By now, every website owner knows the value that blogging can bring to their business. But knowing that blogging is a great marketing strategy and knowing how to create a great blog are two very separate things. If you’re not sure on the latter, here’s our guide to writing a great blog post in 2019 and beyond.

Planning is important

Even if you are a great writer, it’s very hard to sit down at your laptop and bang out a great blog post in an hour. It can take several hours or even several days to create a great blog post, and a lot of that time isn’t spent writing. Brainstorming topics, finding keywords and researching ideas are all crucial if you want to create a blog post that is both informative and effective from an SEO standpoint. As part of your plan, you’ll want to create an outline for the post. This will help guide your writing and keep you on-topic.

Spend a lot of time on the headline

The headline may be the only thing that some people read — so make it worth their time and encourage them to read further. If you have a bland, boring or convoluted title, readers are going to switch off and think that the article is going to be written in the same way. You want to make your headline short, catchy and engaging so that when people read it they can’t help but want to read the rest of the article. Headlines are tricky and practice makes perfect. If you need help, check out some of the most popular content websites like Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post.

Write the post

With your outline ready and your title created, it’s not time to write the blog post. Make sure that you keep your sentences as short and clear as possible. Don’t overcomplicate things and use simple words wherever possible. Subheadings are a great way to break up your blog post and they will also help keep you on point, too. Keep paragraphs short, too. Large paragraphs can be intimidating for online readers so break your writing up as much as possible.

Add images

Images are essential for every great blog post. Not only are they great at explaining your points and adding additional value, they help break your blog post up, too. There are dozens of online websites where you can find high-quality images for free. Just be sure the file size of the images isn’t enormous and to add a relevant alt tag to every image.

Edit fresh

Take a break once you’ve finished your blog post. Step away from your laptop, have a walk or grab something to eat. Then, when you feel refreshed, come back to your blog post and read it through. Read slowly, carefully and allowed. You want to check that what you have written makes sense, that it flows and that you haven’t made any silly mistakes. Read it through twice and, if you can, have someone else read it too. Once you’re happy, you’re ready to post!

Internal linking is an incredibly straightforward concept. But it is also an incredibly important one. Every website owner should be internally linking and indeed many are without even realizing it. That’s because it is a powerful SEO technique and considerably improves your website’s user experience, too. If you want to learn how you can improve your internal linking or how you can get started with internal linking, read the following steps for success.

Start by creating loads of content

You can start building internal links if you don’t have lots of pages to build them from and to build links to. Lots and lots of high-quality content is essential if you want to succeed with internal linking. A few good pages aren’t enough. Users don’t want to be redirected back to the same handful of pages every time they click on your links, they want to discover something new and interesting. So before you get carried away with building links, start by building out your content first.

Use anchor text where possible but don’t over-optimize it

When building internal links, you’re going to want to focus on building links within the text of your page, rather than using images as links. That’s because Google prefers links from text and adds more weight to them. Don’t try to force keywords into your content in order to include them in the internal link, however. Your anchor text should be natural and descriptive while including a keyword or part of a keyword phrase where possible. Most importantly, your anchor texts should be descriptive so that users know what they are going to read.

Focus on deep pages

When building internal links, you don’t want to focus on the very top level pages like your home page and your contact page. Instead, you’re going to want to focus on building links to much deeper pages like product pages and blog posts — the kind of pages that people may not find naturally. These pages are going to benefit most from internal linking, both in terms of the SEO boost and the additional traffic,

Make sure you use follow links

There are two types of links follow links and nofollow links. Nofollow links are ignored by Google and don’t boost SEO. They were introduced as a way for sites to tell Google not to give value to the linking page and to not pass any link juice. This is the opposite of our goal with internal linking, which is why it is essential to make sure all internal links are follow links.

Link but don’t go crazy

It is important to build internal links, but you shouldn’t go overboard with the tactic. No one wants to read a page with dozens of internal links throughout. It makes the page hard to read and it takes away value from the internal links that matter. If you find yourself linking more than a handful of times in the same article, you should probably stop unless the piece is exceptionally long.

If you want to rank well in local search, there are three key factors that you need to take into account. They are prominence, relevance, and proximity. The more well known you are, the more relevant your business is to the search in question and the closer you are to the target area, the higher you should appear in Google’s Map Pack. This is easy for fixed location businesses such as shops to get their head around. But it can be a very different story for service-based business, such as plumbers, builders, and exterminators, who provide their trade to a large area.

Many of these businesses don’t have a physical office or, if they do, their office is located in their home. If this is the case, Google gives these businesses the opportunity to define a service area — the area in which the business will travel to work. This was initially done by defining a set mile radius from the point if their address. Understandably, this wasn’t perfect. Because businesses travel by roads and not in straight lines, there could be huge differences in travel time and ability to get to different locations, even if they were in the same radius area.  

Thankfully, Google has changed tack and service-based businesses are now allowed to hide their address and submit the exact areas (cities, ZIP codes, regions) that they operate in. This provides much-needed and much better functionality for service-based businesses looking to improve their local SEO and their rankings in Google’s Map Pack.

That’s not all that has changed for service-based businesses in Google, however. New local services ads are being tested across the U.S. which come with a Google Guarantee badge. This badge is the result of a paid-for ad with Google, through which Google will vet the company and check the quality of the service provided. If customers aren’t happy, Google claims it will pay users back.  

How can service-based businesses improve their position and CTR?

Now that Google has improved the way that service-based businesses appear in Google, it is important that these businesses improve their local SEO to get the clicks they deserve. Here’s what we recommend.

Get more and better reviews

Reviews are a huge factor for Google but also for customers. The more and better reviews you can get, the higher Google will rank you and the more likely customers will be to click on your listing.

List in every directory

The number of directories you appear in and the way in which you are listed can also have an impact on how high you rank in Google. Make sure that your business is listed in every directory you can find AND that it is listed in exactly the same way, with the same name, address, and phone number in particular.

Partner with an expert

Ranking with local SEO may seem straightforward, but it can be very hard in practice. There are all sorts of issues that we’ve come across that even some experts would have trouble fixing. If you want to be sure of improving your Map rankings, the easiest and smartest option is to partner with an SEO expert.