How to Write SEO-Friendly Blog Posts With WordPress & Yoast

Table of Contents

• How to Write SEO-Friendly Blog Posts
  • 1. Fix any Technical or Performance Issues
  • 2. Keyword Research
  • 3. WordPress & The Block Editor
  • 4. The Yoast Plugin
  • 5. Should I Use AI to Help Write SEO-Friendly Blog Posts?
  • 6. Page Structure & Layout
  • 7. Schema Markup (structured data)
  • 8. Images
  • 9. Internal & External Links
  • 10. Uniqueness & E-E-A-T
  • 11. Updates
  • 12. Google Search Console
  • SEO-Friendly Blog Posts With WordPress & Yoast – Conclusion

Once you’ve identified the keywords you want to rank for, your next step is knowing how to write SEO-friendly blog posts. This article takes you through 12 tried and tested steps that’ll help propel your article to page one of Google.

Furthermore, we’re aiming to land there in under 24 hours. That’s right! Let the speed SEO challenge begin.

This year, I’ve been making a conscious effort to stop writing pointless blog posts. You know the ones. You pour your heart and soul into it, only for a tumbleweed to bimble through your website.

Conversely, with a few tweaks and refined focus, I’ve had a decent run in ranking articles either at the top or very close to the top of Google. Here’s how you can do the same with your business’s content.

How to Write SEO-Friendly Blog Posts

Most of the following steps can be applied in any CMS (content management system). However, for the purpose of this article, I’m using WordPress alongside the rather handy Yoast plugin.

Why? Well, in general, it’s because this is where I have the most experience. But also, despite the healthy competition, it’s still one of the best solutions for an impactful SEO strategy.

The Quick Answer

1. Fix any Technical or Performance Issues

Firstly, before focusing on your content marketing, let’s take a look at the bigger picture. How is your website performing?

To clarify, if you’ve got technical issues that could potentially be affecting the SEO of the entire site, these will need addressing first.

Tools like the free website audit from Semrush can help to significantly improve your website’s performance. The report will identify any issues that need fixing before adding more pages or posts.

Alternatively, if the technical side of things isn’t floating your boat, have an SEO specialist or agency check over your site for you. Most companies offer a free initial audit.

2. Keyword Research

Your keyword research is next, but equally important as step one. Try to avoid writing articles that you think may rank well.

Again, a free Semrush account will be useful here. Before even having to pay them a single penny, it’ll let you conduct up to ten keyword searches each day.

Head to the Keyword Magic tool to start gathering ideas and inspiration. A good starting point is to add your service. For example, ‘window cleaning’.

If you then click on Questions, you’ll see FAQs that people are asking. Head straight to the green and amber options to start with. These are the easiest to rank for.

In the example above, we’ve instantly got a few decent article subjects to write about. Additionally, we’re not going after keywords that are impossible to rank for.

3. WordPress & The Block Editor

The WordPress block editor is where you’ll create and publish your article. You can either write it up externally (somewhere like Google Docs) and paste it in. Or, instead, simply type it up in the block editor itself.

The latter is my personal preference. This is because you’ll have guidance from Yoast (more on Yoast in the next step) as you write.

The WordPress block editor offers an array of blocks that can be used to create media-rich pages and posts. 

Blocks are the content elements that you add to create content layouts. You can add blocks for paragraphs, images, headings, lists, videos, galleries, and more.

wordpress.org

The block editor is a lovely, clean, non-distracting experience. You can close the side menus whenever you need to focus purely on your writing.

Another key point is the ability to build or place anything you like within your blog post. To illustrate, you can add a call to action button, table of contents, gallery, icons or a form at the click of a button.

4. The Yoast Plugin

Yoast is an SEO plugin for WordPress. What’s more, it’s one of the most useful plugins you’ll start using on your website.

The free version will often be enough for smaller websites. However, it’s well worth considering the paid upgrade (currently £99 per year) as your online presence grows.

The main areas to focus on as you write or edit your article are the traffic lights. You’ll have a red, amber or green signal for SEO, Readability and Inclusive Language. Keep an eye on your passive voice and transition words.

Transition Words or phrases are “connecting” words and phrases. They help to emphasize a point and establishes the relationship between ideas—words like “because” or “also” are simple examples of Transition Words.

wpjunction.net

Boom! Just upped my score simply by adding the above quote. Ultimately, I’d aim for as many green lights as possible.

Lots of folks say it’s not important to obsess over, but let’s be honest, it’s not going to do any harm.

Yoast will also let you edit your title, meta description, schema (page and article type), and social media appearance.

5. Should I Use AI to Help Write SEO-Friendly Blog Posts?

From an SEO perspective, should you use an AI assistant such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini for your blog content?

The quick answer is yes for ideas, research, assistance, and blog titles. However, it’s (definitely) a no when it comes to writing your entire article.

For content to rank well, it needs originality and personal insights from your business. Google call this E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness). AI can not provide this for you.

With that said, tools like ChatGPT will usually help develop a more engaging title for your blog posts. Furthermore, it does a great job of outlining an article based on your subject and requirements.

Lastly, AI writing assistants like Grammarly are super helpful regarding how your content sounds and fixing passive voice.

AI can help your business generate more content ideas and improve your article’s presentation. Just don’t fall into the temptation of letting it write the whole blog post for you. This won’t pay off in the long term (if at all) on search engines.

6. Page Structure & Layout

Next up, an SEO-friendly blog post should always follow the correct page structure. For example, H1 (main heading), H2 (sub-heading), H3 (additional headings) should all be in the relevant order.

It’s important to realise that most people will skim-read your article. Because of this, it needs to be, erm, skimmable.

Make sure your paragraph text is broken up with plenty of images, headings, lists or quotes. Furthermore, the width of your content shouldn’t go across the whole page on a desktop/laptop. This makes it difficult to read.

Most blogs (including this one) are around 700px wide. It’s also good practice to keep your paragraphs short. Long walls of text are off-putting and rarely read.

7. Schema Markup (structured data)

Schema markup provides search engines with additional information about your blog post. Most of the articles I’ve had success with this year contained the FAQ markup.

This tells Google or Bing that you’re answering a frequently asked question. If you’ve identified a question that you can answer (these show up as ‘people also asked’ on Google) then it’s a jolly good idea to add an FAQ block.

Again, Yoast has you covered here. Even with their free plan, you’ll have this option available. Place it towards the top of your article and write a detailed but concise overview of the answer covered in the rest of your blog post.

As a result, this will help give your website more prominence in the search results if it shows a featured snippet.

Featured snippets are special boxes where the format of a regular search result is reversed, showing the descriptive snippet first. They can also appear within a related questions group (also known as “People Also Ask”).

Google

Reviews are another popular schema markup. If you’re writing a review of a product or service related to your industry, you can display a rating that will sometimes be shown in the search results. The Yet Another Star Rating plugin will help you to easily add this to your article.

8. Images

Your article should include at least one image. This would then be the featured image that accompanies the article. In most cases, this shows at the top of the blog post as well as within your link preview when you share the post online.

The title and alt text should ideally contain the keyword that you’re writing about. Additionally, it’s normally a good idea to add further images throughout your article.

Wherever possible, use original photos or graphics and make sure they’ve been compressed and correctly sized before uploading to WordPress.

Search engines crawl webpages to discover images and extract data from images, such as metadata and file names.

Google considers factors – such as surrounding text, image file name, alt text, captions, and page content – to understand the context of images and uses image recognition technologies to understand the content of the images.

Search Engine Journal

9. Internal & External Links

Next up, both internal and external links play a crucial role in all of your SEO-friendly blog posts. Once again, Yoast is going to prompt you to add these.

It’s important to link any related content on your blog and website. A good example of this is where I’ve linked to part one of this article (How to build an SEO-friendly website) further up.

I’ve also linked to our main service pages as close as possible to the top of the blog post. Lastly, you’ll see that I’ve included links to credible websites underneath each quote.

All of the above helps build a bigger picture of your article, which is essential in helping search engines understand what it’s about.

10. Uniqueness & E-E-A-T

No matter what you’re writing about, chances are it’s already been done before. If not, you’re onto a winner straight away. However, Google doesn’t really want to rank loads of articles all covering exactly the same subject.

What it does want, though, is original content. Sure, write about a subject that’s already been covered, but throw a load of your business statistics, insights or data in there for good measure.

This is an easy way to add uniqueness to your article. In turn, this will also help demonstrate your E-E-A-T. It’s a win/win situation.

11. Updates

As you start to build out your blog (or a content hub, as it’s sometimes referred to), keep your articles updated regularly.

This helps show search engines that the content remains fresh and relevant. Add or change paragraphs as you see fit, and as soon as you publish a new post, go through your previous ones to see if any would be suitable to link to the new article.

Tying in with step 9 – A mistake I always used to make was publishing articles that had no links pointing to them. It’s much better if you can address this before requesting the article to be indexed on Google.

Which leads nicely onto…

12. Google Search Console

Lastly, we’ll use Google Search Console to index your article ridiculously quickly. This way, you won’t have to wait around for Google to next crawl your site.

In Search Console, simply paste the URL into the top search bar. It will say it’s not yet indexed, and you’ll also see a handy ‘Request Indexing’ button.

This will add your shiny new blog post to the priority queue. How long does it take? In recent experiments, it’s taken less than 24 hours. During this time, you can start directing traffic to your article from your social media channels.

Keep an eye on the position once it’s indexed and ranked on Google. If it’s not where it needs to be, continue working on the article. Additionally, Search Console is a brilliant tool for keeping track of your impressions and clicks.

SEO-Friendly Blog Posts With WordPress & Yoast – Conclusion

Knowing how to write SEO-friendly blog posts will completely transform your online presence. With just a few tweaks, you can start driving a healthy amount of traffic to your website.

Content marketing, admittedly, requires plenty of trial and error. However, the more you can borrow from tried and tested techniques, the better your chances of ranking well.

If you’re up for taking on some DIY SEO, here are the 12 steps to keep in mind for content marketing success:

1. Fix any Technical or Performance Issues
2. Keyword Research
3. WordPress & The Block Editor
4. The Yoast Plugin
5. Should I Use AI to Help Write SEO-Friendly Blog Posts?
6. Page Structure & Layout
7. Schema Markup (structured data)
8. Images
9. Internal & External Links
10. Uniqueness & E-E-A-T
11. Updates
12. Google Search Console