- Advice, Tech
Geeky Skills to Work Smarter: Optimizing a Blog Post with SEO, UX/UI, & Copywriting
In today’s digital landscape, creating content that stands out and captures the attention of both your target audience and search engines is crucial. Optimizing a blog post to captivate your audience, rank well on search engines, and provide a seamless user experience requires a harmonious blend of copywriting, SEO, and UX/UI design.
Starting with a few guidelines will help you elevate your own online presence or be able to offer blog writing and optimization as a service to others. Let's dive into how copywriting, SEO, and UX/UI work together, transforming a single blog post into a beacon of engagement and discoverability.
Copywriting: Understanding Your Audience and Their Needs
Copywriting isn’t merely about stringing words together; it’s about speaking directly to the heart of your audience. The goal is to craft messages that resonate personally and motivate readers to take action.
Identify the pain point of your audience
Start with empathy. Understanding and articulating the specific challenges or problems your audience faces is the first step in effective copywriting. This connection is not just about acknowledging the issue but also demonstrating that you genuinely understand and empathize with their situation. This builds trust and establishes a rapport with your readers.
Incorporate real-life examples, anecdotes, or testimonials that reflect these pain points. Use a tone and language that echo the readers' thoughts and feelings, making your blog post feel like a conversation rather than a broadcast.
Present benefits rather than features
Shift the focus from what something does (features) to how it can improve the reader’s life (benefits). This perspective change is crucial in compelling your audience to take action, as it directly ties what you offer to the fulfillment of their needs or the resolution of their pain points.
For each feature you might want to mention, ask yourself, “So what? Why does this matter to my reader?” The answer will often lead you to a benefit that you can highlight. Use persuasive language to make these benefits vivid and desirable.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
SEO plays a critical role in how visible your content is on search engines. By writing headings and paragraphs with strategic keywords, you’ll set your content up for enhanced visibility.
Keyword Research
The journey into effective SEO starts with thorough keyword research to identify the words and phrases that people are using to search for things on the internet. For the biggest impact, you’ll also want to evaluate these terms by two other criteria, search volume and difficulty, in order to ‘rank’, or show up higher, on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Keyword search volume refers to how often a keyword is searched for. This can be all about finding a sweet spot. High volume keywords mean lots of people are interested, but it also means there’s more competition to rank. Low volume keywords have less competition and are easier to rank for, but it may mean less people are interested or it could mean that they are niche enough to attract very targeted audiences.
Keyword difficulty refers to how competitive a keyword is, which determines how challenging it will be to use that keyword to rank on SERPs. When looking at a tool like ubersuggest, this difficulty is ranked from 0-100. Under 10 would be ideal, but it may still be beneficial to settle for under 30!
Recommended tools:
Content for SEO
Content creation should align with both business goals and audience needs, embedding keywords naturally to maintain the flow and engagement. Optimizing headings offers a quick win; particularly, incorporating keywords into H1 tags and refining H2 and H3 tags can significantly improve structure and readability.
A few other ways to incorporate keywords in the content are with internal linking and alt text. Internal linking is the practice of linking to other relevant content within your website. Alt text is text that provides image descriptions and context that both improves accessibility and better search engine understanding.
While it used to be the standard to create a page for every single query, it’s now way more impactful to create one comprehensive page on a topic rather than several smaller pages. So when you are writing a blog post, consider diving deeper into a topic with at least 600 words rather than splitting it up into short posts.
SEO Plugins
We love WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) at GeekPack, and one of the reasons is that plugins can extend functionality in so many ways. To streamline the optimization process, adding plugins can simplify and boost SEO implementation, offering real-time feedback, increasing ease of sharing, and even making suggestions on how to improve your content. If you are thinking of using a CMS other than WordPress, it’s worth asking what that platform offers to help further optimize the pages.
Recommended plugins:
UX/UI: User Experience and User Interface
The visual and functional design of your blog post significantly affects reader engagement. User experience (UX) is about how the visitor uses the page:
Is it clear to understand?
Is it pleasing to the eyes?
Does the visitor know what to do and where to go?
How does it make the visitor feel?
User interface (UI) is the parts of the page that the visitor interacts with: colors, font, buttons, even the spacing and alignment.
Readability is the ultimate determination of successful UX/UI on a blog post. Effective use of alignment, spacing, and layout should guide the reader's eye through the content effortlessly. When it comes to font choices and pairings, simplicity is key for clarity and visual appeal. The objective is to create a layout that not only looks good but also enriches the reader's experience, making the content accessible and enjoyable to engage with.
When optimizing content, you’ll see that copywriting, SEO, and UX/UI have quite a lot of overlap and it becomes about adopting a strategic mindset towards content creation. By understanding the needs of our audience, utilizing SEO to enhance visibility, and crafting a user-friendly design, we can create content that not only ranks well but also truly engages and converts.
As we continue to navigate the ever-evolving digital world, these skills are not just nice to have—they are essential for anyone looking to make a mark online. Whether you’re a blogger, a content creator, or a business owner, applying these principles can transform your online presence, ensuring your message not only reaches but also resonates with your intended audience.
Become the Irreplaceable Digital Expert in the Room
Discover more by exploring all GeekPack's Free Resources HERE or if you’d like to learn about applying these skills and what being a Tech VA (or Tech Strategist) means join our FREE Masterclass - How To Become A Sought-After Tech VA with a Pipeline Full of Leads & Lucrative Projects!