Blog Post Writing Hack: How to Improve SEO and Easily Expand Your Content
Want to know how you can easily expand your blog post content so you have a bunch of topic ideas at your fingertips?
Well keep on reading because you’re in luck!
First off, let’s chat about the relationship between SEO and blog posts.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is about making your website more Google-friendly so that you can appear in the top search results.
By publishing top notch content through your blog (and properly optimizing each post), you send signals to Google that you’re an authority on a topic.
When Google crawls (which is a fancy word for “scan”) your website and sees all this incredible information, it’s more likely to showcase your content on page 1.
That’s why blogging is so powerful and such an important aspect of ranking on page 1 of Google for online coaches and service providers.
It’s extremely difficult to rank on page 1 of Google without a blog, unless you are a location-based business or your industry doesn’t have any competition. Or maybe you have content-rich main pages of your websites and you’re building dozens (or hundreds) of backlinks to them.
In this post, I’m breaking down my top tip and writing hack for creating a bunch of ideas at once and easily expanding your blog content.
Pro tip: expand your content from specific to broad
Let me break this down. When I say broad, I still mean using a long tail keyword and being fairly specific. But I want you to think about the “ultimate” type blog posts where you mention a lot of different things but then have additional blog posts that pull from it.
For example, here is an example of one of my posts: Squarespace SEO: Ultimate Blog Post Guide to Rank in Google.
Think of your “ultimate” type blog posts as the top.
Then you can pull individual topics from that blog post and expand off of them.
So the “ultimate blog post” has a summary, whereas the individual niche blog posts go much deeper.
What this does is allow you to “double dip” by using similar content, but it’s not the same. The “summary” content that is in the ultimate guide is worded differently than what’s in the niche blog post.
Let me explain by taking you through my Squarespace SEO blog post I mentioned above.
1. Create “ultimate” style blog posts
When I say “ultimate,” I’m referring to things like…
Ultimate Guide to Starting an Online Business as a Copywriter
Ultimate Guide to Planning Your Wedding
Ultimate Guide to Using Instagram as a Service Based Business
See how these are fairly broad?
That’s because it gives you a whole lot of room to drop a bunch of tips and make this post super meaty.
In other words, it gives you the ability to write 3000-4000 words because there’s so much you can say on the topic.
Ultimate style blog posts typically do great because they’re so incredibly in-depth and Google loves high quality content.
How to create these posts…
1. Think of all the nitty gritty elements of the post
There’s a solid chance you’ll come up with 10-20 ideas that fall under the main category of your blog post.
Jot all of them down inside a Google doc.
2. Write out each section with a few paragraphs but don’t go into too much detail.
From there, start writing summaries of each aspect of the post. Introduce what it is and why it’s important.
Reorder any sections if needed so that it makes sense in terms of steps that the reader needs to do first and last.
3. Once you’ve got a foundation, go through and refine the post
Check your word count. You’ll most likely want it to be at least 2,000 words.
Where can you expand on a section? Maybe not going into the “how” as much, but more the “what” and “why.”
2. Create specific posts that branch from the larger ones
Now that you’ve got your ultimate style post finished, it’s time to hone in on each section.
Here’s what I would recommend...
1. Create a Google doc for each of the elements mentioned in your main post
Let’s say you have 15 main points in your document. You’ll want 15 individual Google docs to keep all your blog posts separate.
Copy and paste the content from your ultimate style post for those specific sections into this Google doc. For example, your number 2 section from your main blog post becomes its own document, and includes what you originally wrote as the summary.
Quick note: You’ll want to do some keyword research to verify that people are searching for information related to these individual blog posts. Most of the time, you’ll find that they are popular topics. It’s just a good idea to double check so that you’re not writing a bunch of posts that won’t be searchable.
2. Write full blog posts for each of these individual sections
Start with one document. Looking at what you’ve written from your main document, paraphrase and change up the content so it’s not the exact same.
This is where you can in-depth on this one specific aspect. In this post, you can speak to the:
What it is
Why it’s important
How to do/create the thing
Feel free to include step-by-step instructions for how to do something if needed.
One by one, expand on each of these elements so it’s its own blog post. Now this is not something that happens overnight.
This has even been a year-long process for me because I didn’t go directly from the ultimate post to creating all these smaller, more specific posts.
But if you look through my ultimate post, you’ll notice that many sections have interlinks to more in-depth blog posts on the specific topics relating to each section.
Aim for 1000 words if possible so that it still has a strong chance of ranking in Google.
Benefits of these smaller blog posts
One important aspect of SEO is interlinking. Creating these smaller posts allows you to go back to your ultimate blog post and add interlinks to the smaller ones.
This not only helps Google understand the relationship between these different posts, but it also keeps readers on your website for longer.
Since the time that people spend on your website is a Google ranking factor (along with bounce rate), this will help keep readers engaged and click through to your other content.
So there you have it! That’s my blog post hack :)
Tell me below...have you tried to do this with any of your blog posts?
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