How To Write An SEO Optimized Blog Post To Drives Traffic To Your Site

- Are you blogging for your business, but still failing to get the traffic you need? SEO optimizing every post on your website is essential for driving organic views to your content. What's up, it's Jamal from HubSpot and welcome back to the channel. In this video, I'm gonna give you a simple process of how to write an SEO-optimized blog post to help ensure that every article you post is doing its best to bring in traffic to your site and eyes... to your business. And to make it even easier, I h

ave a bunch of blog post templates that you can download from the description below. And while you're down there, yeah, you know, you might as well subscribe, I'm just saying, and hit the notification bell so you never miss a video. Blogging is a key component of any inbound marketing strategy, and if you're looking to engage current customers or bring in new customers, you need to make sure you're focusing on search engine optimization or SEO. If your content doesn't rank well on Google's searc

h page, there's very little chance that a potential customer who's looking for a solution you offer can actually find one. Seriously, how many times have you ever gone past the first results page? I can tell you personally that for me, it's never, except for that one time. That's why you need to make sure all of your blog posts are built from the beginning to succeed with SEO. And with that, the first thing you need to do is keyword research. Keyword research is the process of finding and analyz

ing search terms that people enter into search engines, then matching those keywords with topics relevant to your business. I could literally make an entire video just about keyword research, in fact, I did. So the goal of your keyword research will be able to create a list of best keywords you could use in your online content to help your blog rank high in search results. Now that you have your keywords down, it's time to begin prepping to write an actual blog post. The best blogs are carefully

planned out. So instead of just typing the actual post, you wanna start by creating an outline. To knock out a quick outline, open up those free blog templates I told you about in the description. There, you'll find templates for some of the most common blog post types, including how-to articles, lists, what is articles, and more. Use these templates to sketch out the key points of your blog, organize them in a logical fashion, and plan out any additional content like images or videos you wanna

include in the article. And if you've been watching me for a while, you know that I'm very partial to memes, so be sure sprinkle a couple of those in there if you can, tastefully, don't be cringe, thank you. This is the time to conduct any additional research you'll want to include in your post. Be sure to keep track of any URLs you'll wanna link so you don't have to go back and find 'em later. Now that you have all your information organized, it's finally time to do some actual writing. Most p

rofessional bloggers start off by writing the headline. The headline is key because it's the primary thing a potential reader sees when they come across your content, either on search engines or social media. A good headline checks the following boxes. It contains the keyword, preferably at the beginning of the title. It highlights the benefit the reader will get if they click on your article. It includes a clear call-to-action. It leverages positive or negative emotions to incite the reader to

react. And five, it does all this around 60 characters of less so that the title displays fully on all screens. You can use tools like Headline Studio to score each possible headline in terms of its effectiveness on readers, in addition to how well it will perform in SEO And if you want even more detailed assistance, you can use HubSpot's free headline writing templates to get word by word guidance for writing impactful headlines. There's a link to the template down in the video description. (li

ghthearted hip hop music) - Our software is the worst. - Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. - I think I love our new CRM. - Our software is the best. - [Narrator] HubSpot. Grow better. - With your title on lock, it's time to start writing the actual body copy of your post. Blogs can take a lot of different forms, but each one starts an introduction. The key to an effective blog introduction is to addres

s the follow concerns. Why is the subject of your blog important to the reader? You wanna be sure to include your keyword in the first sentence or two, which confirms to the reader that the page they've landed on does in fact relate to the search query that brought them there. It also reassures the algorithms that your content matches the query when assigning search ranking. Next, write a sentence or two about the audience or industry the blog is meant to address and include the benefit for the

reader like you did in the title. And finally, summarize what you'll be covering in the article so that readers are enticed to keep scrolling down your article. Next comes the meat of the article itself, which is called body copy. The actual body copy of a blog can vary greatly. It could be a list, a step by step how-to, or a more article like you find in magazines. But there are a few rules that apply to any blog format when it comes to SEO First, write out each thought you wanna convey in disc

reet two to three sentence pieces. This makes it easy for readers to skim the article and get the info they need without pouring over dense paragraphs. It will also help you keep your writing clear and succinct, which will in turn, help search engines parse the content. When writing out these pieces, be sure to include the links to the information you found while writing your outline. Search engines like to see links that direct to other webpages, as well as links that go to other relevant pages

on your own site. This gives your site authority and credibility, or as I like to call it in the business, the good stuff, you know what I'm saying? Body copy is also the place to start inserting secondary keywords, meaning those that are not central to the blog post, but are still relevant to the topic. You don't wanna jam a bunch of keywords in haphazardly. Google is too smart to fall for that in 2020. I know, I've tried multiple times, my business suffers because of it. But, by organically w

orking in relevant keywords around the main topic, your site can end up ranking for hundreds, if not thousands of secondary keywords, each with the potential to create a small stream of additional readers you wouldn't get otherwise. An amazing example is this Wirecutter blog about vacuum cleaners that ranks for over 13,000 secondary keywords that help it achieve over 80,000 organic monthly page views. As you're writing your keyword-rich sentences, you wanna group them into topical segments that

are divided by subhead. Treat these subheads like you would a headline because not only do they help convey the information to the reader, they also are road signs for search engines to check that your content is still relevant. And be sure to format the subheads in H2 or H3 font so that readers and web crawlers can easily identify them. At this point in the process, your blog post is basically written, but it's not finished, let's not get ahead of ourselves. There are several additional actions

you can take to optimize the post for SEO. Let's start with adding images. Adding visual elements like photos, illustrations, charts, and memes break up your text and can help further convey your message visually to readers. It can also help with SEO by creating another place where you can insert keywords. So be sure to fill out the alt-image text field when adding an image to your blog post. Treat the alt text with the care you would a title or subhead, effectively describing the image to help

the algorithm rank it whenever a user conducts an image search. Mastering alt-image text to get more information on your blog posts, Instagram photos, or even Pinterest photos is a whole nother beast to handle. Be sure to let us know if you want a video on that in the comments below. And speaking of alternative search results like alt-image text, you can level up your SEO by optimizing blog posts for Google's featured snippets. These are expanded results for a specific blog post that appears at

the top or side of a search results page. These snippets are usually a single paragraph that answers a specific question or a list or table, depending on the query. Google can pull the snippet from anywhere, like this, boop, just pulls it outta there. But to increase your odds, write your content out as if you're directly answering a question or defining a term. For example, if you have a cooking blog, adding the images, SEO-optimized copy, and step by step recipe instructions is a great way to

try to get featured in Google's snippets. And now there's only one step left in writing an SEO-optimized blog post, and that's getting your meta tags in order. Meta tags are additional backend code that help search engines index, rank, and display your content. Most meta tags are done in the development phase of your blog, but there are a few tags that you can customize for each post. A title meta tag lets you change the title of your article as it appears only in the search results page. This

is useful if you want the title in the search results to be different than on the page itself or different from how it appears on social media. You can also change the meta description if you want something to appear on the search results page other than the first few lines of your blog posts. And don't forget to think about your blog post URL, which you may wanna strip down to the basic keywords. Now that you're ready to write an SEO-optimized blog post, you can dive even deeper into planning a

complete business-wide SEO strategy. You can get started by signing up for HubSpot Academy's free online SEO training course using the link in the description. If you have any questions or want a part two, make sure to comment below. Until then, I'll see you next time. There, you'll find templates for more... (sighs) There you won't find anything because apparently I can't tell you about it.