Before you write your next blog post, you need to read and understand my blog and how to write a perfect blog post from start to end. Did you know there’s a repeatable process to writing posts that can get you consistent traffic? I use the same process over and over to get thousands of number-one rankings on Google.
This process was created by combining three different research strategies. The first was single-variable testing. The only way to truly know how Google works is to run controlled experiments. It works like this: You have a set of test pages that solely exist for SEO experiments. All these pages have the same things in common. They have the same word length, optimization factors, etc. Then for half of these pages, you introduce a new variable, such as writing NLP-friendly content in your blog posts.
Don’t worry, I’ll explain what NLP is later. Then you watch the results. Did the NLP group gain more traffic and rankings than the control? In this case, yes. More featured snippets, better rankings, and more traffic.
Next, I dig through Google guidelines and patents for answers on how to write content. If you know what you’re looking for, you can find some gems. For example, in Google’s helpful content update release notes, they ask, “Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? No, we don’t.”This document put to rest the false idea that 3,000 words is the magical length all blog posts should be written.
Lastly, I fall back on the experience. We’ve been in search engine optimization since 2018. The point is that I’ve worked on hundreds of websites at this point. I’ve tried it all. I’ve seen it all. Now I’m gonna share it all.
Your First Step: Choose the Right Topic
The first step in the process how to write a perfect blog post from start to end is to choose the right topic to write about in the first place. What’s the point in spending your time and energy writing a post if you’re not gonna get traffic from it? It’s a waste of your time. The key is finding topics that are related to your niche, have a nice search volume, and actually have a chance to get an article to the top of Google.
Let me show you a way to do this for free. Let’s say that I wanted to create content on SEO courses to bring awareness to my own SEO course. Go to Ahrefs free keyword research tool and type in, “SEO Course.” Then once you’re here, download all the keywords. Once you get your report, sort by competition index. Lower is better.
This looks like an interesting one: SEO Crash Course. The competition score is 18. 210 searches per month. Not bad at all. Spoiler alert, I already rank number one for this keyword, so I’ll be using a blog post, which I clearly did a good job on, as an example for the rest of this blog article.
Next, you wanna make sure that you got the search intent correct, Let’s move more on how to write a perfect blog post from start to end.
Preparations: What is Search Intent?
If you were to Google, “Buy Lego Millennium Falcon,” which you should be doing anyway, you’d find an e-commerce page in the top position. The search intent is transactional, so Google expects the content to be transactional. For the SEO Crash Course, if you open up the top articles, you’ll see that they’re laid out in a step-by-step, numbered format. That’s the format Google wants to see, so that’s how to write a perfect blog post from start to end.
Next, you wanna create an outline for your content. Remember in high school English when the teacher would make you create an outline before you started writing? It’s the same thing. But where to start? The same place you looked before, the articles are already at the top of Google. Use the free plug-in, Detailed, to see what outline structure the top articles already used to succeed. So, clearly in my article, I need to talk about what is SEO, keyword research, knowing your competitors, et cetera.
But if you just copy the top article, how can you expect to beat it? Very clever question. Here’s how. Repeat this process for the number two article for SEO Crash Course and the number three article. So, your outline becomes a superset of all the top articles. Then you can add an FAQ section that further enriches your content with commonly asked questions. Where do you get these FAQs? Once again, directly from Google itself. Google the main keyword and start clicking around this People Also Asked section. These questions are made for FAQs.
Crafting the Perfect Title
Now it’s time to start crafting your title. Every good blog post starts with a great title. Your title has two jobs. First, you want a keyword to optimize your title so Google knows what searches to give you traffic for. To do this, make sure your keyword is in the title, preferably towards the front, and keep it together in a string. The second job of your title is to get people to read. You can add dates to your title so people know that your content is current and relevant. Everyone loves reading listicles,
So adding numbers to your title gets people excited. And there’s always good old-fashioned clickbait, which is what I’ve done in my SEO Crash Course article. Crash courses are supposed to be quick, so I assured the reader that it’s only five minutes of what you need to know.
Starting How to write a perfect blog post from start to end
Now that you have a title, it’s time to actually start writing that blog post. Starting with the introduction paragraph. Just like with the title, the job of the introduction is to hook the reader. If your intro isn’t good, then no one is gonna read the rest of your post, which is a very bad signal to Google and will also cause your girlfriend to dump you. My first piece of advice is not to fluff around. If someone searches for, “Best crypto wallet,” or “effective blog post writing” you shouldn’t start off your article explaining what cryptocurrency is.
They searched for, “Best crypto wallet.” Show them the goods. Next, people engage when their emotion’s engaged. Use your introduction paragraph to entertain them, educate them, or even scare them into reading your article. In my SEO Crash Course, I appealed to readers’ fear of loss. “Neglecting SEO can spell doom for you. You’ll be stuck on the bench while your competitors are raking in the traffic.
Writing Process: Crafting the Body of Your Blog Post
Now that you’ve got a perfect intro, it’s time to start writing the rest of the blog post. One of the main benefits of creating that outline is that you already have a framework for writing. Now it’s time to fill in the blanks. Under each section heading, your goal is to simply answer the question of that heading.
So for this SEO Crash Course outline, I need to answer, What is SEO? Then I need to get into the onsite factors, like content, metadata, et cetera. But here’s where we’re gonna get into the advanced strategies that the SEO pros use. Write your content in Surfer’s content editor.
The magical tool looks at the articles on page one to reverse engineer which words, entities, and phrases were used in those articles. Then it guides your writing to use them as well. After all, Google knows you shouldn’t be on Page 1 for a ribs recipe if you’re not using words like temperature, sauce, and Oh my God.
In your content, make sure to link to other authoritative websites as a resource for your readers. Especially if you’re referencing data, you want to be able to say where you got that data from. Reboot ran a study where they added outbound authority links to an experimental group of test pages and compared them to a control group, a well-designed single-variable test. As you can see, the pages in blue with the outbound links outperformed the orange control.
Cracking Google’s Code: NLP-Friendly Writing for SEO
Write in a way that Google’s natural language processing, NLP algorithm loves your content. Here’s how you do it. Echo back the question, then add the word is, and then give your answer. If there are any units associated with the answer, then use them here too. In my SEO Crash Course article, in the section on metadata. I write, “Metadata is just a fancy term for the title and,” blah, blah, blah. When you provide answers like this, Google cannot mistake that you provided a clear answer to the question.
Writing great blog content isn’t just about making the search engines happy. Far from it. The main goal is to make your readers happy. The next section is a set of readability hacks that belong in every blog post you write. No one wants to read a huge wall of text. Write in short, one-to-two-sentence paragraphs that are easy on the eyes. These days, most people scan content instead of actually reading word for word. So, you wanna dress up your blog post with eye candy that’s gonna move them down the page. Break up text walls with images and graphics.
Enhancing User Experience in Blog Posts
Your headlines should be sized appropriately to anchor the eye as they scroll. Use custom graphics to illustrate your points. Use callouts to draw the eye to key content, and embed videos that will keep people on the page longer once they’re played. Always remember to re-size images before uploading them to your site. If you have a huge, 10-megabyte, high-resolution photo of a cat in your content, even if you only show the thumbnail version of it, it’s gonna load the full 10-megabyte version. So, size it before uploading.
The last readability hack is to write your content for middle schoolers. Given that the average American reads at a 7th-to-8th-grade reading level, you don’t want to alienate your readers with your fancy pants language. – Inconceivable! – Use a Flesch-Kincaid reading tool to analyze your content.
As you get closer to the end of your blog post, you need to start thinking about a conclusion. Do you know how I mentioned that people scroll content these days? Many folks, maybe even yourself, will scroll right to the bottom for the concluding summary, so you need to give them what they wanna see, a summary. But also think about what is your goal with this blog post. What would you like your readers to do next?
A common question that comes up is, how long does your content need to be? How many words? People used to think that the longer you write, the higher your rankings will be on Google. Give Google some credit here. Google knows it doesn’t take 10,000 words to explain how to reset an iPhone. Google expects to see patterns on Page 1. So if all the top articles on your topic are 1,500 words, then your article should follow suit.
Now, I know you’re itching to get this perfect blog post up on your site, but hold your horses for a bit.
Proofreading: Cross the T’s and Dot the I’s
It’s time to cross some Is and dot some Ts. Run your content through a grammar and spellcheck tool like Grammarly. Although grammar isn’t a ranking factor on Google, typos and other blunders sure aren’t gonna impress your readers. Then for good measure, get someone else, a human, to proofread your content. Ask the biggest grammar police, teacher’s pet, or uptight friend you know to go over your content just to get another set of eyes on it before the upload.
Now it’s time to upload your masterpiece to your blog.
Write a perfect blog post and Upload Your Blog Post
But now that it’s on your website, is there anything left to do? You bet your buns. First, you wanna put structured data, or schema, in your article. Schema. Schema is code that you put on your post that makes it super easy for Google to figure out exactly what your content is about. Remember, we always want to make things easy for Google. That’s how we roll.
To get started with schema, use Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator. Open it up, then just start filling the stuff out. The title of your article, the author, all of it. You’ll see your schema code getting generated on the right. When you’re done, copy it all to your clipboard. Then you simply paste it into the HTML editor of your WordPress page.
Next, make sure to interlink existing relevant blog posts to this one. For example, when a post on anime links to another post, Google thinks, “How to write a perfect blog post from start to end”, I see. This receiving post must also be about anime.”
You wanna add a meta-title and meta-description. These define what your listing will look like in Google search results. For the title, just copy the same title that you wrote earlier. Hope you understand how to write a perfect blog post from start to end. The description should be descriptive, of course, and include keywords so they get bolded in the search results.
