How to Write a Good Blog

Learn how to write engaging content with our expert blog writing tips.

Blogging has become a must have tool for businesses and individuals to connect with their audience, share their knowledge and drive traffic to their website.

To write a blog post that’s both engaging and effective there are some important steps to follow. This includes knowing your audience, choosing compelling and helpful topics, structuring your content and optimising for both humans and search engines.

Before you even start writing, you’ll need to implement your blog’s foundation. This means understanding your target audience, their interests, challenges and search intent. By recognising the challenges faced by your target audience, you are better served to create content that speaks to them.

Choosing a Topic with Keyword Research

Keyword research is a crucial step in creating successful blog content. Consider your audience’s industry, needs, interests and pain points to identify the priority keywords that your audience are searching for. With these keywords as your building blocks, you can create targeted content that also optimises your blog posts for search engines, increasing your chances of being found.

Once you have your keywords, brainstorm blog ideas that are sure to engage your audience, share expertise and also display an up to date understanding of developments in your industry. 

You can also use online resources like Reddit, Quora, Answer the Public and other social media groups to find topics that your audience is already discussing, gaining a real time insight into their interests and allowing you to cater directly to them. 

Structuring Your Content

Now that you have your topic, you might be asking, what is a good blog structure?

Well, a good structure makes your blog post easier to read and also helps to guide readers through the content to keep them engaged.

Start with a compelling headline, something that instantly grabs the attention of your readers, clearly demonstrates the focus of the piece and piques your readers interest, making them want to find out more.

Utilise subheadings to organise your ideas and ensure a logical flow. These subheadings also help to break up your content into smaller, digestible sections, improving readability and helping readers to skim through your post to find the information they are looking for.

Finally, try to keep your sentences and paragraphs concise and to the point. Opting for sentence structure that is overly long and convoluted can not only appear like rambling, it can make readers lose interest.

Human First Content

Focus on writing content that prioritises humans, not just search engines. Your blogs should be informative, engaging and helpful to your readers. By creating high quality content that is genuinely valuable, you will naturally draw in readers and over time, build a loyal following.

Now, we’re not saying that optimising your content for SEO isn’t also important, it definitely is. However, it shouldn’t be your primary goal. The key is finding the balance.

Adopt a user first approach, keeping your tone conversational. This approach also applies to the frequency that you publish blogs, a few high quality pieces of content are always better than an abundance of diluted low quality posts.

Then, when it comes to optimising for search engines, incorporate the fundamentals but keep it natural, this means seamless keyword placement (title, headings & body text), internal and external linking, optimised meta descriptions, descriptive image alt text and ensuring a swift loading time on your page.     

This way, your blog will please both readers and those search engine algorithms.

Publishing and Promoting Your Blog

To keep your audience engaged and improve your search rankings simultaneously, it is important to be consistent with your uploads. Start by establishing a content calendar (remember not to over do it) and plan your posts in advance.

Also, when you are uploading your blog, incorporate imagery and graphics where possible. This is particularly important if your post contains large amounts of information or data, using tables or graphs is both easier to digest and more engaging for readers.

Now that you have your content ready and waiting in your CMS, give it a final proofread and make sure to preview it before making it live on your site, correcting any potential errors or formatting issues.

Once your post is published, the first thing you should do is ensure that it is indexed, by submitting it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, this way it will actually appear on search engines and you can begin appearing in the SERPs.

Finally you can begin promoting your content on your social channels to help it reach a wider audience, use appropriate hashtags and encourage shares to increase visibility. Or, if your blog is part of a larger marketing campaign, you can link to it within your email marketing, Youtube channel or newsletters. 

Need Support with Your Content Strategy?

If you are looking for support creating killer content, speak to our team at Extramile.

From Digital PR to Technical Copywriting, our creative experts work alongside you to gain a thorough understanding of your brand tone, audience and industry developments to devise a plan that is specifically tailored to your business, supporting all of your content writing needs.

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