You have undoubtedly noticed that some of your blog posts are more successful than others: some receive greater social media interaction, others result in more conversions. To some extent, this is due to your actual content; however, the structure of your posts also plays a big role.
There are a few key elements that tend to be present in every successful post. By ensuring that you incorporate all of them, you can be sure to create perfect blog posts every time.
Check Out These Important Tips for SEO Content Writing:
6 Tips for SEO Content Writing:
1. A Great Title
You have probably heard countless times that an effective title is an essential element of any blog post, but it is still worth mentioning again. A headline is your chance to grab the attention of your audience and persuade readers to read on. Titles must demonstrate that your content is useful, interesting, and urgent.
Research has found that there are eight specific types of titles that receive the most clicks, explains Buffer. These are:
- Surprises — anything unexpected
- Questions — stimulating your readers’ brains into forming answers
- Curiosity gaps — suggesting to your audience that they may be missing some vital information
- How-to's — promising to solve your readers’ problems
- Numbered lists — people like predictability, and numbered lists tell them exactly what to expect
- Specificity — another way to tell your visitors what to expect from a post
- References to audience — readers know immediately that content is targeted at their particular needs
- Negatives — a study by Outbrain found that titles containing negative words or superlatives received 63 percent more clicks than simply positive headlines
Finally, as readers not only scan content but also headlines, you need to write content titles where the most important information is in the first three and last three words. Headlines should be at least six words long, but they should never be too long to appear into search results (Google and other search engines calculate by pixel meaning that the exact number of characters varies).
Related: Your Blog Titles Don't Have to Be Boring!
2. A Compelling Intro
An introduction is the second instance where you work to retain readers. Use the opportunity to go into more detail about what your post is about, why it is worth reading, and what result your audience can expect to take away.
3. Meaty Information
After a great headline and introduction, you need to follow through with unique, actionable, great content. To ensure that your content makes an impact by:
- Being concise. Cut the fluff.
- Backing up facts with statistics and studies from reputable sources.
- Offering readers information that is unavailable elsewhere.
4. Subheadings
Very few people are going to read your content in its entirety, the majority will scan your posts to find the parts most relevant to them. Solid blocks of text, even when split into paragraphs, instantly fatigue readers. However, by dividing your content up with expressive subheadings, users can quickly find the information they need.
5. Appropriate Length
There is no ideal length for the perfect blog post — content can range anywhere from 200 words to more than 1,500 words, depending on the subject and how much your audience need to know. With long posts, there is a greater need to break up your content to keep it scan-able. You can achieve this by:
- Using bullet-point lists.
- Keeping paragraphs short.
- Adding visuals at regular intervals; however, never use images just for the sake of including a visual — images must add value to your content.
Related: 4 Things Every Blog Post Needs
6. A Call-to-Action to Conclude
Finish with a paragraph to summarize what users have learned from your post and explain what you want them to do next through a call-to-action. To decide on an appropriate CTA, consider where readers are likely to be in your sales funnel. If they are at the top of the funnel, you may like to ask them to subscribe to your mailing list, follow your page on social media, or leave a comment. For those around the middle, you can ask for their contact information to deliver them premium content. If content is aimed at leads who are close to converting, invite readers to check out specific products or services.
For your inbound marketing efforts to be successful, every blog post needs to count. If you are serious about increasing your conversions, follow the above tips for SEO content writing you create, never skipping a single step. To learn more about content marketing, check out our white paper, "What is Content Marketing? And Why It's So Important."
