How to write blogs that people love to read: hot advice for ideas, structure & SEO. In a recent session with small business owners we were looking at how to write great blogs for better website SEO. We looked at on-page SEO (i.e., being more people-friendly) and how quality content is vital, if you want to improve your website SEO and increase traffic to your website.

Previously, we’ve looked at how to optimise the key structural things on your website, such as the navigation or page hierarchy. These are things that make your site more easy to crawl and index from a search engine’s perspective (such as Google).

A clear logical structure allows search engines to understand what your site is about and present it to whom it’s most relevant.

This time we're focussing on the content itself on your pages or blogs. High quality content within a clear, logical site structure is a key factor in better helping your target customers find your website in search engine results.

Wildings is a website designer for small businesses. Our studio is based in Torquay, Devon, and we provide small business website design for creative, hospitality & lifestyle businesses across the UK (like garden designers, interior designers, architects, floral designers and more!). If you’d like to find out more, explore our website design for small businesses or contact this small business website designer →

Website SEO: how does content relate to search engine results?

For many people, a common way to get answers to their problems is to write a little question or phrase into a search engine. Google (others are available) then serves up what it believes are the most relevant answers.

If the suggested pages in the results do not answer the question posed satisfactorily, the individual might then tweak the wording slightly for a second go. This process is absolutely critical in understanding the importance of good quality content on our websites.

To get traction with our website content in SEO, we need to have a good understanding of who exactly are our target customers and the kinds of things they’re likely to be searching for. This way we can create content that speaks to their needs and addresses the questions they are asking.

If a search engine can see a high degree of relevance between our content and a search query, it’s more likely an individual will see our content in search results.

In terms of what people type into Google searches, this area of SEO relates to keywords. These are the short phrases (around three to four words) that contain the key information relating to the search query. This will often include the particular service or product, such as ‘website designer’. Or the desired location, as people often want to find someone near them, such as ‘website designer in Devon’ or ‘website designer near me’.

Read more on keywords: What Are Keywords And Why Are They Important For SEO? from Moz.

The keyword phrase might also include key attributes of the product or service required, such as ‘sustainable’ or ‘luxury’. Good quality content on a website will include relevant keywords and refers to them consistently, whether in headings or the body text. This allows a search engine to see that the page or blog has a high degree of relevance.

A visitor is likely to find your website content helpful if it is built around relevant keywords, plus if your content addresses them in an expert, authoritative and trustworthy manner (known as EAT by Google).

What we're going to focus on is the blog aspect of your website. All the things we mention are relevant for other pages, but your blog is the perfect place to keep adding relevant, fresh, interesting and useful content. That’s what Google wants to see, so that’s why we make it our focus.

Why is writing great content important for website SEO?

Overall, your content should be geared towards your visitors and your ideal customers. We need to know what they want and we need to be able to give it to them in fresh ways regularly and create unique content that's easy to read. By doing this we show Google that we’re a trustworthy source and demonstrate our authority.

Read more on Google’s EAT acronym: What is Google EAT and how does it work? by WordTracker

Furthermore, the more content we have on our website that includes relevant keywords, the more chance we have of ranking for relevant search terms. We want to show Google that we know what we're talking about and we have good content to back that up.

It’s important that we show a good amount of knowledge and insight into what we're writing about, avoiding what’s known as thin content - sadly there are no shortcuts!

This type of content is suited to longer format posts, particular on your blog. You can write shorter ones, but there's more for Google to chew on when your visitors can read in-depth insights into the problems that you solved; plus you get an additional boost when you’re able to get keywords into the headings that form the structure of the blog or page.

Ensuring you feed Google the right information to think about and serve up (technically known as crawl, register and index) is critical.

The other thing to be mindful of is to create content primarily for people; we want to serve people and their needs. On the other hand, things that really irritate website visitors are distractions. These include banners that pop up, paid ads and things like that. So don’t clutter your website with popup after popup or advertising banners that jars with your desire to help people meaningfully. If your website annoys your visitors, they’ll very quickly decide to leave, more often than not.

A good example of this is food blogs. Recipes on food bloggers’ websites often force you to scroll a long way down the page to get to the actual recipe and instructions. Often there is a lot of waffle (for SEO purposes, but annoying all the same) or advert after advert.

When you make your website visitors work hard to find what they want, they start asking, ‘do I even want to bother with this website?’. It’ll need to be an exceptional recipe or piece of content if you are creating friction like that for your audience.

What we're going to do now is break these principles down: how to generate ideas and how to get a practical framework together for writing content. Again, always keep in mind that SEO is all about good content, and as fellow human beings, we can all write and produce content. This is not a dark art or anything especially technical; it's primarily about finding the things that people are asking about and pain points they want to resolve.

How to generate great content ideas that boost website SEO

Once we are clear on the needs, problems, challenges or questions people face, we can then produce the words that effectively answer those questions. Good content for good SEO is not technical; it's fundamentally to do with answering questions and speaking to people's deep-seated needs.

What we'll do now is unpack how to go about finding a topic for a blog on your website, planning it, writing it and then ultimately publishing it.

Write good website content with your ideal customer in mind

The first step is generating content ideas in order to get that great content on our websites themselves

This process starts with our ideal customer in mind.

In order to generate a good topic, we need to know to whom we're talking, otherwise it’s a waste of time and won’t generate any web traffic. For us at Wildings, we specialise in working with garden designers, interior designers or interior architects, so that immediately helps us focus on the questions or topics that will be helpful to those types of people.

Practically think about who your ideal customer is:

What do they look like?
Where can you find them?

Try to put yourself in the shoes of that person and that will then help you think about and find the ideas that you can then write about.

If you want to get into this more deeply, consider:

What their goals are in life
Where are they going
What do they want?
And what are some of the barriers to achieving those goals?

Go beyond the superficial. Knowing your target customer’s emotional needs will help you develop richer, more powerful content.

What product or service do you want to promote on your website?

Once you’ve answered these questions you’re in a much better position to incorporate them into your content and specifically answer some of the questions in search engine results.

A practical example could be to do with car servicing. A customer might have an obvious need: ‘I want to get my car serviced’. However, a deeper, emotional question might be: ‘How do I know I can trust a garage?’. ‘Are they gonna rip me off?’ ‘I'm afraid of that because I don't understand how cars work.’

Start to tap into some of these fears and challenges; brainstorm ideas to do with how your product or service works from a customer’s perspective; what they can expect; or how do you know if you can trust a car garage?

This will start to give you some great content ideas which are focussed on helping people who don't know anything about cars feel confident plus be able to trust you.

Once you’ve got your ideal client in mind, focus on what are the services or products that would be relevant to them. For us as a branding and website design studio in Devon, our key services are going to be branding or website design.

The point of this process is that by making it an intentional step we ensure we are connecting what we do with that ideal customer and eventually writing what connects with what they need.

Quite quickly this will become second nature, but always be asking yourself, ‘Is what I'm writing absolutely relevant and specific to whom I want to attract?’.

We recommend documenting this process as you start out; alternatively we use an online app called Notion to collate content thoughts and the refining, optimising process. Eventually this will become instinctive, but it's helpful to do it a methodical way as you start.

What are your ideal customer’s problems and challenges?

Now that you have your ideal client in mind and clear on the product or service you want to offer, start to think about your customer problems, challenges, pain points, burning questions and hurdles that they face; things that are in between what they want, and where they are now.

Brainstorm what those are - here are a few suggestions on how to find them:

Discovery calls

When somebody gets in touch with you on an initial call, ask them what their pain points are
What's stopping you from getting from where you are now to where you want to get to?

Frequently Asked Questions

Any questions relating to essential aspects of what you offer
Make a note of that or whether it something you’ve already included in an FAQ on your site or elsewhere

Onboarding

Questions that come up in onboarding sessions that might relate to, for example, how long it takes to get a product or service or simple things like, ‘Do you charge VAT?’
Use these highly practical and focussed questions to inform your website content for SEO

Testimonials or feedback

Within the run of your business, always aim to get people to specify how you've helped them
From the answer, you can then extract the problems you help them overcome it

Social media

Social media is helpful too: if you chatting on direct message or in comments with people, they might talk about some of the things that they're facing and you can then take that and form a topic for an article
Things like Instagram Lives or webinars (like Website Club) are extremely helpful, as they’re a place where people are totally comfortable with asking questions - use them as the basis for more in-depth blog
By positioning yourself in front of your audience, you're perfectly placed to get them to tell you what they're facing

Market research

When you set up your business that's another good opportunity to generate ideas
This might include market research or development of your business values; you may have looked at how your values address problems that clients face

Google suggestions

If you’re completely stuck for ideas, a very handy trick is to go on Google and type in a search query
Under the ‘local map pack’ and top suggestions you get a section called ‘People also ask’
What Google does here is give you some alternative questions or it paraphrases your search query
Whatever the query you've put in, you'll also get similar suggestions; these are incredibly helpful for getting alternative article ideas or helping you think around the topic

Read more on 'People also ask’: What is “People Also Ask”? by Ahrefs

Google Keyword Planner

If you want to get a bit deeper, there's things like the Google keyword planner
This is a professional tool that allows you to do some more in-depth research

Answer the Public

This is an online tool developed by a marketer Neil Patel
Simply put in a term or a phrase and it gives you some suggestions

Other top tips on generating ideas for SEO-rich website content

Write it all down which will help you clarify things and also give you further ideas
Try to write one thing a week (don’t worry if you don't always manage it!)
Keep an eye on what other people are posting or receiving good engagement - think about your take on it or how to develop or deepen it
Create an ideas bank and send yourself audio notes or prompts when walking the dog or away from your screen
They don’t have to be 100% original thoughts - give your take on a topic; your angle and perspective from your business
It doesn't need to be a masterpiece - it can be your look at a particular topic and build off something you've seen someone else

How to set up your blog article & write the content

So that's the planning stage - at this point you should have loads of ideas and hopefully a good idea of who you want to talk to and some of the things that people are facing. These should be connected to the particular product or service you’re promoting.

Choose the topic and specific keyword for your blog

So at this point, what you want to do is choose the particular topic using our ideas bank. And what we advise doing is deciding on your specific keyword for the article.

As an example, some of our recent ones (at the time of writing) were about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Unsurprisingly, the keyword has been, ‘on-page SEO’ or ‘website SEO’.

Form a working question or result for the blog article

The next to do is form a working question which is the overall thing you want to address in the blog itself.

Once you have this question you can then use the article to help your readers achieve a positive outcome through the blog article.

For our recent blog, that working question was ‘how to make my website SEO more Google-friendly’. I.e., how can I make my website more visible on Google?

When thinking about your working question, you want to have that transformation in mind; the ideal end destination for your reader with the problem they’re facing.

The other thing to say at this point is, you don't need to necessarily fine-tune it or at this point. We want to get an overall sense of where we're going with the blog; the wordsmithing comes later, which we’ll show you below.

The key reason for uncovering a question to answer is so that we can position ourselves as experts, showing that we can be a guide to the customer.

We want to show that we can help them resolve their problem or overcome a challenge. We want to offer a helpful plan that demonstrates expertise; one that they can trust and that shows our authority.

Plan the structure including headings for your blog

You can now sketch out the skeleton of your blog, for example an introduction, five paragraphs (or however many you want).

I suggest a minimum of three or four paragraphs because you want to avoid thin content by offering sufficient value through the blog.

Finally, there will be a conclusion or a call to action. The conclusion essentially restates the case, rounds things off and sets the context for a call to action.

The call to action can be a link to social media or related articles, so nothing too complicated.

Don’t forget the key principle is getting the structure of the content itself in place before you start writing.

Write your draft blog, but not on your website

You can now look at writing your blog, and I'd highly recommend not doing the draft directly on your website.

I will either use a Word document, Google Doc or Notion; the reason for this is to avoid distractions when you're writing.

When you write directly on your website, it’s tempting to start fiddling around with the styling or other things.

It's much more efficient to remove those distractions and focus on the content itself.

Later on you can copy and paste it into your site, which makes drafting and tweaking a bit easier.

How to put your draft blog together

We can now put everything together in your blog, and hopefully by this point you will have a good idea of what you want to talk about, plus what you want someone to get from reading this particular blog article.

You should also have a final draft of your blog ready to go at this advanced stage.

Copy and paste your text into your blog

Go ahead and copy and paste your draft paragraph text (we’ll come to headings, SEO title, meta description and images below) into your blog on your website.

Add headings and subheadings for key sections in your blog

This might seem obvious, but start at the top and work logically, adding headings above each paragraph of text (where relevant). Again, don't necessarily worry about fine-tuning things at this point.

What you want to do with headings is be very logical. Heading 1 is basically the subtitle for the entire article, and you typically have that at the top, and you don't you don't use heading one again.

We’ll come back to Heading 1 below.

Then what you do throughout is have your Heading 2 for the main points. Then if you want to develop subheadings, your sub-sub headings will be Heading 3 and so on and so forth.

What you want to avoid with headings is jumbling them up and using them illogically and out of order. Don't mix them up - this is key!

Ultimately people are going to be scanning through your content, so they'll make decisions based on some of those Heading 2s where you're putting your main points. They’ll be thinking, ‘Is this actually going to help me?’.

The headings are acting as signs for people so that they can understand to what extent your content will actually answer their question. They might jump to the bit that they want to read and if that answers things, they might then read the rest. If there's lots of text and no subheadings, it's hugely overwhelming.

So you want to be able to break down your article and your headings are key places that tell Google important things about the content that's being served up on the page. Don’t forget, make sure that the words in your headings are as relevant as possible to people searching Google.

Also don’t fall into the trap of using headings to style your text when you could use bold or italics. This can confuse Google, especially if your headings are then out of sequence.

Sometimes it doesn't quite work or sound natural to have the specific keyword phrase in all of your headings, so you might need to play around with them a bit to get the right order or a bit of variation. The key thing to keep in mind is what might someone write in a Google search and then reflect that in your headings.

It’s much easier to work on your headings once you’ve written your paragraph text, as you can then summarise what’s in your content.

Add internal and external links to your blog

The next thing to do is to add links to the blog or webpage.

Google loves links from blogs to related articles. When you add helpful, quality links you are showing Google how you’re backing up the claims you’ve made.

To help get ideas for good external links, we tend to have a look on Google and find other websites that have written good articles on the same topic or that have gone into more detail on a particular aspect.

You can link to those pages and encourage your readers to check them out, if they want to find out more.

This creates a little bibliography which tells Google that you're linking to authoritative sources on this particular topic. It makes you more of a trustworthy source of information in Google's eyes.

Don't forget internal links too, so if you've written other articles on your website that are relevant, related and helpful to the topic, do link to them.

If you can, it's helpful to link to your service or the product that the article is ultimately about - we tend to mention this at the beginning of our blogs, which helps to set the context.

You connect up all the dots and make it obvious what you do, for whom it is and how you help. This helps Google as well as human visitors get the context.

Optimise and add images to your blog

Once you've done your links, it's time to look at images. Images help to break up the, but you don't need loads of them.

We suggest having a main ‘hero’ one at the top and then two or three scattered throughout.

Whatever you do, make sure that you shrunk them and have given them an appropriate file name plus alt text (also know as alt tags). See our previous post and handy guide for more info.

Overall what you want to do is avoid overloading your site with massive images. Anything above 500KB is going to slow your site down over time.

Avoid uploading massive images and by optimising the filename and alt tag you are again telling Google what the page is about and what someone can expect to find.

How to get people across the threshold in Google search results

That then is the end of the writing, tweaking and fine-tuning. The last step is getting your blog or page ready to be published. There are a few small things to do, but ones you should be careful not to miss.

Refine your blog title (also known as page or SEO title)

First refine the overall title of the blog. We use a very helpful tool called Headline Analyzer by Co-schedule for this task.

And the reason we want to spend a bit of time refining the page title is because it's highly visible in search results so one of the main hurdles or incentives to people clicking and then reading your article.

It's important to have a good, catchy and interesting page title.

You can use the Headline Analyzer to score your page title out of 100. We aim for a score above 80, and the tool gives you suggestions for words that garner more interest, such as emotional words or power words. Including these sorts of words is helpful to drive more traffic.

However, it goes without saying that you should avoid spammy titles that come across as clickbait.

There’s also a Headline Analyzer Chrome extension that makes the refining process quicker and easier.

Add your Heading 1 (subtitle), but only one per webpage

Once you’ve sorted your page title, follow the same process for your Heading 1. This is the main subtitle for the page.

We tend to use it to paraphrase or elaborate on the page title. It gives people a bit more context for what follows on the page.

Check your page title and meta description for length

Your page title (also known as the ‘SEO title’) is the short headline of text that appears in the Google search. Along with it is the meta description, which is the slightly longer paragraph below it.

These are two highly visible bits of text, so they need to be short, concise and engaging.

Try to include your keywords in them too.

If you can tick all these boxes, it’s more likely you’ll get people clicking through to your website from search engine results.

Bear in mind that there are particular character limits in Google searches for the length of your page title and meta description.

If they are two long, the text simply flows off page and gets cut off, leaving a tantalising ellipse.

Both the page title and meta description have specific character counts, so always keep them short and engaging.

Add a thumbnail to your blog

Finally, before you publish your blog, make sure you've included a thumbnail.

If you share the blog on social media or it appears in a summary on your website, the thumbnail is the small image that goes with the link.

Make sure it relates to the overall thrust of the blog.

How to boost your blog after publishing

Assuming you’re happy with your blog and have published it, don't forget to publicise it - a lot of people assume the work is done at this point!

Anything you publish needs to be publicised.

Link to your blog from your newsletter; tell your audience on social media (can it find your website or URL via the link in your social media profile or bio?); plus repurpose the content wherever you can to give it a boost.

Eventually Google will crawl your blog or webpage, but we need to do what we can to get people clicking through and viewing it. Once Google has crawled it it then indexes it, so runs it through its algorithm and adds it to its database for presenting in search results (or not, depending on the quality of the article).

Historically, we used to create Instagram content, post it and then work it up into an article on our blog later on. However, we always start with the blog first now. We'll write the post and then post on Instagram.

The only difference is that because people prefer simple, bite-sized content on Instagram, we pare down the blog content and then direct people to read more on the blog. This is a good way to economise on your content creation time, plus it helps to drive traffic to your website.

We very much recommend creating content for your blog and then condensing it for social media, rather than the other way. It's a lot harder and longer process to take a social media post and then make a blog from it.

Plus, content on your blog is evergreen, so you can continually refine it over the months and years, whereas social media content is ephemeral.

So there you go - an overview of how to create ideas and write great content for small businesses - blogs that answer the questions your customers are asking and so improve your website’s SEO and drive more traffic to your site. If you’d like to learn more from us on SEO or get visual inspiration, follow @wildings.studio on Instagram or read more of our blogs on website SEO below.

How to write brilliant blogs for better website SEO