Blogging for SEO is great, but how do you get people to read it? 

As a website designer I can build a website that’s SEO friendly. It will be properly structured, accessible, responsive and Google will love it. 

Once the website’s published it’s up to you to keep it ship-shape; answering your potential clients’ questions and making your content so good that the search engines will love (and rank) it, too. 

If you’ve been following or working with Nikki for a while then you’ll know the importance of blogging for SEO. How to find keywords, search intent and what to write for your potential clients. What you won’t necessarily know, is how to style these posts in a way that engages the reader, builds their trust and encourages them to stay on, or re-visit and recommend your blog, and at some point, turn into one of your clients. 

Here’s how to do it: 

Titles – know your hierarchy 

The different size titles you have on your website – yes, they look good but they’re there for more than style. The titles (or Headings – both mean the same thing) are an important part of helping search engines to read, prioritise and index your content. There’s a structure for how Titles/Headings should be used and this is it: 

Heading 1 – Should be used once per page. At the top of the page. It should describe the page and contain the keywords that you’re hoping will cause people to land on the page and keep reading. 

Heading 2 – These should appear at the top of each section. It helps to break up the text and let the reader (and Google) know what to expect in that section. 

Heading 3 – This is for grouping information within a section. They always appear under an H2, never on their own. You may use these for describing pros and cons of something, or as a supplementary titles where you’re going to write something under (not a bulleted list). 

Your website builder may give you options of up to 6 Headings/Titles. You’ll only need to use 1 – 3. 

Formatting text

A blog isn’t the place to go off-piste when it comes to styling. Yes, you’ll have more freedom to speak a little more plainly than the rest of the website, and you can be a little more creative with images, but there are some rules that are important to follow: 

Fonts

That stunning script font you spent ages choosing looks brilliant on the website. However, people who have issues with their vision, or are dyslexic, may not feel the same way. Make sure you have a clear, sans-serif backup font for those script fonts, so people who do struggle can switch and read your content more easily. 

Use left aligned text

This is a recommendation from the dyslexia society. Left aligned text is the most accessible for people who struggle with reading blocks of text. It will also help with your styling as it means the style will be predictable (which keeps both, humans and search engines, happy), and it means you never need to think how to style it. Left aligned. Always. 

Use bullet points

People are busy with short attention spans, using bullet points throughout the blog will help people to break up and read the information, without it being too taxing. You don’t want bullet points in *every* section, but one or two sections with a quick list of bullets will go a long way to keeping your readers engaged. 

Don’t use emojis as checklists 

When using bullet points, if you want to keep the design sleek consider using the checklist element of your theme. This will help with formatting – as it wraps the text, so looks good. It also adds a bit of visual play to the posts. 

Checklists are designed to be accessible for those using screen readers, emojis are not. Don’t be tempted to use emojis instead of a checklist element as search engines could penalise your content as it won’t be accessible. 

Links should be obvious that they’re links

You should be using links in your blogs – to both, internal pages on your website, as well as external sources. When you add the links, it should be very obvious they’re links. This means having them a different colour to the rest of the text, changing colour on hover, and you can enable ‘link decoration’ which means it’s underlined, or underlines on hover. 

Links should open in a separate tab to the blog post so people don’t lose their place in the post when clicking on them. 

Use relevant/relatable images 

We all know that if we look at a large block of text our brain automatically scans it thinking ‘how long is this going to take to read?’ And whilst doing that, the message you’ve spent so long crafting, gets lost. 

Your blog isn’t a white paper, or a dissertation, it should be broken into easy chunks where people can read each section easily. Using images here can help to keep people engaged with your content and break up the page so your readers don’t start to skip over sections. 

There are different types of images you can use – stock photography, infographics, screenshots of results, photos from your work, AI images if you have something specific in mind. 

It’s also a good opportunity to see where you can add some relatable elements. Think about using images which include diversity, so everybody who’s likely to read your blog feels represented in it. Use screenshots to highlight real time results or challenges, or from Social media, such as a LinkedIn post where someone has made a point well. 

Once you’ve chosen the images for your post, you’ll need to upload them properly. This isn’t only good practice, but it will help with your SEO if your images are the right size, named properly and compressed before they are added to the website. 

Uploading your images

Use landscape or square images. Portrait images take up too much of the page, take too long to scroll and end up being a distraction from the rest of the content. 

Once you’ve chosen your images, resize them for the website. As they’re going to be in blog post sections I recommend making them around 600px wide. This allows them to feature without dominating the space.

Next you want to give them a name that is relevant to the post or section of the post. No uploading image_17984.jpeg into the database. 

The final thing to do before uploading is to convert them to webp format. You can use free online tools to do this, or download a free converter to your computer. The webp format will compress the image by up to 90% saving a lot of server resources once you upload it to the website. 

When you upload the image to your website database, include alt text which is a description of the image. This is essential for accessibility and people who are using screen readers will thank you for having image descriptions. If the image has been created using AI then declare this in the  alt text. I usually describe the image then add ‘this image has been created using AI’ at the end. 

Once you’ve uploaded your image preview it in the post to make sure it has enough space around it, that it’s not bunched up with the text. You can increase the space using top and bottom margins. As a general guide, 30px above and below should be enough space. 

Styling 

When we have a lot of text it can be tempting to try to bunch it all up so people can get through it quickly. This really doesn’t work with blogs. The more space you have around something, the easier it is to read, and to highlight. 

Use your padding and margin options to add a bit of space between sections, text blocks and images. 

If you’re not sure which one relates to which: 

Padding: adds space inside the element/container.

Margin: adds space outside the element/container.

Most importantly, don’t have your post occupying 100% of the page width. If you scroll through social media pages like LinkedIn or Facebook, you’ll see that the main content occupies roughly half the space, in the middle, with a sidebar on either side. You don’t need to make your post as tight as this, but consider either using a 2/3rds column for the main content, with 1/6 columns either side, or use a full width column but set padding of 15% each side to constrain the content. Just remember to adjust the padding settings for mobiles or people won’t be able to read it easily. 

Keeping in touch 

Having put all that hard work into creating and styling your blog, you’ll want to have people sign up to read more from you. Your blog is the perfect place to have a newsletter subscribe option. It’s quick and easy for the reader, and it gives you the opportunity to nurture them through your email list, so that when they’re ready to invest in your service or product, you’re at the top of their mind. 

You’ll need to have an email marketing account to manage this – MailerLite offers free accounts up to 250 subscribers, or you may like to go for a paid model like Kit or Active Campaign. Whichever works for you. The process is to design the email sign up forms in the mail account then link it to your website using the embed code. 

I’ll often use a side bar or create a sticky column so the form is always showing whilst your visitor is reading your post. This means that at any time, they can leave their details. Or you may like to have a sign up block that you insert several times within the post (this can also be useful if you don’t have a lot of images breaking up the text). 

Use a call to attention

This is a section of micro copy which persuades people to sign up. It could be ‘join 1000s of other subscribers in receiving emails directly to their inbox’, it could be a benefit like ‘sign up and receive X’ the choice is yours. Use the text directly above the form. 

Make signing up as easy as possible

This means not asking lengthy questions or having a load of check fields. Just an email address, or name and email address is enough. People are busy, if you put obstacles in their way, then they’ll abandon the process and move on to something else. 

You’re now ready to get blogging, bring in more traffic to your website and answer your customers’ questions. Use these methods every time you post and you’ll end up with a beautifully consistent design across your website. Consistent design contributes to the ‘know, like and trust’ experience which gets people engaging with and coming back to, your content, ready to work with you. 

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