How to Write Blog Posts that Rank in 2021

Billions of people search on Google every day. But there are also billions f websites and blogs competing for the top positions on Google.

When you get traffic to your blog, you can make money from a product or service, from advertising, affiliate marketing, and many more avenues. The foundation of all these revenue channels, however, is getting traffic.

You can promote a website on social media, but it is generally less sustainable than ranking on Google, also known as search engine optimization, or “SEO.”

With Google, if you rank on the top page, you will tend to stay there for days, weeks, or maybe months if you regularly update your content and adhere to the latest SEO best practices. On social media, unless you are paying for ads, your traffic will be more intermittent. Also, social media websites tend to reduce the reach of any posts that include links. Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms make money from ads, and to do that, they want to keep people on their websites and apps. Therefore, they don’t want people to click on links and leave!

How to Write Posts that Rank

There are several things that you can do to increase the chances of your post ranking on Google. If you haven’t already got Google Analytics and Google Search Console installed and running on your blog, then I would highly recommend that you do that, to begin with. These free tools can give you valuable insights into the keywords and search terms that your blog is ranking for and which blog posts are just shy of the top positions.

Keyword Research

An excellent way to find topics to write about is to make a list of what you would search for in a particular product, service, or article.

Make a list of these search terms and type the first one into the Google or Google Chrome search bar.

Let’s say you want to promote and write about business startup ideas, type “business ideas” into Google, then make a note of any predictive search terms that are shown below your search term:

You can also add letters at the end of the search terms to see what else people are searching. For example, “business ideas a,” “business ideas b,” and so on up to z.

Search for each term and scroll down to the bottom of the results page, and you should see some related search terms. Make a note of these too.

You can then take all of the search terms and use a tool such as Google Keyword Planner or UberSuggest to see the search volume for each term. You can also check out the websites ranking for those terms and use a tool like the Moz bar to see what their domain authority is compared to yours.

If you have a new blog, it is unlikely that you will be able to rank for head terms’ such as “business ideas,” but you might be able to rank for a term such as “business ideas with a van” or “business ideas and plan pdf.”

You can also check out Reddit and Quora for questions related to different topics. There is even a Reddit keyword tool here. Just choose a subreddit (a forum name) and the tool will tell you the most common subjects or topics that are discussed there.

Also, take note of the “people also ask” boxes, or rich snippets results for your search terms. If you can directly answer some of the questions shown in the results pages, you have a better chance of showing up in them – at the top of the results pages. You can use subheadings and schema markup to improve your chances of showing up in the answer boxes. WordPress plugins such as Yoast can populate the markup for you.

You can also use a tool such as Buzzsumo to see which articles related to your blog, got the most social shares.

Buzzsumo will show you which articles got the most social shares and links. This can help give you some ideas when it comes to writing your own blog post. Searching on a website such as Udemy.com can also be a great way to find blog post ideas. Search for your niche, and see what the bestselling courses are. for example, at the time of writing, the top courses related to business are ones related to database management, project management, and business analysis.

Original Research

People like specific statistics. For example, let’s say someone wants to find out how much it costs to start a business from home. The standard answer would be “it depends”. However, a great answer would state the average startup cost from the 2,000 people we researched, and then a breakdown of how much the startup cost was per niche or business type, and what the expenses were related to.

This original research could also be formatted into an infographic, tables of statistics, and even a video that you could embed in the blog post. Remember that great content is all about providing a great experience! You want to be relevant and interesting.

Original research does not have to be expensive. You could for example, make a table comparing all the different specifications of different laptops, processor, memory, cost, link to where to buy them from. By doing research for people, they are more likely to share your blog posts, have a great user experience and come back to your blog.

EAT & Domain Authority

Your blog should ideally have author, about us, and contact us pages. You can also embed links and widgets to your social media accounts. These pages can help Google verify that you are who you say you are and have some authority to write about specific topics.

If you are writing about fitness, for example, on your author page, add your qualifications, your experience and list any awards that your blog has won.

On the about us page, write about how the company was started. The contact us page should ideally have your contact details on it. Showing all of your contact details isn’t 100% necessary, but again, it tends to suggest to Google that you are a genuine individual or person, interested in a specific topic. You could always list a virtual office address and use a phone answering service to answer any phone calls. If you are selling a product or service, people will have more trust in your website if you have contact details – in addition to reviews and testimonials.

Many blogs in the past have been set up by the same individual, under different personas, to make money from posts and advertising. Google now wants to verify whenever possible that people have the “Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness” E.A.T. to write about certain topics.

Layout & Structure

Remember to make the blog post informative, yet easy to read. Use subheadings, bullet points, quotes, pictures, and structure the post with an introduction, key insights and a summary. It can also be helpful to provide some recommended further reading links near the bottom of the post.

Your introduction should hook people in.

For example, you may want to write something along the lines of:

“find out how I get 10,000 visitors to my blog per day and made $1000 per day in ad revenue.”

Most people will be motivated to keep reading with a statement such as this in the introduction!

Remember to use on-page SEO strategies, including a meta title, a meta description, and the appropriate header tags and images.

Remember to keep images small in file size and compressed. Images can slow down the load speed of a page, which can directly impact a blog post’s position on Google.

Think carefully about your headline. Buzzsumo recently published a study looking at the blog posts that got the most shares on social media. A further study by OutBrain also suggested that adding brackets or parenthesis to a headline can increase the click-through rate by up to 38%

Longer content also tends to rank higher than short content. The more informative, relevant and interesting a post is, generally speaking, the higher it will rank. If you do write a post that is thousands of words long, be sure to break it up with subheadings and images.

Conclusion

There is no easy way to write posts that rank well on Google. Adding original research, statistics and creating high-quality long-form content is a great start, though! Be sure to use Google Search Console to see what search terms your posts are ranking for. This can help give you even more ideas about posts to write in the future.