How I write blogs that Google AND humans like to read
Balancing SEO with unique, interesting writing
There’s a tension in blogging today between writing for SERP ranking and SEO, on the one hand, and writing interesting, beautiful prose, on the other. We worry about having to sacrifice one of these to achieve the other.
Maybe you believe that your posts must, unfortunately, sound boring, formulaic, and clunky — in other words, a reader’s nightmare — to have a fighting chance at ranking on Google’s page 1 results. But no one likes reading (or writing) this content. Maybe that’s why you end up never posting on your blog at all.
Fortunately, you can write blogs that Google AND humans like reading. I’ll break down how I, a classically trained creative writer, write blogs that are interesting and optimized for SEO wins.
CASE STUDY: A Travel Blog
Let's say you’re a travel company, and you want to write a blog post about one of your trip locations, Rome.
First, you need to…
Find your blog topic
Start by researching what people are asking about the topic. There are many free tools that help you find this information: for example, Answer the Public.
For example, if you're writing an article about visiting Rome, people will likely search for where they should stay.
If you research keywords relating to hotels and accommodation in Rome, Italy, you’ll find that a high-volume, easy-to-rank-for keyword is ‘best hotels in Rome with a view’.
Write a blog about this topic.
You can title it “Best Hotels in Rome With A View 2024” – the year lets readers know that the information is up-to-date.
Create an outline of your blog content
Outlines are critical to any piece of writing. Not only do they ensure flow and organization in your content, but they also make it much easier to write the piece.
Create an outline including the subtopics and information you want to cover in the blog post. Think about how you’ll organize the information, such as by dividing your recommendations by neighborhood, the closest attraction or budget range.
Fill in these sections with quick bullet points on the hotels or places and details you want to write about.
FOCUS ON HEADER STRUCTURE
Create your header structure based on your outline. Headlines are super important for Google and readers. Your reader should get an idea of the entire article just by skimming the headlines.
The structure should be an inverted triangle, starting with general information to more specific details. For example,
H1 Best hotels in Rome with a view 2024
H2 Hotels with a view of the Colosseum
H3 Palazzo Manfredi, small luxury hotel
Write the blog article
Now that you have the outline ready, you can start filling it in with a narrative. First — and this is essential — write without thinking about SEO. Let your creative juices flow and just free write.
Infuse your voice (or brand voice), keeping in mind that the most important thing is that you need to tell personal details and insider knowledge.
Both SERPS and humans LOVE new, unique content. The easiest way to add something new is to share your own experiences and opinions.
Insert SEO keywords after you finish drafting
After you write and edit your article, you can think about plugging in SEO keywords strategically.
HOW TO FIND YOUR KEYWORDS
There are many tools you can use to identify relevant keywords to your topic. I use SemRush, but there are plenty of other options, including Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, etc.
The key is to find keywords with high search volume and low difficulty to rank for (low competitiveness). Of course, the keyword must also be relevant to your brand and content.
In your blog article, many SEOs recommend using approximately 1-2 keywords for every 100 words. So, if your blog is 1,000 words, aim for around 10 keywords. Not all of these should be primary keywords. Focus on just a couple of primary keywords and use the others for long-tail keywords and variants of your primary keywords (i.e. terms that are close to your primary keyword but not an exact copy).
Google penalizes keyword stuffing, so make sure you’re not stuffing by running the text or URL through this free keyword density assessment tool.
INSERT KEYWORDS WHERE THEY FIT NATURALLY
Read through your article and see if there are places you can naturally slide in keywords. You might find that you've organically already used some keywords or a variation of a keyword that you can easily tweak (e.g. changing ‘luxurious hotel’ to ‘luxury hotel’ if it's a keyword).
Prioritize keywords in the blog title, subtitle and headers
Keywords are important in the body text generally, but they are paramount in your headers and the first 60 words of an article. I like to have an introductory 'subtitle' or summarizing paragraph at the very beginning of the piece, which gets in those keywords right away and tells people what they will be reading about.
Hit Publish
With strategic headers, relevant keywords and always taking advantage of other SEO tools, such as meta titles and meta descriptions, your blog is optimized for searchability.
The best part is it's still fun for people to read and gives thoughtful, personal perspectives and insights that can't be found in a quick read of someone else's blog — it's your own unique contribution to the internet.