Updated: Apr 28, 2025
Author: Tony Waldegrave
Blogging is an effective strategy for attracting new potential customers to your website. Blog articles that answer topical or niche questions in depth are most effective for improving visitor engagement. However, as we will explain, most people waste a lot of time writing mediocre articles that actually hurt their websites' performance on Google.
We've covered the foundations of blog writing in depth in our article How To Write Blog Articles. This article illustrates best-practice blogging through the lens of Google's quality website SEO guidelines. These guidelines emphasise that SEO boosts are now given to websites with high Expertise, Authority and Trust (i.e. E-A-T standards for SEO).
Provided your website is technically sound and crawl-able by Google, publishing relevant and unique content is the single most important SEO tactic.
Provided your website is technically sound and crawlable by Google, publishing original, relevant content is the single most important SEO tactic you control. A quality blog helps you:
Google rewards sites that demonstrate expertise, authority, and trust—known as E-A-T. Well-crafted blog content is the best way to show these qualities and climb the search rankings.
Write knowledgeably about your industry or field; highlight your credentials (especially on your "About Us" page).
Reference credible sources for facts—fact-check all claims and link to original sources when appropriate.
Avoid writing vague, thin, or unoriginal content. Aim for concise, practical articles of at least 300 words.
Avoid publishing just to “tick the box”—Google values useful, relevant, and original insights.
Regularly update your blog so older content doesn’t become outdated advice.
Research what your customers and prospects are searching for. Use Google’s auto-suggest, “People Also Ask,” and tools like KeywordTool.io.
Focus on topics where your expertise matches genuine searcher demand and where your content can stand out.
In educational and service-focused industries (e.g., healthcare, travel, professional services), blogs are particularly valuable as customers search for answers before making decisions.
Aim to fully answer questions, provide actionable guidance, and cover related subtopics—this increases dwell time and signals quality to Google.
Use one main headline per article, and break up content with relevant subheadings.
Naturally use primary and secondary keywords in your titles, headers, and introductions.
Use internal links to other relevant content on your site; this strengthens your overall SEO.
Blogs are great for those businesses where there is good opportunity to write content.
Blogs are great for those businesses where there is good opportunity to write content. Particularly those segments where customers have a lot of questions and there is an educational and informational need. Some obvious segments would include travel, health and well being, professional services, etc.
If the content opportunity is good, then the next consideration is about authoring the articles. Writing articles takes time and good articles are best written by someone with strong domain expertise and this normally means by someone within the business. Outsourcing may seem like an easy solution, but doesn’t always produce the best results for SEO. This all adds up to you finding a willing and able author that is knowledgeable within your business and industry.
An effective blog will:
Blogs are a nice delivery vehicle for new content as they provide a suitable means to deliver all types of content and provide for easy categorisation of content as your volume of content grows.
Always house your blog under your main website domain (for example: www.mywebsite.com/blog/article-title). This ensures all SEO benefits—from links, engagement, and authority—are directed to your business, not to a separate subdomain or external blog.
Identifying article topics is a process of determining what your target audience is searching for and then reverse engineering content in the form of articles. This forces a deeper understanding of the behaviour and issues of interest of your target customers.
Using Google search is a great way to work out what these searches are. Type into Google what you believe customers may be searching for. As you do this take notice of the prompted suggestions in the search bar and also the suggestions at the bottom of the search results. Try various options and then settle on the search query that you believe will be commonly used.
If you have access to a keyword tool, these can also be helpful to verify the best search query opportunities to target.
The Keyword Tool is great for article research, as it provides longer tail query questions.
Check the results of the chosen query for winnability. If the first page results are flooded with local content then it may be difficult to out rank these, but if the results are not local to your city or country then there will be a good chance to rank well.
You can also check what your competitors are doing - see what topics are generating traffic and engagement for others in your field.
Keep a list of ideas so that you have plenty of options for when you have time to write.
The key is to write high quality articles that will satisfy the target audience. Frequency is far less important than writing great winning articles.
For more insights on blog article structure and optimisation, read our article on how to write blog articles.
This Moz.com article about blog article content ranking factors is very good and provides some great insights.
Or contact us for a consultation on your SEO and blog content strategy.
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