Blogging is a great way to improve your online presence and drive traffic to your site. However, simply writing content and then publishing it isn’t enough. Your blogs have to be engaging and optimized for search engines.

These qualities will make them stand out among the sea of content that’s already out there. But how do you craft blog posts that are both engaging and search engine optimized? Well, in this article, we’ll teach you how to do that. So without wasting any time, let’s get into it.

Steps for Crafting Engaging and SEO-Optimized Blog Posts

Below, we’re going to discuss everything you need to do to craft SEO-optimized and engaging blog posts in steps.

1.     Start with Keyword Research

Keywords help search engines identify what your content is about and what queries it should be displayed against. Therefore, it is important that you look for relevant keywords that people are searching for to try and make your blog posts revolve around them.

Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can be used to find relevant and highly searched keywords for your blog posts. A tip from our side is that when researching, focus on long-tail keywords. These are specific phrases that are a bit longer and easier to rank on. A targeted audience can be achieved through them.

Besides this, you can see what keywords your competitors are ranking their blog posts against and try to use them as well. This may sound cliché but many recommend doing it. However, the choice is yours.

Once you’ve found keywords that you want to use in your posts. Note them down as you’ll be incorporating them naturally in your content once you sit down to write.

2.     Create a Compelling Outline

Keyword research isn’t the only thing that you have to do before starting to write. Creating an outline is important as well. Pen down all the headlines, points, and key information that you want to talk about in your blog post. Add subheadings where needed as they help break up your content and make it easier to read. Include bullet points and lists if necessary too.

Doing so will help you during the writing process as you won’t have to stop and think about what you’re supposed to talk about next. Every cue will be there, you just have to elaborate on each headline and there is a good chance you’ll have a coherent and engaging blog post at hand.

Additionally, some general pointers for making a compelling outline are as follows:

• Use numbers and power words in headings: Headlines like “10 proven ways to…” or “A comprehensive guide to…” are often more eye-catching. So try to write headlines like this whenever it seems appropriate.
• Keep outline concise and relevant: Always keep the headings and points in your outline short. Long ones will only push the readers away and not look compelling. Try keeping them under 60 characters for optimal results. Besides this, the headings should also be relevant to your blog post’s title.
• Include your target keywords: Since our goal is to craft compelling as well as SEO-optimized blog posts, try to add the keywords that you found earlier in your content’s headings and subheadings. But do so in a natural way. They should not look forced. This will give a boost to your post’s SEO.

3.     Write High-Quality Content

When both aforementioned things are done, it is time to start the writing process. While writing, quality must be given special care as obviously, the higher quality a text will be, the more compelling it’ll seem to the readers.

Focus on adding ample information to your articles. One that the readers are looking for. This will improve your content’s value and readers and search engines will prefer it. Additionally, it is important to use simple words rather than complex ones and keep the sentence structuring easy so an average reader can understand your blog post.

If, for some reason, you struggle to implement simplicity in your blog post during the process of writing, simply write however you can and paraphrase it later. Paraphrasing can instantly improve the quality of a content piece. You can either do it manually or use a tool like Paraphrasing.io that can automate the process.

Besides this, some other things that you can do to ensure your blog posts are of high quality are as follows:

• Be original: Refrain from copying and pasting anything in your articles. It can lead to plagiarism and can damage your content’s credibility. Even if accidental plagiarism occurs, you must remove it before publishing the post.
• Use your voice: Let your personality shine through your writing. Stick to your unique writing style and try not to mimic anyone. Use the tone you generally talk in. Guide the readers through the problem, provide them with effective solutions, or entertain them.
• Write short paragraphs: Lengthy blocks of text can be intimidating for readers. A high-quality blog post is one whose paragraphs aren’t that long but still convey the required information effectively. Use Editpad if you can’t seem to keep things concise yourself. We too, often use this tool to improve conciseness in text.

4.     Add Visuals

Images, infographics, GIFs, and videos can break up the text and enhance the engagement of your blog post. Besides this, when visuals are added, the content looks way more appealing.

Trust us when we say no reader wants to keep looking at blocks of text. Hence, add visuals to your posts so they become eye-catching and less intimidating. Jeff Bullas says that blog posts featuring images and other visuals usually get 94% more views as compared to ones that don’t have any.

However, do keep in mind that the visual you’re adding must be relevant to your blog post. You can’t add an image of a red traffic light under a heading that says “Stop getting low-quality backlinks”. The overall context and core message of the heading should be taken into consideration.

Having said that, add up to 4 or 5 visuals in each of your blog posts as this amount is considered optimal.

5.     Optimize for SEO

Assuming you’ve already added keywords to appropriate places throughout your content’s headings and body, there are some other things that must be done to your blog posts to optimize them for search engines and those are as follows. 

• Add internal and external links: Internal links are ones that point readers and search engines to other pages of your site. Whereas, external links point them to a page of some other site rather than yours. Add both these types of links to your blog posts on relevant anchor texts. This way, readers can get more information, and link juice is also passed to all the links that are added. When it comes to external linking though, try to only add links to authoritative and credible site pages.
• Use alt text for visuals: Alt text describes what the visual is about and what’s going on inside it. It is displayed in place of a visual if it fails to load so readers know what visual was present here. Additionally, it also helps search engine crawlers index the image, video, or whatever visual you’ve added.
• Write a good meta description: This is the snippet of text that appears under your blog post’s title in the search results. It gives users a glimpse of what the article discusses. Try to make it as compelling as possible so readers open your post to read it whole. Besides this, meta descriptions are quite short. They should be kept between 50 to 160 characters.

These are the steps to craft engaging and SEO-optimized blog posts. With each one discussed in detail, our article comes to an end.

Final Words

Blog posts have to be engaging and SEO-optimized for them to perform better. In this article, we saw how you can craft such articles with ease.