Blog Blueprint: What Makes a Post Successful
Posting to a blog can be a smart way to share important information with your customers, improve retention, and earn more traffic to your website (decreasing customer acquisition costs). But it is also a dump truck’s amount of work!
Once you decide to commit to blogging as a marketing tactic, you want to make sure you are doing it well so you get every ounce of return on your effort investment. So let’s start with the basics.
Parts of a Perfect Blog Post
Headline: Obvious, we know, but still critical. This is sometimes called an H1 because that’s how it needs to be coded so search engines know that this is the most important thing. Your headline is what the post is about. Sometimes people like to get crafty and instead of writing a text headline, they create a beautiful image using something like Canva that has the headline in the image. Love that for Instagram, but as of today, search engines can’t read text on images so you have to add an H1.
Introduction: Your introduction doesn’t have to be a boring inverted pyramid, journalistic style paragraph, but it should give the reader a warm open. Frame the blog post by sharing what the rest of it is about.
Subheads: This is your secondary headline or H2. Depending on your format, you may have lots of these or just a few. Think rooms in the house you’re building. Each section should have its own subhead and a paragraph or two with proof points, or additional details related to your introduction.
Close: Continuing with the house comaprison, you can’t forget landscaping; tie everything up in a pretty bow and include a call to action.
Intralinking in Your Blog Post
In any home, you need plumbing, electrical, sewer, and phone lines to connect to the outside world. The same goes for your blog. It’s important to connect the piece to other posts, products, and pages on your website. As you’ve probably seen in many of ours, we do that by hyperlinking text to relevant content elsewhere.
You should always be linking to other pages of your own website, but you can also link to external content as well, like the research report you pulled a statistic from, a product you are recommending, an event website you’re sponsoring, etc.
Images, Graphics, and Other Visuals for Your Blog Posts
Ooh, the decorating part! Many readers’ eyes glaze over due to long blocks of text so photos and graphics, and even videos are great additions to your posts to break it up a bit. Just be sure to add alt tags to your images, both for SEO purposes and accessibility. The image name should also be descriptive instead of random letters and numbers that typically come from camera files.
Make Your Blog Posts Accessible
Speaking of accessibility, unlock the doors so everyone can get into your home. Your whole site should be set up to ensure as many people as possible can get what they need from you. In addition to text alternatives for visuals, a couple basics include high color contrast for folks with low vision, captions for video and audio content, ensuring it’s navigable with keyboard shortcuts, and avoiding bright flashes or loud sounds that could cause physical reactions, and more.
How Long Should Your Blog Post Be?
You were that kid who asked the teacher how long your book report had to be, weren’t you? We get it, there’s so much that we don’t know so sometimes it’s nice to have guardrails. Where are the property lines?! Unfortunately, the data and science vary widely so there isn’t a perfect answer. We recommend somewhere between 250 and 2,500 words. Consider the topic. Does this post talk about new extended hours and why? Then it can probably be pretty short. You can think about the purpose of the message, the reader, and their intent to decide if it should be a super long and engaging think piece, or if it can be short and sweet. The most important thing is quality. If it’s clear, concise, and well written, you’ll naturally find the right length.
While we have you thinking about quality, we wanted to share a quick note about some really bad blog post writing hacks that you might consider and that we’ll beg you to just not:
- Duplicate Content. It may sound nice to include a super long quote from someone else in order to pad your post. And while that’s okay in some very minor ways, it’s best to paraphrase and then link to their content. Search engines don’t want to see any more than 20 percent of your content anywhere else on the web so just write your own stuff to be safe.
- Artificial Intelligence. While AI can be helpful in developing an outline, it’s still not advanced enough to write high-quality content. Often the facts are incorrect, sourced poorly, or it’s just boring and stale. Additionally, search engines are already working on tools to determine if something has been written by AI and they plan to decrease visibility for that content, prioritizing human-written work. That may change in the future, but for now, write your own stuff. If you do need ideas, check out our guide with 50+ things to write about on your blog.
Metadata for Your Blog Posts
Once your house is built, you need to make sure the address is correct and that your home is labeled so friends and delivery drivers can find you. Outside of the parts of a blog post above, there are a couple items you’ll need to add to each post that are kinda hidden to the reader, but very important to search engines. Both of these fields should contain the keywords you want people to use to find your blog post.
First, the page title, which is the phrase that lives in the browser tab at the very top of your screen. Usually this field only allows 60 characters or less, so be strategic about how to fit your keywords into the title. The other item is your meta description, which is a teaser or blurb about the page content. This can be up to 150 characters. Both of these items appear in search engine results pages. In Google for example, the page title is the blue link and the meta description is the paragraph below it.
As a bonus tip, remember that you should also customize your blog URLs when possible. You can certainly leave it to match your H1, but you may also want to shorten to move keywords toward the front of the URL for most SEO impact.
Beyond the Basics, Technical SEO for Blog Posts
If you’re feeling confident about all of the above and are looking for more technical tips, congrats! We got you covered too.
- Start with your URL structure. Is it clean and simple or does it get complicated with layers and layers of categories? Screaming Frog can help you get a sense of this. This tool will also help you identify broken links and bad redirects.
- Take advantage of “noindex” tags to prevent search engines from crawling duplicate or low-performing older content. This is particularly useful if you’re using lots of source-coded URLs to track traffic and other metrics in specific campaigns and Google Analytics as all of those look like separate URLs to Google.
- Use schema markup to increase your chances of appearing in the knowledge graphs.
- Create a plan for intralinking and backlinking programs.
- Implement SSL (https) to tell everyone your site is safe and secure to visit.
- Ensure your site performs optimally on mobile.
If you’re still looking for more technical SEO help, this Hubspot guide might help.
While the home construction metaphor might have been a bit contrived, we hope this post was helpful in explaining everything that goes into making a successful blog. It’s more than just brain dumping something about your business once a week. If it sounds too much for you or your team to take on, but you still see the value in blogging, we love, love, love this stuff and would be happy to have a conversation about executing that work for you. You know where to find us.