How to optimise a blog

2.3 million blog posts a day are published on WordPress alone, adding up to a whopping 70 million posts a month, so, making your blog stand out or even visible at all can be a challenge. But structuring your blog content properly can give you the best chance, as writing an optimised blog post can benefit both readers and search engines.

We have all heard the saying quality over quantity, but it this the case when it comes to creating blog content? It is recommended that you write a minimum of 300 words for your blog post. Since longer articles are proven to have higher search rankings, shorter posts may not perform as well mainly because there is not enough content there for Google to recommend your article to their users.

Writing any less than this may also provide a negative experience for your website visitors too, and they may not get all the information needed from your blog post, causing them to look elsewhere for the missing information. On the other hand, if your article is too long and difficult to read, it might scare users away. Its finding that perfect balance of quality and quantity.  

When you Google ‘what’s the best length for a blog post?’, its stated that they should be 1500 – 2500 words, wow. Apparently, posts with around 2,500 words rank the best. However, how realistic is it to write regular articles at this length.

I guess there’s many benefits of having a blog post that long. It will increase the time visitors spend on your webpage and it will definitely make you look more knowledgeable and reliable.

How often should you post on your blog? Research indicates that companies who post about once a week get twice the web traffic as those who do not blog at all. Simply, the more you post, the more exposure your blog gets. Although make sure to not put pressure on yourself to meet these measures and post something just for the sake of it, but as the saying goes, the more the merrier!

The headline of your blog is arguably one of the most important parts as this is what will make the end user decide whether to read the blog or not! Here’s your chance to capture the reader’s attention and encourage them to read on! It also tells search engines what your blog is about.

A technical tip here is to ensure your header is wrapped in a H1 tag so that Google’s web crawlers understand the topic of your blog post.

The headline of your blog is arguably one of the most important parts as this is what will make the end user decide whether to read the blog or not! Here’s your chance to capture the reader’s attention and encourage them to read on! It also tells search engines what your blog is about.

A technical tip here is to ensure your header is wrapped in a H1 tag so that Google’s web crawlers understand the topic of your blog post.

Images are good for breaking up your text and being a visual aid to complement the content.  Images can be used for SEO too, by adding ALT tags and captions to each image. The ALT text you use against images in your posts should describe what’s going on in the picture, giving Google a better idea as to why the image is there and how it supports the content.

The meta description tag is a description of the article you are writing, almost as an extension of the blog title, which will appear in search results, to give both Google and internet users a description of your page. A good meta description can increase your click through rate dramatically.  Social media platforms often display this description when your blog is shared on those platforms. It may not be a vital part of optimisation, but it is certainly best practice.

Keywords are essential to your SEO efforts; by knowing what people are searching for, you can then use the right keywords in your content to help Google rank you for specific search terms or topics, but balancing keyword placement with natural sounding content can be challenging.

One way Google determines the subject of a blog is by being able to identify synonyms and other words relating to the key phrases used, which is often referred to as Semantic SEO. This has come about on the back of the Hummingbird algorithm update that occurred back in 2013. Your article will lose its appeal if you cram it full of your focus keyword, even though this strategy worked well ten years ago.

Aim to make sure every blog post you write either entertains, educates, engages or promotes. Remember who you are writing for and why you are writing a blog – you are still writing for your customers, not search engines. Yes, part of the reason for having a blog is to drive traffic to your website which SEO can certainly contribute to, but the primary reason is to convince potential customers to buy from you.

Another thing to note is that each blog piece you write should meet the E-A-T requirements, which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Although this is not a direct ranking factor, it can affect where your website ranks when Google raters review your content.

Sometimes the writer will focus too heavily on the SEO guidelines, making the blog hard to read for the user. Therefore, the ideal approach for creating the best blog posts for readers is to keep them simple and easy to read. Shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, punctuation, and bulleted/ number lists can help readability and boost success.

Give your readers numerous ways to get in touch with your dealership, by placing call to actions strategically throughout. Let them decide how they want to interact – email, call, comment, share on social, follow on social, enquiry from or even provide the option for them to sign up to your newsletter.