5 Lessons I Learned from Writing 150+ SEO Blogs in 1 Year

I’ve recently crossed the threshold of writing over 150 SEO blogs in just under 12 months.

👍🏼I’ve managed to rank on the first page of Google for many of them. I’ve achieved featured snippets and I’ve also ranked in “people also ask” boxes, driving thousands of organic visitors to my clients.

👎🏼On the other hand, I’ve also failed to rank on the first page of Google, first hand seeing the difference ranking position makes to your organic traffic.

So what makes the difference between a SEO blog strategy that succeeds and one that fails to provide returns on your investment?

Use these 5 lessons I’ve learned from working on multiple SEO blog projects over the past year to maximize your content investment.

1. Keyword research is critical

One of my favourite benefits of deploying a SEO strategy using blogs is that you’re often meeting people where they are - searching for answers to their questions, problems or challenges.

A targeted SEO strategy can increase the quality of your leads as you’re specifically targeting people who already have an interest or stake in the topic or subject matter at hand.

So how do you find and attract these leads? Through keyword research!

Keyword research is a method of finding popular words and phrases that people are using in their searches to find the information they’re after.

For example, if you’re offering mental health services, keyword research will help you uncover which keywords and phrases people are using and how many unique searches occur for those keywords every month.

Below is an example of keyword research for terms related to “anxiety.” It’s interesting to see how many more people search for anxiety compared to stress and burnout compared to overwhelm.

To conduct keyword research you will want to use software such as Semrush - a well known SEO marketing insights tool.

You’ll also want to understand the basics of keyword research like:

• Monthly search volume

• User intent

• Relevancy

• Long-tail keywords

• Types of search query

Building a keyword strategy takes a lot of time, effort and strategic thinking. Working with an experienced SEO specialist to do this is well worth the investment.

2. Balance quantity with quality

If you’re hoping to rank on the 1st page of Google, you need to remember that Google is a service.

Google wants to serve up high quality content to their customers - search users.

So what does Google consider to be high quality content? In a nutshell, your content needs to:

• Satisfy the search result and intent of the user

• Offer accurate information using high quality sources

• Be original (offering unique context or an opinion)

• Provide a satisfying user experience for people who visit your page

After writing over 150+ SEO blogs in the past year, I’ve come to learn that it’s better to write extremely well-written longform content that will outcompete the other search results for your target keyword, than it is to write double the amount of content with lower word count and lower quality output.

Why is this?

Because if you’re not ranking on the first page of Google, you’ll see significantly lower returns on your investment. Now, this isn’t to say that your blog content that doesn’t rank on the first page isn’t useful, however if your goal is to bring in organic traffic from Google, you want to be on the first page of results.

Below is a chart showing the average traffic for blog posts at each word count threshold. You can see that the posts between 2,501-4000 words generated significantly higher traffic by far.

Why be on the 1st page of Google?

Close to 75% of people using a search engine will not scroll past the first page of a Google search. Think about it - how often do you click on a result past the top five results?

It takes a lot of effort to out compete the content currently ranking in the top 10 positions, but it’s well worth the effort to try to win this battle as you’ll be rewarded with significantly higher traffic to your website.

This means that the #1 search result is ten times more likely to bring visitors to your site compared to spot #10.

3. Upload your SEO blog properly

This sounds straightforward, but sadly it isn’t.

After working on a number of SEO projects now, I’ve come to realize that SEO is a work stream where there can be multiple hand-offs. Maybe you’re working with a strategist, or a writer, and an agency, but there’s an internal team member who’s managing your site. Or maybe you’re working with an agency, but within the agency the person uploading the content is different from the person creating it.

Either way, what I can tell you is that I’ve sent over strategically written blogs for SEO in multiple projects that failed to perform because it was missing important structural elements like H2 tags that weren’t applied when the blog was published. You need to tell search engines what your content is about. The best way to do this is to use headers like H1, H2 and H3.

You’ll want to make your images searchable and accessible by adding in descriptions and alt text.

Make sure that everyone working on your SEO project understands their role and how both technical and content SEO work together to deliver results.

4. Promote the blog through other channels

I’ve had some clients who are interested in investing in SEO content think that once the blog is published it will do the work of bringing in the traffic and backlinks just simply by being present in the SERPs.

Promoting your blog through other channels such as social media, email marketing and more, is critical to not only maximizing use of the content, but also increasing your rankings and potential backlinks.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you write an incredible article about how to save money on your grocery bill. But, after publishing the blog you’re only ranking in position 80. You need more authority - i.e. backlinks. If you push this blog on social media and attempt to get the attention of personal finance bloggers, mommy bloggers and more, you’re increasing your chances of potentially getting a backlink.

Plus, direct website visits are not only good for your brand, but also your rankings. SEMrush’s Ranking Factors Research Study shows that direct website visits does play a role in your search rankings.

5. Work with a talented SEO strategist

SEO is an evolving field and there’s a lot of components to get right.

I don’t pretend to know everything there is about SEO and I’ve also never encountered a SEO strategist who “went to school for SEO.”

What also makes the practice of SEO more difficult is there is no concrete recipe for success to always rank in the #1 position or every business would…and that’s just not possible.

Google’s algorithm is like a magical complex math equation floating in outer space, controlled by AI. If there was a way to guarantee success using Google’s algorithm, anyone who could do that would be so rich, they wouldn’t be writing blogs for SEO.

All of this being said, there are people out there who do know more than a thing or two about SEO and if they’re experienced they should have examples of successes and lessons learned from their own projects.

Look to work with a talented SEO strategist, not just a writer. Set your project up for success right from the start and know that SEO is an investment - it does take planning, time and usually edits and technical tweaks to get things right.