How to Optimize a Blog Post for SEO + Our Checklist
If you’re reading this post, odds are that you already understand the importance of blogging for your business.
It may sound like a lot of work at first, but if you stick with it, blogging regularly is a free and effective way to get more traffic to your website, build trust with your audience, and get established as an expert in your industry.
But failing to think about and include SEO best practices when you’re blogging is like baking a cake you aren’t going to eat… WHY?! If you’re going to go through the effort of writing blog posts, you want to make sure people are actually going to be able to find them.
Here’s where our SEO checklist for blogs comes in!
We call it our SEO Punch List, and it’s a 12-step checklist that we use to make sure we give every blog we write its best shot at ranking in the search engines.
We’re sharing it with you today so you can write well-optimized blog posts that drive traffic to your website and help you reach your business goals.
The Importance of SEO
Before we jump into the SEO Punch List, let’s go over some quick SEO basics.
Keywords (the words or phrases that people type into the search engine bar to find content on the web) are the name of the game for SEO.
Google has robots that “crawl” through your website looking for keywords. The more content you have on your website, the more opportunities you have to work in keywords for them to pick up!
That’s why blogging regularly is super helpful for SEO. But when you write a blog post, you don’t just want to write about whatever’s on your mind that day. You want to be strategic and write about topics your audience is searching for. You need to be using the right keywords on your website to attract the right people, and you need to make sure that those keywords are in the right places.
That’s what we’re going to guide you through today.
If you need some more background info on SEO and why it’s important, check out our 6 steps to an SEO-friendly website and tips for creating a successful blogging strategy first – then come back here and dive into the checklist!
How to Optimize Blog Posts for SEO
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s jump into the checklist we use for every blog post we write (and the ones we write for our clients, too!).
You’ll find the full checklist to copy-and-paste at the bottom of this post, but we’re going to go through each step and explain the how and why we implement them.
Disclaimer: This checklist is based on the process we follow for optimizing blog posts on Squarespace, but most blogging platforms have similar (if not the same) elements. You can easily adapt this punch list to optimize for SEO on other platforms like WordPress, Wix, and Shopify.
1. Find Your SEO Focus Keyword
The foundation of an SEO-friendly blog post is the right keywords. But how, exactly, do you find them?
We’ve got a whole blog post on how to perform SEO keyword research + our favorite tools we use, but here are the basics:
Start by brainstorming. Think about the common questions your clients are asking you regularly. What hesitations do they have? What are their goals? You can make a list of the common questions and concerns you hear often, and turn them into blog posts.
Take your brainstorming list to a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest is the tool that we use. We have the paid version, but you can search for three keywords per day on the free version. Plug a few of the questions from your list into Ubersuggest and see what pops up.
Evaluate the keywords. Ubersuggest will pull up a list of related keywords along with their search volume (how many monthly searches the keyword has) and search difficulty (how difficult it is to rank for that particular keyword on a scale from 1-100). You’re looking for the right balance of high search volume and lower search difficulty.
Choose one or two of the best keywords to implement in your blog post. Once you’ve got your keywords, it’s time to implement them in the right places.
2. Work Your Keyword Into Your Blog Title
Each page on your website should have one H1 (Heading 1) tag. On a blog post page, the H1 would be your blog title. This is the most important thing that Google’s robots look at when they index each of your pages, so you want to make sure you include your SEO keyword here.
For example, our keyword for this blog post is how to optimize a blog post for SEO, so that’s what we used for the blog title.
3. Look for Opportunities to Work Your Keyword(s) Into Headings and Subheadings
Google prioritizes heading text when crawling your blog post. It assumes that the most important text is in the headings and subheadings, so you’ll want to try and work your keyword(s) into those places as well (where it makes sense, of course).
4. Use Your Keyword in the First 100 Words of Your Post
Along with using your keyword in your blog title/H1 and at least one H2 tag, you’ll want to make sure your SEO keyword appears within the first 100 words of your post.
You should also use your keyword(s) a healthy number of times in your blog content. A good rule of thumb is to try and work your keyword in twice for every 500 words.
It’s important to not “keyword-stuff,” though – remember that you’re writing for humans first and Google’s robots second.
5. Shoot For (At Least) 1,000 Words
Google loves long-form content – it generally sees longer blog posts as more information-rich, so it prioritizes them in the search results. It’s best to get to 1,500 words with each of your posts, with 1,000 words being the bare minimum.
6. Write a Custom SEO Title + Description Using Your Keyword
SEO titles and descriptions (also known as meta titles and meta descriptions) are what you see in Google search results. They describe the page and what content you’ll find on it.
If you don’t manually add these, Google will pull from the copy you have on the website page. When this happens, it most likely won’t look clear or intentional, and the content it pulls won’t encourage users to click on your website to get more information.
You definitely want to make sure your SEO keyword is in your SEO title. You can simply use your blog title for this, but you have up to 60 characters if you’d like to add more context to encourage people to click.
You don’t need to include your exact SEO keyword in your SEO description (Google doesn’t factor SEO descriptions in its algorithms), so write a sentence or two about what the user can expect to find on the page. Be sure to stay under 160 characters so nothing gets cut off in the search results.
7. Optimize Your URL Slug
A URL slug is just the piece that comes after your domain name in the browser bar. You should include your SEO keyword in the URL slug of each blog post. Your URL slug should be short and sweet (around 3-7 words or so). For example, the URL slug for this blog post is just our focus keyword: /how-to-optimize-blog-post-for-seo
8. Reduce the File Size of Your Blog Image
Every blog should have a featured image/thumbnail (we love Unsplash.com, Pexels.com, and Canva.com for free stock photos!). Before you upload your blog image, you’ll want to make sure it’s smaller than 500KB in size.
This is because large image file sizes slow down your site – and a fast website is an important piece of the SEO puzzle. So, go ahead and minimize the size of your blog image. We plug our images into TinyPNG.com to compress them before we upload to our website.
9. Name Your Blog Image
Next, you’ll want to rename your blog image to include your keyword and business name. For example, the featured image for this blog post is named how-to-optimize-a-blog-post-for-seo-hoffbeck-co.
10. Add Alt Text to Your Blog Image
Alt text is a written description of an image on a webpage so that visually impaired users can get an idea of what that image looks like. Even though Google’s robots can’t actually “see” the images on your website, they can read the alt text, so you want to make sure it’s there. Don’t worry about adding your keywords here – alt text is meant to be functional for users first – so just describe what the image is. You can write something as simple as: “A woman typing at a computer”.
11. Add Categories and Tags
Google’s robots can see the categories and tags you add to a post, so you’ll want to make sure you add these in the settings of your blog post.
Categories are the main topic or topics that a blog covers. For example, the categories we’ll add for this blog post are “SEO” and “Content Marketing”. You’ll want to add one to three categories here, and you shouldn’t worry about including your SEO keywords.
Tags are bits of information relating to your blog post that can help categorize them further. You can add as many tags as you want, and you’ll want to add your SEO keyword(s) as tags here.
12. Add a Blog Excerpt
Your blog excerpt is a little 2-3 sentence blurb that explains more about your blog. These live on your website’s blog page (you can see what we mean on our blog page here) and can be a little bit longer than your SEO description. Their main purpose is to explain what your blog post is about to people who are already on your blog page. With that in mind, if it makes sense to include your keyword here, do it! But remember that you’re writing for humans first, so leave it out if it feels clunky.
The 12-Step SEO Checklist Every Blog Post Needs
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Remember that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. You likely won’t see the results immediately, but if you stay consistent and strategic with your content strategy, your hard work will pay off in the long run.
If you’re just getting started with your content strategy, our SEO checklist will help you get off on the right foot. And if you’re panicking because you’ve been blogging for a while now and haven’t optimized your content for SEO, don’t worry! It’s not too late to go back and optimize your old blog posts for SEO.
As always, if you get stuck or have any questions, we’re here for you! Schedule a Call (it’s free!) with our team, and let’s talk about how we can help get Google to ❤️ your website!
More soon,
Mara
WEB DESIGNER AND DEVELOPER + COPYWRITER + SEO SPECIALIST
P.S.
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