everybody wanted. It has not changed. And I do not see it changing because here we are in 2023, we still have a focus on creating great content that provides value to our customers.

Google's not going to change. So just focus on it and know you're going to need to write your content yourself, at least for now. To have great quality, you have to write it. So you've brainstormed, you've identified a keyword. You've written a really great blog post. And I know we're supposed to tell you, don't write to a certain word count. And I always say that. The reality is your blog post needs to be as long as it needs to be to provide value, answer questions, and give insights and depth. That it needs. I will tell you that Google tends to rank longer, more in-depth blog posts higher than shorter ones. So, if you think you're going to rank high with a blog post that's 300 words, it's not going to happen. But a blog post that's 300 words basically tells you nothing and really doesn't provide much value to your ideal customer. So you're not going to rank because there's nothing there. Usually, blog posts are going to be anywhere from, at this point, 500 words is pretty short 1, 7 50 to a thousand is a little more in-depth. And we're starting to see some really long, like skyscraper-type content where it's just super long, 1500 to 2000 words.

I honestly think this is part of why we see the recipe posts that tell us about everything, including where they bought the bowl. Nobody cares where they bought the bowl, but they think they need to tell us where they bought the bowl to get it to be long enough. You don't need to do that. Just write a great blog post, provide value, and ask questions. Think about the questions your ideal customer would ask, answer their questions, anticipate them, and just be a resource.

Then you want to go back through and you want to edit. Using your optimization keyword. So look to make sure that you're optimizing and you're editing. So you've edited it. Then, go ahead and optimize it. Make sure you write a title tag that uses your keyword. Write a meta description that uses your keyword. Remember, these two are going to go in your code. Google's going to read them. And Google is going to look at them to understand what your content is about. But they're also going to show to your ideal customer in the search results, which means you want to write them for the person who you hope to have click and come through to your website.

So, the title tag is less than 60 characters, including spaces. Meta-description is less than 160, including spaces. Both need you to use your keyword. Then you're going to want to make sure you look at your headers in your blog posts. Those are your sections. So how you've broken up your blog post or how you've broken up your content piece, make sure you have your keyword in those sections. If you've used. So, an H1 tag, by default, is generally the name of the page, the title of the blog post, et cetera in most website builders. If you have to edit yours, you have to add one. Make sure you use your keyword in there. If not, make sure your keyword is in the title of your piece, which it should be. Because remember we chose a keyword before we started writing. Then I want you to make sure it's. So it's in your headers, your H2 or your H3, your H2 is your section headers, and your H3 is your subheaders for your sections that break down. So if you have three points and you have two points in each of those three. And your big pointer, H2, and your small points or H3.

Then, you want to make sure that you have an image or multiple images. It's actually ideal to have one image every 200- 500 words. You want to break it up. If you have something that you really need images to help showcase what's going on to help explain the post, use extra images. If you're like me and you do a podcast, a video version, and a blog, go ahead and add your video or your audio version to your blog post page because that's going to help people connect in different ways. Make sure you're using your keyword in your video file or in your image file, make sure you're using your keyword in your image Alt text. Because again, Google is going to look for that. If you don't yet have my SEO content quick start guide, visit the freebies page. I have the link in the notes. You can also go to the website etched marketing.com. Freebies is in the navigation towards the right.

So you're really great blog post involves a keyword that you can rank for that your ideal customer uses. A topic your ideal customer is interested in, enough content to really be helpful and give them great insights and information, your background, your expertise, your experience, and your personal anecdotes to really build it and round out. And then optimization so that Google understands what it's about, so they're more likely to show it to more people to bring targeted relevant traffic to your website so that you can start to nurture them.

Writing great blog posts makes a huge difference. If you need help with tips on how to write your blog posts to make it easier. I just did an episode on my content production hacks; make sure you go back and listen to that one because that's going to walk you through how to choose the right one, like how to write content in a faster way by batching it and I walk you through my whole process.

If you're not sure how to choose the right keyword, listen to the episode, Everything You Know about SEO Keywords is Wrong, and Here's What to Do instead because that's going to walk you through the most common mistakes that people make and how to correct them so that you get results. The whole point of this is to get results. There's no point in creating content, that doesn't get seen, and if you create content without doing search engine optimization on it, nobody's going to find it. And if you do search engine optimization without on a site that doesn't have good content, people aren't going to stay. They're not going to engage. They're not going to come back. And eventually Google's not going to rank you because Google knows whether or not people are engaging with your content. So, if you want to win with Google and you want to get organic traffic to your website, you have to use both SEO and content marketing. You need both of them together, like peanut butter and jelly. If you have any questions. You know how to find me @EtchedMarketingAcademy on Insta; just DM me and let's chat. Thanks for being here. I'll see you next week.

Updated May 2023 and July 2024, Rachel