When it comes to SEO, blogging is a powerful tool for businesses and organizations across a variety of industries. A well-organized and structurally optimized blog can offer opportunities to drill down on important keyword themes related to a business’s core product offering or services. Blogs also provide a great way to establish experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) with visitors. With proper care and due diligence, each post has the potential to attract organic backlinks and pass some of that link authority back to transactional or core pages, thus strengthening their ability to rank while improving brand awareness and credibility with visitors.
That said, starting a blog takes thought and strategic planning to make it work, and each post requires certain elements to give them, and the blog as a whole, a fighting chance at collecting and passing link authority and building brand awareness.
Below, we’ve identified 13 components that can set each blog post up for success. The more you can implement, the stronger and more engaging each post will be for visitors.
1. Sitewide Navigation
Just like every other page on your website, your blog needs to feature your site’s header and footer navigation. By appearing on every page, sitewide header and footer navigation can pass relevant link authority from the blog to the pages that matter most on your core site. Plus, it gives visitors to your blog relevant (and transactional) pages to explore after they’ve read your blog post.
2. Blog-Level Category Navigation
Blog level navigation organized by category gives the blog an easy-to-navigate structure, as well as clear topics that can serve as landing pages for relevant blog posts. Furthermore, categories create a topical hierarchy that helps Google navigate and understand the contextual relevance of the content on your blog. Much like the sitewide navigation, a blog level category navigation present on each post ensures link authority flows throughout your blog. It also provides more landing pages to link to, with increased opportunities for bots to easily discover blog posts without having to crawl pagination.
3. Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumb trails are small, navigational pathways typically found at the top of individual pages. They highlight a site’s hierarchical structure, as well as offer internal links for both users and Google to follow. Breadcrumbs that link to posts and the category they live in can help Google better understand the structure and hierarchy of your blog.
4. Blog Search
A blog internal search feature won’t help your search engine optimization (SEO), but it is helpful for users. Giving visitors a place to search queries and related topics on your blog keeps them engaged and on your site. If you can track the types of queries users are searching for, this can also double as a source of blog topic ideation and inspiration.
5. Recent Posts
Having a recent posts widget on your blog post encourages readers to explore your site, and creates internal links to the newest posts. This feature encourages users and search engines to more quickly discover recent posts that you’re looking to rank for.
6. Featured Posts
Whereas a recent posts widget focuses by date, a separate featured posts widget highlights content pieces that are important to your business or industry or are the most valuable for users. This is another feature that can increase dwell time on your site and reduce bounce rates by keeping visitors clicking and exploring your blog.
7. Textual Body Copy
A blog post can’t exist without some form of body copy. This is where you carefully weave your target keywords into an authentic, helpful, and informative piece of content for your visitors. While there are no rules on how long (or short) a post should be, we recommend aiming for about 700 to 1,500 words of high-quality, human-written content. This should make for a meaty and interesting read, but if there is plenty more to say beyond that word count, don’t hold back! The goal should be to cover a topic as thoroughly as possible while making it easy and engaging for visitors to consume.
Should I Use AI to Write My Blog Post?
While it’s definitely tempting to start with a piece of AI-generated content, copy created by large language models (LLMs) tends to be hyperbolic and fluffy with very little substance. AI is better suited for idea generation, research (with some fact-checking to verify that research), and outlining your blog post.
8. Engaging Elements
Engaging elements aren’t ranking factors, but they’re user-friendly additions that can encourage visitors to read, scroll, and learn more about what your blog and business has to offer. These elements serve to help break up long blocks of text, and they can take form in a variety of ways, from textual elements to visuals and videos that offer supplementary information that speaks to the topic. Consider adding elements such as:
- Headers with appropriate <h> tags;
- Visuals like relevant, useful images, graphs, diagrams, or icons;
- Bulleted or numbered lists;
- Divider bars;
- Embedded videos from YouTube.
9. Author Name & Bio
Crediting a real author boosts E-E-A-T signals for your blog post. Beyond listing the name of the author, it’s ideal to have a short 2-3 sentence bio at the bottom of each post. This can be the same bio across all posts written by same person, with the author’s name linked to an author landing page that aggregates their posts.
10. Date Published or Updated
Listing a date published sends a signal to visitors and Google as to how recent — and therefore how potentially relevant — your blog post is. This helps with establishing trust, as both users and search engines weigh timeliness when ranking articles. This is also why it’s important to refresh and update blog posts as needed, noting both the original publication date and the updated date in an editorial note.
11. Internal Linking
Internal linking, when done appropriately, is a great way to send link authority to other blog posts and relevant pages important to your business. It should only be used when the linked page is related to the topic of your blog, the page is likely to be evergreen so that you don’t create a future broken link, and you choose the anchor text within the link strategically to convey both meaning and relevance.
12. Business CTA
Without a proper call to action or branding, all that time spent crafting the perfect blog will lose out on brand awareness and conversions. Having a visible logo, branded link, or sign-up box that promotes your business informs readers as to who you are and what they should do next to continue their journey with your business. For informational sites, this may take the form of a newsletter subscription, or for ecommerce sites, this could be a link to a relevant category or product page.
Bonus: Shoppable Elements (If Applicable)
Imagine blogging about white sneakers without a module of bestselling white sneakers from your store or writing about the perfect tennis racket design without having the perfect racket on hand to offer to customers. When appropriate, adding shoppable elements that highlight specific items from your ecommerce site can make the most of your hard work blogging. These should only be added when they specifically relate to the topic, but they can be a great way to capitalize on that hard-won traffic and drive revenue while also helping visitors discover relevant products they want.
When put into practice, these components come together to give your blog structure the framework it needs to succeed. From building and adhering to E-E-A-T to properly flowing as much link authority between your blog posts and the business side of your site, your blog will be primed to compete for rankings and win the trust of new readers and customers.
