How to Format Your Blog Posts for SEO and Optimal User Experience
If you’re using blogging as a marketing strategy for your small business (here’s 7 reasons why you should), you need to consider how both your dream clients and Google are reading your blog posts.
Google takes user experience into account, so how you set up your blog posts visually affects SEO and ranking.
Have no idea what SEO, or search engine optimization, actually is? No worries - here’s an SEO guide for newbies.
It’s important to take into account both SEO and user experience on your blog if you want readers to not only read through to the bottom of the blog post, but also click around to more pages.
Not sure how these two aspects come together?
Here are 4 tips for ya!
1. Use headings properly
Your Heading 1 or H1 tag (aka your blog post title) tells Google what the blog post is about, and there shouldn’t be any other Heading 1 on your page.
Otherwise, it will confuse Google.
Be sure to break up your content into sections using Heading 2. These can be the main steps of process, ways to do something, or samples in a list.
Adding headings to your post also makes it easier for your readers to scan and get a glimpse of what you walk through.
For example, if your blog post is “5 tips to land clients online as a solopreneur,” each of those tips should stand on its own line as a Heading 2.
As you can see from this post, my main points are broken up with Heading 2 tags.
Within your Heading 2, you can break up your content further by adding Heading 3 if you have sub categories you want to include.
If you really want to get fancy, you can dive further with Heading 4 and 5.
Note: Squarespace only goes as low as heading 3. You’d need to add code to create a heading 4 or 5.
Notice the hierarchy of the headings in how they are broken up. This helps Google understand the structure of the post.
The other benefit of using headings is that many times, Google will pull the main points that are a Heading 2 from an article or blog post to provide a quick answer for a searcher.
For example, here is a screenshot for the search “seo for photographers Squarespace.” Here, you can see that Google pulled my 8 tips from this blog post into the preview as bullet points.
If you click on the blog post, you’ll notice that each of these steps is in fact a Heading 2 tag.
2. Don’t be afraid to use bullets and break up large paragraphs
This is not so much for SEO, but more so for the user experience. But as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, Google still takes this into consideration.
Unfortunately, if you just add your blog post as an essay with large chunky paragraphs, there’s a high chance that people won’t want to read it.
That’s because it’s overwhelming.
You want to make your content as easy to read through, and breaking up the information into digestible chunks paired with bullet points or numbered items will certainly help.
Ditch the old way of writing with 5-7 sentences in a paragraph (you know, what you learned in high school English class). Don't be afraid to break up each sentence on it’s own line.
You can even use bold and italics to get your message across. These formatting options will stand out to your reader.
An example that demonstrates my point here that will most likely resonate with you are Instagram captions...
Aren’t you much more likely to read a caption when each sentence has line breaks?
I don’t know about you, but seeing a caption that is formatted as a massive paragraph with no line breaks makes me want to skip over it right away.
That’s why most online business owners put a line break between each sentence.
And you should do the same with your blog.
3. Add visual elements
Whether it’s an image that goes along with each Heading 2 line or a graphic that links out to a freebie landing page (see photo above as an example), including these visuals will help make the post easier to read and enticing to readers.
If you’re writing a blog post that is a tutorial, be sure to include images that further demonstrate what you’re explaining in text form or embed a video walkthrough if you have a YouTube account.
However, make sure that the visual elements you add don’t make your blog post too busy or distracting. Think of them as accents so the blog post isn’t just black text on a white screen.
Before uploading the images, make sure you’ve renamed the file size to include keywords and condensed the file size so that it loads quickly.
JPEGmini and Tinypng are my favorite tools for condensing file sizes without compromising quality!
Read more: Squarespace Image Size: How to Resize & Optimize for SEO
4. Don’t leave em hanging
At the end of your blog post, what do you want them to do?
Taking your business goals into account, direct them to the next step with a call to action.
Typically, you only want to have one call to action at the bottom of your post to avoid analysis paralysis.
It may seem silly, but including 3 options can many times stump people. Instead, you want to make this as clear as possible.
Do you want readers to...
Sign up for your freebie?
View your 1:1 services or courses?
Set up a free strategy call with you?
Whichever call to action is most important to you, make sure you include it as a button or a graphic.
Text links get lost in the body of the content, and you’ll increase conversions if you make your call to action really pop out to the reader in the form of a button or graphic.
Another important thing to note here is that it’s best for your call to action to lead to another page on your website or to a free offer. Chances are that most readers won’t be ready to just hand over their credit card for your $500 course or service that is a four figure investment.
There you have it. Those are my top 4 tips for formatting your blog posts for both SEO and user experience.
Tell me below, do you incorporate all of these on your blog posts? Or have questions? Drop them below!
Ready to get seen by people that need your services most? I help coaches, creatives, and other service providers explode their visibility and reach for free in Google. Ready to get seen by people that need their services most?
Looking for more Squarespace SEO tips? Check out these blog posts: