Do you want to improve your blog post SEO but don't have the time to learn about all the latest changes? Or don't have access to all the latest SEO tools?

We can help with that!

Our streamlined workflow steps below will help you write better, more engaging blog posts that will keep your readers coming back for more. Plus, our SEO writing tips and tricks will help you rank sooner and higher on search engines (Google is the only search engine that matters), so more people can find your content.

It's easier than you think! And with our help, you’ll be able to write better content in no time. And the best part is that it won’t take up much of your time – we promise. So, what are you waiting for? Get started now!

So please bookmark this page and share it with those that could benefit. Take all or part of this process to improve your writing for better SEO. (and read our related post answering the question, does blogging help SEO?)

Here's A Quick, Efficient Keyword Research Process

Using AI for Keyword Research

AI-driven keyword research is a crucial component in creating successful marketing campaigns.

Here's how to do it:

Step 1: Seed Words

The first step in your AI-driven keyword research process is to identify relevant seed words to your product or service. These are broad terms that describe your product or relate to its features. For instance, if your product is an eco-friendly water bottle, your seed words could be "water bottle," "eco-friendly," "reusable," and "sustainable."

Here's a simple example prompt to generate your keywords from the seed list:

AI Prompt: what are keyword ideas from this seed list: "water bottle," "eco-friendly," "reusable," and "sustainable"

AI Results:

1. "BPA-free water bottle"
2. "Best eco-friendly water bottles"
3. "Reusable water bottles with filter"
4. "Sustainable water bottle brands"
5. "Benefits of reusable water bottles"
6. "Eco-friendly water bottle alternatives"
7. "Insulated reusable water bottles"
8. "Why choose sustainable water bottles"
9. "Affordable eco-friendly water bottles"
10. "Recyclable water bottles"
11. "Durable and sustainable water bottles"
12. "Glass vs plastic water bottles"
13. "Top-rated reusable water bottles"
14. "How to clean reusable water bottles"
15. "Impact of eco-friendly water bottles on the environment"

These keywords cover various aspects like the quality, benefits, alternatives, usage, and impact of water bottles that are eco-friendly, reusable, and sustainable. 

Once you have a list of potential keywords, it's time to analyze their relevance, search volume, and competition level. After all, you don't want to spend time developing content if nobody searches for the keyword. 

Relevance refers to how closely a keyword matches your product or service.

Search volume indicates how often users search for the keyword, while competition level shows how many other websites are trying to rank for the same keyword. Your goal should be to identify high-volume, low-competition keywords that are highly relevant to your product.

So now you take your keywords and throw them into a keywords analysis tool. Many paid SEO Tools are out there - like SEM Rush, Ahrefs, etc. These SEO tools can be expensive. So, if you want a free, inexpensive option - use Google Ads Keyword Planner.

Free Tools to Help You Do Quick Keyword Research:

You should use Google as a research tool regardless of whether you tap into generative AI for keyword research.

Use it to research your keywords and topics - this step aims to narrow down the terms and topics you will write about that have the most economic value. And then, to also gain insights into the ranking pages, you can write even better content. 

Google Trends: Head over to Google Trends and type in your search phrase.

Here's an example where I typed in "Content Marketing" and changed the date range to show 2004 to 2022. Right away we can see this has been trending up consistently since 2010 (a related post here on why content marketing plus SEO will skyrocket your leads and sales).

The default timeline is the last 12 months. You can change that to see longer timelines as I did and that will help you see trends (here's a more in-depth post about using Google Trends for marketing).

Keep in mind that Google Trends is big data so you won’t get all sorts of keyword variations or more granular insights, but it will give you hints into other topics and perhaps something you didn’t consider, along with trends. Some topics that are low volume will have little data here.

Next, scroll down and pay attention to the Related Topics and Related Queries for additional ideas that perhaps you had not considered. Do any of these resonate as better topics to write about?

You can also change this to show "Top" Related Topics and Top Related Queries - just click the word Rising with the down carrot. You can then click on any of those terms for more trending insights. 

Google Ads Keyword Planner: 

This free tool will give you hard numbers on monthly search volume along with additional related phrases. It also gives CPC data per keyword - cost-per-click - an indicator of relative economic value. The higher the CPC, the more valuable the word is since companies are willing to bid it up. 

Once you are logged in you should see the below options - choose, Discover new keywords.

Then you will see much more detailed search data that you can use to refine your topic keyword selections. 

Once you have the keyword phrases you’re considering, do a Google search for each keyword - incognito, of course, to get unbiased search results. Scan through the top 5 - 10 results on the first page. Pay attention to the following:

Here's a related post on how to develop a blog strategy that you might find helpful, too. 

Here's an example:

Also, make sure the blog post URL, or in WordPress it’s referred to as a Slug, is the same or similar to your Blog Post Title or primary Headline. Keywords shown in the URL can help improve the click-through rate (CTR) from search results to your page. 

As you can see in the results below, our page ranks first and also has the keywords in the URL. Compare that result to the next two - one has "On the Line > Marketing" and the other, "Blog." 

Keyword usage guidelines:

General guidelines for keyword usage are 1 or 2 times throughout the article. However, don’t worry about this too much - if you write for humans first, you likely will be just fine. Just make sure the keyword is used at least in the headline and perhaps one other time in the article. 

But if you’re concerned about understanding keyword usage for this topic, go back to the ranking articles and search for how many times each article uses the term. And then calculate the keyword density (frequency count of the keyword / total keywords on the page). 

You can us AI to help you write more quickly.

First, ask your go-to AI tool to create an outline of the blog post for you based on your keyword. 

Once you have your outline, have AI help you write each section based on your brand's voice and style. 

How can you help break up the textual content with images? Can you represent data on the page in an image as a chart?

The benefit of effective image usage for SEO is that you can rank in Google’s Image search and Image tab, which has a massive volume of monthly searches. Therefore, your goal should always be to rank in as many places within Google as possible and images are one of those ways.

Here's an example of a blog post we wrote on using Facebook Ads to market your restaurant - we have two images ranking in the number one and number two positions. But don't forget to optimize your images for SEO, or you will lose an opportunity and worse yet, hurt your SEO.

If you have a lot of content on your site, a PRO TIP to find content that you can link to, or that can link to this post, use an advanced URL operator in Google to find relevant posts.

Here's an example below.

In this example, I searched the 39Celsius.com site for any content that includes the words, "content writing." Just vary the keywords you use to find content on your site. Here's the actual advanced operator - site:yoursite.com [whatever keyword you want]

Google will list the content on your site in order of the most authoritative. 

Include common questions and answers in your content that people are searching for in Google. And then, if you have someone more technical on your team, have that content marked up with schema code and added to your page in the <head> section of the html - this will make it clear to Google that you have FAQs on the page and allows you to show in additional places in a search results page.

Here's a related post I wrote as well on how to update content for better SEO and in that example, I show results of a page that had FAQ and Video schema added and the incremental lift in clicks and impressions that post received. 

 The SEO benefits are clear - your page can rank in the Video tab of a Google search results page, so that’s one more spot you can occupy (and a side benefit is that click goes back to your page, not YouTube if you're using YouTube).

And as we did with the FAQs, markup this video with schema code. Video schema markup will make it clear to Google that there is a video on the page and give it details about what that video is about. Otherwise, Google likely will not recognize an embedded video on the page.

Here is where you paste in the new page URL for your blog post to let Google know you have new content. 

FAQs