How to Write Effective Blog Articles for SEO and Customer Engagement

Why Write Blog Articles for Your Business?

Writing blog articles is one of the best ways to get found in Google, connect with your customers, and showcase your expertise. Businesses that regularly publish valuable content attract more website visitors and generate more leads than those that don’t.

Articles that contain content that reflect what target audiences are looking for, will often rank highly in search engines and generate good volumes of traffic. Executed correctly, article writing is a highly effective form of content marketing and a very effective SEO tactic and means to generate organic traffic to your website.

But how do you create articles that actually get discovered—and are worth your time?

Where to get article ideas?

The main obstacle to blog article writing is identifying a readily available stream of topics to write about. The intent is to write about related subjects that would likely to be discovered by target audiences when they are searching in Google. It is essentially a process of reverse engineering content to what is being searched.

Here's where to start:

• Listen to your customers: What questions do they ask most?
• Use Google search suggestions: Ideas can be validated by typing them into the Google search bar, and seeing if Google suggest prompts something very similar. This would then indicate that this is a relatively common question or query and potentially a good topic to write about.
• Check “Related Searches” at the bottom of Google results. These provide good insight to related queries. These can also be used for sub heading content within your article.
• Ask your sales and customer service teams: They know what people care about.

Aim for focused, specific topics that answer a single, common question or challenge—this gives you plenty to write about and each post becomes its own traffic driver.

It’s best to keep a list of ideas that can be added to for when you are ready to write.

Choose a great article title

Pick a title that matches how people actually search for answers. It should be clear, specific, and include important keywords.

Example: “How to Waterproof a Deck in Auckland”

How long should an article be?

We would normally recommend a minimum of 400 words and up to 800 words and more if viable. As a general rule the richer and more comprehensive the copy the better. Its critical that the copy is unique and not copied.

Where appropriate, including some highly detailed and longer and more comprehensive articles can be a very successful addition to the blog collection.

Article structure and format

The blog should preferably be an integrated part of your website and called a blog. The structure should look something like:

www website.com/blog/article-title

The article title should be used as the main headline and utilise a H1 tag.

It should also be used to form the page title tag along with your brand appended at the end.

Page title tag convention example:

Article Title – Your Brand

The url structure should also align closely to the title name and where appropriate be shortened to exclude any conjunction words. Only hyphens should be used as word separators in the url addressing.

Ideally, copy should be written in a conversational style and formatted into easily digested paragraphs. Utilising sub headings are often a great way to make copy more readable and engaging. Use H2-heading tags for sub headlines.

Include a relevant image within the article and use an image file name and alt text that describes the content of the image using keywords.

It’s a good idea to include 1-3 links within the copy that point to referring or associated copy. The rule is that links should be useful and of value to anyone reading the article. These links can point to internal and or external content.

Blog Posting Best Practices

• Date-stamp your articles and update them every 12–18 months to keep them fresh
• Add author details to build credibility and trust—link to a profile with your expertise
• Decide if you want to allow comments and, if so, be ready to moderate and reply
• Aim for 1–2 quality articles per month for steady growth

How often to write articles

In general the more often you publish quality articles, the faster you will acquire traffic and followers and achieve results. The focus should be on quality and not quantity.

In practice, we would recommend a minimum of 1-2 articles per month.

Articles take time (4-6 months) to rank highly in search results. Provided the quality of the content is good, they will however continue to rank for some time. High performing articles should be reviewed and revised and updated where appropriate every 12-18 mths.

Date stamping articles

Your article should be date stamped with the published date and show an updated date when the article is updated or edited.

Author credentials

Each article should have an author tag and link to the authors profile. The author profile should set out the authors expertise and credentials, especially in relation to the blog.

What to do after publishing

• Share your article on social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) with a short summary and a link
• Feature articles in your email newsletters to drive even more traffic
• Review your most successful posts periodically and update or expand them for ongoing results

Posting will generate traffic to the article and will also help to create a linking profile for the article.

Read our article on content marketing.

Why Quality Content Matters for SEO

Well-written, helpful blog content is a powerful SEO tactic. Over time, articles can rank for dozens of search terms and bring in organic traffic for months (or even years) after publishing.

Need help with content strategy, SEO, or blog writing?

Contact Adhesion for expert guidance and practical support tailored to your business.