Since 2015, we’ve grown the Ahrefs Blog from zero to over 600,000 monthly search visits.
What’s our secret? Consistency.
We’ve been using the same SEO strategy for the past six years, and it works well.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
What blog SEO is
Why blog SEO is important
How to write blog posts for SEO
How to optimize your blog posts for SEO
How to improve and maintain blog post rankings
But first, let’s make sure we’re on the same page.
What is blog SEO?
Blog SEO is the process of writing and optimizing blog content to rank in search engines like Google. Common tasks associated with blog SEO include keyword research, content writing, on-page SEO, and link building.
Why is blog SEO important?
Although there are many ways to drive traffic to a blog, search engine traffic tends to be the most stable and consistent. If you can rank for the keywords that people are searching for and maintain those rankings, your posts will attract consistent targeted traffic from Google.
Many other traffic sources tend to result in an initial spike in traffic, but it’s quickly followed by a sharp decline.
How to write blog posts for SEO
It’s important to understand that you can’t just create any old blog post and expect your post to attract thousands of visits from Google. It doesn’t work like that. To stand the best chance of ranking, you need to do your research and craft your blog posts for SEO.
Here’s how to do that in five steps
Find a keyword
Check search intent
Choose a winning format and angle
Craft a data-driven outline
Write the post
1. Find a keyword
Each blog post you write should be optimized for one main keyword, and that keyword should be something that people are actually searching for month after month. After all, it’s impossible to get search traffic to a blog post about a topic that nobody is searching for.
How do you find keywords? Use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
Enter a few broad ‘seed’ words or phrases related to your blog’s topic, then check the Phrase Match keyword ideas report.
For example, if you have a food blog, you might use ‘seed’ keywords like:
Chicken
Pasta
Recipe
Recipes
Ribs
steak
Keywords Explorer finds over 14 million keywords containing one or more of these phrases, but it won’t make sense to write blog posts about them all. You need to skim the list for topics that make sense for you.
For example, it would make complete sense for a food blogger to write a post about “chicken tikka masala” but not “chicken pox.”
If your blog is quite new, you might want to set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to something low to focus on low-difficulty ideas.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
Recommended reading: How to Find Low-Competition Keywords for SEO
2. Check search intent
Ranking high in Google is the secret to getting consistent search traffic to your blog posts, but unless people are actually looking for blog posts when they search for your keyword, your chances of ranking are slim to none.
That’s why it’s important to understand whether most searchers are looking for a blog post or something else. This is known as assessing search intent.
To do this, type your keyword into Google and look at the search results. Because the entire point of Google is to deliver relevant results to searchers, its search results are a great way to identify search intent.
For example, take a keyword like “pasta maker.”
You might assume that it wouldn’t make sense to write a blog post about this because people are undoubtedly looking to buy pasta makers. Yet if you look at the search results, most of them are blog posts reviewing the best pasta makers.