SEO is a must in any marketing plan today, and while the purpose is to align with search engines, what lies at the core of good SEO is high-quality content. Your business blog is where much of that quality content will live, so you can establish your expertise, add value, and increase your website traffic without cluttering up the main navigational pages of your website. While the body of your blog post triggers most of the behavior that Google measures and uses to rank it, the title is important in getting users to click on the post in the first place, and then in formulating that all-important body content.
In this post, we provide an SEO-driven strategy for coming up with blog post titles that will increase the visibility of your business blog, improve the quality of your blog posts, and result in more traffic for your website.
Steps for Creating Blog Post Titles
1. Choose a Subject
Choosing the right topic for your blog post is one of the hardest parts of the blogging process. You want to find a topic that will generate interest, that will get your article shared, and for which you will be able to provide helpful insight to. Here are some helpful tips for coming up with a blog topic:
- Think about what your customers want to know the most about. It’s easy to lose sight of what your average customer wants to know when you are immersed in your business every day.
- Ask friends or family for ideas. Host a brainstorming session with your team to establish a backlog of topics you can use in the future. The next time you’re choosing a topic to blog about, you can refer to the list from your brainstorming session.
- Already covered all the burning questions your customers could have in previous blog posts? Try looking to industry news for ideas. Are there any particularly hot topics right now? New product lines? Scientific breakthroughs? Legal considerations? What are people in your line of business buzzing about right now? The more active a topic is, the better chance you have of getting a slice of the search engine traffic to your blog post.
- Check out our post on Things to Blog About
2. Choose a Core Keyword
Now that you have a killer topic for your post, it’s time to decide what the main keyword is going to be. Keywords are the words that will help Google connect your blog posts with the people for whom they will be most useful. Here’s how to choose a core keyword:
- Make a list of search terms you think your customers would use to research the topic you’re writing about. Try to think of the kind of words they use, as opposed to the words you use when talking about this topic.
- Once you have come up with five to ten phrases, plug them into keyword tools to help discover related terms and terms that are searched heavily. There are several keyword tools out there that can help you find high-traffic keywords, such as SEM Rush or Keyword Spy.
- Look for keywords with a lot of traffic, but try to avoid phrases that are only made up of one or two words (go for long tail keywords instead).
- Identify a term that has a good amount of searches being performed and is also highly relevant to your topic, this is going to be your core keyword for the article.
3. Choosing Supporting Keywords
This part is pretty easy. Now that you have your core keyword, Google it. Look at some of the top sites coming up in the results, and what the headlines of their listings are. This can be a good source of supporting keyword ideas. Next, look for the section called “People also ask” or at the bottom list for related searches. This is a list of other search phrases that Google thinks is closely related to what you just searched for. Make a note of these, since you should try to incorporate some of them into your post later on, or write an additional related post.
4. Create Your Blog Title
Writing the headline for your blog post is a very important step for SEO, but does not need to be a difficult one. You already have the topic you’re going to be writing about and the main keyword you’re going to be focusing on. Between these two things, your headline should practically write itself.
Make sure you use your main keyword in the headline/title of your blog post and try to place it as close to the front of the headline as possible. The title of your post is the first thing Google sees when looking at the page, so you want to make sure you’re telling them up front what the page is about. If there are a couple words before your keyword, don’t sweat it. You’re writing this post for people too, and an oddly written headline can be a real turnoff for readers.
People often think that optimizing blog posts for search engines means getting highly technical, when in reality, you’re simplifying your content into terms that your target audience will understand and presenting it in a way that search engines will be able to detect and more easily serve it up to your audience. Follow this SEO-driven strategy for coming up with blog post titles and you’ll be on your way to creating original, evergreen content that helps you hit your web traffic goals.
