Have a lot of blog content that isn’t really doing much for you and your business? Well you’re in luck. As long time bloggers ourselves, we’ve learned a lot along the way and have a few quick tips to improve your SEO blog post writing to help them drive more traffic to your site.
Blogging can be a super powerful tool when you use it correctly. It will keep leads coming your way long after that Instagram post has stopped showing up and that TikTok sound is no longer trending.
So, if you’re looking for a way to optimize the content you already have, take a look at our top tips to improve your blog posts today.
5 Tips to Improve Your SEO Blog Post Writing
Add Images to Every Post
So first things first, you want to make sure that all of your blog posts have photos, but you don’t want a crazy amount of photos.
So if you’re on the side of the spectrum where you don’t have any photos, maybe like us, you’re a web designer and you’re thinking what photo am I supposed to put in here if I’m talking about like the best CRMs for creatives or something like that?
You can totally use stock photos, you can use photos of yourself if you got branding photos done, or just general photos of a computer on a desk. We have a lot of photos like that or writing a notebook, anything like that. But you want photos in your post.
If you’re on the opposite end of the spectrum and you have too many images in your post, it can get to the point where people are going to either stop scrolling or it’s going to overpower the actual content that you have written.
So if you’re say, a photographer, and you’re writing about a shoot that you did at a specific venue or if you’re writing about some of the best venue wedding venues in your area, we would suggest putting galleries throughout the post of anywhere from three to maybe six or seven images at most.
Then you can scatter those out, so every two or three headings you can put a larger gallery or every heading you can put a smaller gallery of three images or just a single image. That way you can still show off some of the best photos from the session or from the venue, but it’s not going to overpower the content or just have people scrolling for an hour because you put 300 photos in your blog post.
Get Rid of Numbers in Your URLs
One of the other things that we suggest for SEO blog post writing is getting rid of numbers in your URLs. So what we mean by this is if you write a post on the six best places to get married in Denver, you don’t want your URL to be your domain/6-best-places-to-get-married-in-denver.
First of all, you want to make sure your URL only has the keyword in it. But what happens when you put numbers in your URL is it makes it very difficult to update your post and have the URL match.
So for ranking purposes, if you write a post that is six locations, and then somebody else writes a post that has seven locations, they might start to outrank you because they have seven spots. So then you can go back and say, okay, I’m going to put eight spots on here.
But if your slug or your URL has six best spots. it’s not going to match and it’s going to kind of be a little bit confusing. So you want to make sure you don’t have any numbers in your URLs so that you can continue to update your posts without running into any issues.
Kind of going along with that with numbers in your URLs, try not to have the date in your URL slug or permalink structure. So if you already have an established website, you’re already getting traffic, then there’s no reason to get rid of the dates in your URLs or anything if that’s already been a choice.
But if you are completely starting a blog off from scratch, you can actually go into your WordPress settings (we find this more often with WordPress sites than other sites including Showit sites) and you can change your blog posts to not include the date before your slug.
The only reason we say that is because it can make your content more evergreen, which basically just means, you know, five years from now, your posts could still be ranking and doing extremely well and if people were to see that it had a date on it, let’s say from like 2023 and it’s now 2028, then they might be like, is that actually updated content? And it could potentially, not necessarily, but it could potentially make them want to click on a different post.
Now, I will say on our travel blog, I actually had dates in my URLs for the first two or three years, and I was still seeing significant traffic. We have clients who have dates in theirs, and they still see incredible traffic from their blog posts, even though they have like some posts from a few years ago, they’re still getting traffic from those.
So it’s not to say that it’s going to destroy your like SEO or your monthly traffic or anything like that. But it’s just something to try to keep in mind.
A way that you could mediate that is there are a lot of WordPress plugins where you can actually just have the last modified date appear on the actual post. Essentially what that will do is every time you go in and update the post, that last modified date is going to automatically update for you. So that’s a setting that we have set up on Volumes & Voyages, for instance.
Whenever you’re looking for something on Google in the search results, when a post comes up, normally it’ll have the date that it was published or last updated on, and then it will have a little meta description. So, what’s cool about that plugin is that it will actually just show the last date that you updated it.
So even if your URL says something from 2023, let’s say that you updated it in 2028, then it would have that 2028 date pull right next to it. So it’ll still make everything look really relevant.
Establish Authority Fast
Our next tip is to make sure that you establish authority fast. There are a few different ways to do this, but essentially you really want to establish authority in your blog post to signal to Google and your reader that you know what the heck you’re actually talking about and that you’re not just spewing off these random facts that you read from someone else’s post or someone else’s podcast that you listen to.
So like I said, there’s a few ways that you can do this. The first one is that in your blog post, right in the introduction, I think we do it in the second or third paragraph normally, try to fit in a very short paragraph about what you do, what you specialize in, and why you are an expert on the topic you’re writing about.
So for instance, if you’re a wedding photographer, and let’s say you’re writing a post on the five best wedding venues in Las Vegas, in that little paragraph right in the beginning, you can same something like, “As a Las Vegas wedding photographer, I have captured weddings at 20 different venues throughout the city, and I have found that these are the five absolute best.”
So, you’re really just establishing authority very, very fast to your reader, and then they’re think, oh, so obviously I can trust what this person has to say, because clearly they’ve done the research, they’ve done the work, they’ve been to these places in real life.
Another way is to actually make sure you’re using your own photos throughout your blog post. That’s not to say you can’t use stock photos. There’s definitely instances where we don’t have pictures of ourselves working. So if you really wanted to have someone sitting at a computer, obviously a stock photo might be the way to go (unless you want to take one on your iPhone or your own camera or something really fast).
But you want to make sure that you have at least one picture in every post that is your own. And it can be like a janky little iPhone photo that you’ve taken as long as it kind of matches with what you’re talking about in that post.
That’s just because, again, it shows that you know exactly what you’re talking about. If it’s like a venue post, it’s showing you’ve been to that place, you’ve captured a wedding there, it just kind of adds that extra layer of authority.
And then the final way that you can do this is to actually add an author box to your post. So this is something that’s really easy to do in WordPress sites. So again, if you have Showit, this is also really easy to do, but there’s a little plugin you can turn on the backend that will add a author box.
All you have to do in that little author box is like put your photo, write a brief little bio about yourself that calls out what you do, why you’re good at what you do, and everything like that. That’s just going to signify to Google again that you know what you’re talking about, and it’s also going to show your reader that you know what you’re talking about.
Make Sure Each Image Has Alt Text
This next one is probably everyone’s least favorite one to do, but when it comes to SEO blog post writing, you want to make sure that you have alt text for all of your images. So going back to the very first point about adding photos to your blog post, this is another reason why you don’t want to add a ton of photos because it’s going to create a lot of work for you.
Every single image that you have on your blog post, whether it’s in the actual content of the blog post or the featured image, you want all of those to have alt text. This is going to, one, help you rank better for SEO, but two, it’s also going to make your site more accessible because this is what screen readers will read if someone uses them on your blog page. So you want to make sure that you have alt text for every single one of your images.
We suggest not keyword stuffing your alt text. If there’s an image that has your keyword in it or you can fit the keyword in naturally, that’s perfectly fine. But if you can’t, we just say don’t worry about it. Write what the image is about, a short description about what you can see in the image and you should be fine.
The one place that is normally easier to fit the keyword in is in the featured image, especially if you make featured images that have a little text in them or have your blog post name in them, but otherwise don’t worry about that. The main thing is that you want to have alt text for every single one of your images.
Interlink As Much As You Can
Our very last tip is to actually interlink as much as you can. So everyone thinks “I have to get all these links from other people in order to like get my content to rank”, but honestly, one of the quickest wins is just to link to your own posts and your own pages on your website.
That’s because it signals to Google that you trust your own content enough that you’re going to link to it. It’s also going to keep people on your website longer, because if they’re reading your post and let’s say, you have a post on a specific wedding venue that you took photos at and you’re talking about the couple that you took photos of and you’re like going into detail about the venue and everything and maybe you just like slyly put in there “this is one of the best venues in Las Vegas to get married at”.
Then that little sentence right there, you can just link to your other post about the five best wedding venues in Las Vegas and then you’re going to keep people on your site longer and you’re also just going to be linking it to content that has to do with that same topic.
Tt’s also going to start to create a content cluster on your site, which is going to signify to Google again, that you really know what you’re talking about and you’re going to be writing about everything you possibly can related to that topic.
Final Thoughts on Tips to Improve Your SEO Blog Post Writing Today
So those are our five quick tips on SEO blog post writing. If you found this information helpful and you want to learn more about SEO, we highly recommend you check out Inkpot Creative Club, which is our monthly SEO membership.
Every month we’ll be giving a live masterclass on a niche SEO topic. This month in August, we chatted all about how to optimize your website. And of course, if you join later, you do get access to all replays!
Check these out next:
- How Often Should I Blog for SEO?
- How to Plan Blog Content as a Small Business Owner
- How to Write a Blog Post Fast in Just One Hour
KP’s design journey began in book publishing, but she fell in love with the truly limitless possibilities that web design presents. Since then, she’s been helping photographers and creatives become the no-brainer option for their dream clients before they even get on a call.
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8/25/23
Published On:
Krystianna Pietrzak
