Content marketing is known to produce three times as many leads as outbound marketing, while also costing 62% less. However, to get the most out of your inbound marketing, it’s integral that people can find your website on Google and other search engines.

Many businesses use blogging to boost their website ranking while also serving their audience with valuable information. This is one of the best ways to get positive attention on your brand, second perhaps only to making videos. Yet it’s still far less labor-intensive than other forms of content creation and much cheaper than buying ads. Still, success in blogging depends on having good SEO across your website.

Search engine optimization and search engine marketing are advanced subjects, which is why many businesses will rely on an SEO agency. One of the many things these agencies do is optimize blog posts for search discovery. Here you’ll find a simple checklist of things your SEO agency will do, and can teach you to do, before clicking “publish” on your next great blog post.

Plan Your Content Around Keywords

Keyword research is a major part of internet marketing, especially where SEO is involved. But you might not have realized that good keyword research should be the foundation of every blog post you publish.

Many beginning bloggers simply guess which topics they should address on their blog next, without paying any attention to what people are actually searching for. This an ineffective approach, because if your target audience isn’t actively searching for the topics you’re writing about, your blog isn’t going to get any traffic to your website. And while you might get lucky and write about a really hot topic right when a lot of people are searching for it, that’s not a very safe bet.

Instead, your first step before writing a blog post should be to find out what keywords people are actively searching for right now. Long-tail keywords, which are niched-down search terms made up of multiple words, are especially valuable because it’s easier to make a post that stands out when it targets a long-tail keyword.

Besides having the right keywords to target, you should choose a blog topic that answers a commonly-asked question or addresses a common problem. However, you should make sure to address or answer it in a way that hasn’t been done before. Check the first page of Google search results to make sure no one has approached your subject in exactly the same way you’re going to. Once you have a target keyword that relates to a commonly-searched topic, then you’ve found the right subject to write about.

Structure Your Post in an Appealing, Easy-to-Read Format

There are lots of tested formats bloggers use for their articles. Top-10 lists, checklists, how-to’s, and case studies are some of the most popular ones.

Whatever approach you take to writing your article, make sure you structure and format it in a way that’s easy to read. This means using short sentences, short paragraphs, and plenty of headers to organize text. Your posts should be easy to scan quickly for people who don’t have a lot of time to read the whole thing.

Add Images and Videos to Your Posts

Google prioritizes websites that use visual media in addition to well-written text. Take advantage of this by making sure every post has a featured image, as well as visual aids throughout the post, such as graphs.

Hire an SEO Agency

As we mentioned earlier, search engine optimization can get complicated quickly, especially when you’re trying to optimize an entire website. But getting your entire site optimized for search discovery is integral to having your blog posts show up reliably in search results at all. For that reason, perhaps the best SEO strategy of all is hiring an SEO agency to make sure your website gets discovered on Google when your target customers need you most.

Regardless of where you are in your business’s growth, following these tips should help to improve search ranking for every blog post you apply them to. As a happy bonus, when you optimize a blog post for Google, you make it more valuable and engaging for your loyal readers as well.