1. How to Write SEO-Friendly
Blog Posts and Get Them Ranking
WordCamp Niagara 2019
Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries

2. Hello!
Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries
@natasha_bd
• Aspiring teacher/social worker
turned digital marketer
• Living the agency life as an
SEO + Digital Marketing Specialist
• Proud Western University and
George Brown College graduate
• Offline hobbies include soccer,
sailing, playing trombone, hiking and
cheering on Toronto FC

3. Write. Content.Good.

4. 1. Writing
3. Promoting
2. Publishing

5. Writing

6. Step 1: Choose a Great Topic
• Write about questions that readers are asking
• Choose topics that address different stages of the
marketing funnel

7. Step 1: Choose a Great Topic
• What is SEO and Why Your
Business Needs It
• 7 Questions to Ask Your SEO
Agency
• Guide to Generating Business
Leads Through Your Blog
• How Our Blog Increased Our
E-Commerce Sales by 14%

8. • Can’t go wrong with a question
• Embrace emotion, excitement and mystery
• Use numbers and lists
• Incorporate your targeted keywords
• Aim for a length of ~50 characters
Step 2: Craft an Attention Grabbing Title

9. • WordCamp Niagara 2019
• Blog Writing Tips
• Toronto FC Team Profile
Step 2: Craft an Attention Grabbing Title
• 4 Things I Learned at
WordCamp Niagara 2019
• The Beginner’s Guide
to Writing Fantastic Blog Posts
• Why Toronto FC is the Greatest
Soccer Team in the World

10. • Make use of simple, natural language
• Incorporate the phrases people are actually searching for
• Write shorter sentences and paragraphs
Step 3: Write for Humans

11. • Use keyword stuffing
• Plagiarize
• Obsess over algorithms, length or
any rule or best practice anybody
claims to be true
Do NOT…

12. • It depends!
• Quality and comprehensiveness > quantity
• Moz Whiteboard Friday – Content Comprehensiveness
https://moz.com/blog/content-comprehensiveness
• My personal opinion? No less than 500, aim for 700-1200
What’s the Best Length for a Blog?

13. • The average blog post length is 1,050 words
(Source: Orbit Media)
• The average word count of top ranked content in Google
is between 1,140-1285 words (Source: SearchMetrics)
• On average, only 18% of companies’ blog posts are over
750 words (Source: Curata)
• Longer, in-depth blog posts generate 9x more leads than
short ones (Source: Curata)
• Source and More Blogging Statistics:
https://getcodeless.com/blogging-statistics/
What’s the Best Length for a Blog?

14. About the tool: https://yoast.com/use-content-analysis-yoast-seo/
Full list of factors they analyze: https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-readability-analysis/
Yoast SEO Content Analysis

15. Publishing

16. Step 1: Heading Structure
• Make use of headings, don’t just post a bunch of
paragraphs
• Google has recently said having more than H1 is
okay...I’m still sticking with one

17. Step 2: Format for Mobile
• Shorten your paragraphs to avoid the scary wall of text

18. Step 2: Format for Mobile

19. Step 3: Create Internal Links
• Link to other blog posts and pages on your website
• Provides additional information for readers
• Helps Google crawl your site
• Consider the Topic Cluster approach and focus on linking
to specific Pillar Pages
https://blog.hubspot.com/news-trends/topic-clusters-seo

20. Step 4: Fill Out the Meta Info

21. • Set the alt text for images
• Optimize and properly size your images
• Consider adding schema markup
• Set your canonical URL
Step 5: Other On-Page Tasks

22. Promoting

23. Step 1: Submit for Indexing

24. Step 2: Post to Social

25. Step 2: Post to Social
Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-seo-experiment/
“As you can see from the results above, there appears to
be a strong correlation between social activity and
rankings.”
-Hootsuite

26. Step 2: Post to Social
Yoast can help customize the look of your social post

27. Step 2: Post to Social
See the difference?

28. Step 3: Other Promotion Strategies
• E-Newsletter
• RSS Feed
• Link outreach
• Guest posting

29. Step 3: Refresh and Re-Share
• Keep it fresh
• Tweak titles, update internal linking, expand on your
topic, update stats, numbers and dates
• Don’t share it only when it’s new

30. Make the Most of WordPress Plugins
• Automatically post to social media
• Send new blog posts to subscribers via e-mail
• Schema markup
• Redirects
• Analytics
• Speed optimizations
• SSL

31. Some of My Favourite Plugins

32. So, In a Nutshell…
• Write good content
• Don’t forget on-page optimizations while publishing
• Write good content
• Promote your post for an extra boost
• Make the most of WordPress plugins
• Write good content

33. Questions?

34. Don’t Be a Stranger
• Slides and Resources: https://natashabd.ca/wordcamp-
niagara-2019
• E-Mail: nburtenshawdevries@gmail.com
• Twitter: @natasha_bd
• LinkedIn: Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries