What good is a blog if it doesn't rank on Google and other search engines?
What good is a blog if it doesn't rank on Google and other search engines?

Writing blogs that rank on Google - Our 10 tips for success

Written by Daily Fix - Published 24-Jun-2023, last updated 21-Jun-2024

Having a blog is an essential tool for businesses. Not only does it allow you to share valuable information with your audience, but it also provides an opportunity to establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

However, what good is a blog if it doesn't rank on Google and other search engines? With millions (probably billions!!) of blogs out there competing for attention, standing out from the crowd can be challenging. That's where our expertise comes in. In this article, we will share ten expert tips on how to write blog posts that not only capture the interest of your readers but also rank high on Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Here are 10 tips for writing blog posts that rank on Google:

Write for humans, not for bots and search engines
Write for humans, not for bots and search engines

Write for humans, not search engines

While it's important to use keywords throughout your post (see later in this article for tips on using keywords), don't forget to write for humans as well. Your blog posts should be informative and engaging, and they should provide value to your readers.

If you have written a poor quality blog post, stuffed with keywords and phrases, Google will detect this and may penalise your blog as a result.

Structure your post well

Your blog post should be well-structured and easy to read. Use clear headings and subheadings to break up your text, images to illustrate important points and use bullet points and lists to make your content scannable.

A huge block of text is likely to look daunting and uninviting.

For more information, see our article how to use using headings on your web pages.

Choose the right keywords

When you're choosing keywords you are targeting for your blog posts, it's important to think about what your target audience is searching for. Use a keyword research tool to find keywords that are relevant to your blog and that have a high search volume and low competition.

But don't get too hung up on which keywords to choose. If you write an authoritative, accurate and informatative blog, then it will naturally contain keywords and phrases relating the blog's subject matter anyway!

Use keywords throughout your post

If you have done some keyword reasearch and you now how a list of keywords you want your post to include then be sure to use them throughout your post - don't squeeze them all into the first paragraph. And don't keyword stuff!

Use your keywords naturally in your title, headlines, subheadings, and throughout the body of your post. Remember, you are writing this blog to be read by people, not bots!

Write long-form content

Some search engine experts will tell you that Google favours long-form content, so aim to write blog posts that are at least 1,000 words long. This will give you more space to cover your topic in-depth and use your keywords multiple times.

But the other side of the argument is that you should write as many words as are needed to comprehensively answer the question the blog is targeting or the subject it is discussing. If this only takes 200 words then don't artificially elongate the post by using lots of filler text that doesn't add quality to the blog.

Some blogs will be 200 words, some will be 20,000 words. Neither is "correct".

Use high quality images

As mentioned earlier, images can help to break up your text and make your blog posts more visually appealing. They can also help to improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) by giving you more opportunities to use your keywords in alt tags and captions.

If possible, use unique images rather than stack photos. Stock photos will have been used on hundreds and thousands of other websites, and Google will know this. Some industry experts will tell you that Google doesn't like stock photos that appear everywhere, but competing arguments say it has no impact on search results.

If you simply cannot obtain unique images for your blog then use of stock images is fine.

Promote your blog posts on social media

Once you've published your blog posts, be sure to promote them on social media. Share them on your own social media channels, and encourage your readers to share them as well.

Often, traffic to blogs from social media is the largest source of traffic to these blogs. If you have popular social media accounts or you run a successful Facebook Group then you have a captive audience ready to read your next musing. Make the most of this receptive audience.

Keep your blogs up to date

Don't write a blog, publish it, and never give it another thought. Regularly read through old blogs, update anything that's out of date and add extra information if it's relevant to the original blog subject matter. Be sure to keep your posts up-to-date with the latest information.

If the search engines can see that a blog is being kept up to date it is likely to visit that blog more often to see what's changed and update it's index accordingly.

Make sure your blogs look good on mobile devices

More and more people are using their mobile devices to access the internet, so it's important to optimise your blog for mobile. More than half of the traffic to some websites comes from people using mobile devices, so it's a huge audience.

Make sure your blog posts are easy to read and navigate on a mobile device. Ensure the text size is suitable for reading on a smartphone without the need for a magnifying glass!

Consider serving smaller, optimised images to mobile devices. If your website displays a large image on laptops and desktop computers then this file will be large and detailed. Smart phone screens are a fraction of the size of something like an iMac so you should serve a smaller image, more suited to the screen size of a smartphone or tablet and the potentially slower connection as the smartphone accesses the website using 4G rather than fast home WiFi.

Pagespeed is a ranking factor, so make sure your website doesn't take 10 seconds to load on a slow smartphone connection. That will harm your search engine ranking, and also mean many visitors will get fed up waiting for the page to download and go elsewhere.

Conclusion

Following these tips will help you to write blog posts that rank on Google. But remember, SEO is an ongoing process. You'll need to continue to optimise your posts and build backlinks in order to maintain, and improve, your ranking.