Beginners’ guide to SEO

What are purposes of SEO blogs?

To improve your search engine ranking, you not only need to observe consumer demand, but also need to be aware of the ranking criteria. Now, applemint will tell you how to successfully use SEO blogs to gain more impressions by following 7 steps.

STEP 1: Ensure Your Product/ Service Positioning

First of all, in order to ensure your blog content matches customer expectation, you have to clarify the following points for your product/ service:

What is the purpose？

No matter what purposes you are aiming for (recruitment, sales…etc), once you define the purpose, you can then move forward to the next step.

Who is your Target Audience？

With a clear defined purpose, you have to identify who your target audience are, that is, who will need your product/ service? What are their characteristics? Outlining a target audience persona is helpful for SEO blogs writing.

What is your competitive advantage？

Undoubtedly, the purpose of SEO blogs is inbound marketing.
Therefore, do not forget about your competitive advantage and deliver your unique value through your blogs.

Who are your outstanding competitors？

With a comprehensive competitor research, you will be more likely to achieve a successful SEO campaign. This competitor research is an important factor to help you learn from others, identify your own strengths and weaknesses, and further discover your opportunities.

STEP 2: SEO keywords planning

SEO keywords planning is an essential part when it comes to deciding your blog content.
Try to focus on your product/ service, and think about what type of information your target audience want to know from different stages of buyer cycle, and types of keywords they are using.
Collect these information to create a keyword mapping, and use it as future core keywords for your SEO blogs.

STEP 3: Keywords Research and draw up a plan

Once you identify your core keywords, don’t start writing your blog just yet! You can use 2 ways to understand your current keyword status and make your SEO blog post more focused. SERP can be seen as a shortcut for accessing your keyword information. You can discover more relevant words through Google’s Recommendation if you open a new incognito window.

Search engine results page (SERP)

Observe your competitors’ websites

Make a good use of website review tool. Analyse competitors’ keywords from their perspectives, and rethink whether to come up with same qualified posts or to look for other keywords.

STEP 4: SEO blog content writing

In order to optimize your blog post for SEO, it is important that your content meet the customer demand/ desire. Therefore, in order to achieve the purpose, it is important to focus on the following points:

Three elements of content writing

• Expertise: To state relevant content more specifically and emphasize its Unique Selling Proposition.
• Variety: To include more specific and broad range.
• Trustworthy: To be objective and unbiased in your articles.

Draft your blog post outline

By understanding three elements above, you should draft your outline as it has shown below according to your target audience and keywords.

Data collection and reading

To increase the diversity of your contents, you have to collect as many relevant information as possible, and appropriately create your own opinion or new perspective.

5 W’s for your preface

• Who: Who is writing this article
• What: Why are you writing this article
• Where: What is this article about
• When: When did the author write this article
• Why: Why do readers need to read this article

Content formats and details

It is important to break down your sentences and maintain your consistency.

Optimize your content for the featured snippet

According to Ahrefs’s analysis, once featured snippet is achieved, it is likely to take 8.6% clickthrough rate from the first search ranking position. To optimize content for the featured snippet, you can:

• Make good use of bullet points, charts
• Create an question-based title
• Provide answers and put it in your content.

STEP 5: Write your blog title

Title is the main reason to attract your consumers click. Except the fact that you have to place your keywords, it is more appropriate to keep your work count between 10- 20. This is to avoid your title being cut, as word count on search result page is limited.
Based on suggestions from multiple experts, the following points more likely to attract clicks:

Emphasize numbers

Use number to make your audience feel like they understand the idea of your article within a short period of time. It is proved by clickthrough rate that odd numbers attract more clicks than even numbers. Among all odd numbers, number 7 achieve best results.

Frame your title as a question

By using a question as title, it encourage your readers to think and immediately realize the value they can achieve from your post.

Negative titles

According to Outbrain, using negative title has 63% more clickthrough rate than positive title.

Educational title

This is used to guide your readers to accomplish tasks or address problems by using an educational concept. Normally, the content includes more information and variety.

Point out your Target Audience

If you have a clear target audience, you can mention them in your title to attract them immediately.

STEP 6: Search/ Make images for your posts

Once you finish your post, you have to add more relevant images or charts.
According to Skyword’s research, articles including images have 94% more views than the ones without.
However, it is important take image size and copyright into consideration.

You can use the following tools to make your article more visualized:

• Unsplash
• Canva
• Chartblocks

STEP 7: Script Tag setting

This step is to allow search engine system understand the key points of your article.
In fact, search engine learns your blog content through HTML languages.
Therefore, it is more effective to follow rules and allow search engine to understand your article and fall in love with it!

Website title (H1, title)

10 -20 words, you must include keywords, and use comma instead of space, it is also important to avoid repetitive title in one website.

Preface (Meta description)

150 words, the first 75 words are particularly important. Move your important keywords forward and create an appealing content to increase your clickthrough rate.

Headings (H2)

H tag is to inform search engine that it is the title of the paragraph, therefore, it is suggested that you should put some words that cover the main points of the paragraph and use some keywords as your headings.

Image (alt)

alt text is to help search engine system understand the content of the image. By writing enough description and adding keywords reasonably, you can then improve your search ranking and make the image easier to be searched.

Let’s take the picture above as an example, if you randomly name this picture as 123, then the tag will be:
<img src=”123.jpeg” alt=”123″>
This will not allow search engine to understand the content of your picture.

On the contrary, if you would like to increase the searching possibility, you have to name your picture precisely in your file name and alt.

<img src=”Stack-of-strawberry-pancakes-with-powdered-sugar.jpeg” alt=”Stack-of-strawberry-pancakes-with-powdered-sugar”>

Conclusion

All in all, the focus of SEO is content writing and planning.
It is unlikely to achieve positive outcome if these rules are not followed and your blogs are written blindly.
If you can meet these rules that applemint recommended, you will be able to improve your SEO blog writing for sure!