How to Write a Blog Post That Actually Gets Traffic

 How to Write a Blog Perfect Blog

You write a blog post, hit the publish button, and then ... nobody reads it. The problem is not necessarily your writing. It doesn't mean that people don't like you. It just means that your content is likely not optimized to be found. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to write a blog post that draws consistent readers to your blog that you probably should get. 

Same Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you increase your search traffic, research your competitors, and dominate your niche. Today, I want to help you clear up the confusion and turn that blank screen into an absolutely epic blog post that a.) People want to read, and b.) It attracts the target audience you want. 

Now instead of focusing on subjective techniques like the writing style, I'll show you how to create a constant stream of readers with a selection of strategic topics and workflows. Let's do it. First, I want to give you an idea of what constant reading looks like and what it definitely doesn't look like. 

To gain readers, you need to generate traffic. They are essentially the same. But how you get traffic to your website will vary. For example, I'm sure you've seen multiple channels of traffic sources on your analytics platforms, such as organic search, social, direct traffic, and referral.

 All of these people fall into different categories in terms of how they discover and consume content on your website. You may also be using paid ads or email marketing to drive readers to your posts. These are all great, but paid traffic is only good as long as you're willing to pay. 

The same goes for your email list. You send an email and then the traffic drops to nothing. Now, what about social media? The same thing. You might get some nice spikes in traffic, but it's likely to be back to normal. These peaks, as Rand Fishkin calls them, are "peaks of hope." 

And if you've used any of these marketing strategies, I'm sure you've experienced what comes next. The "flat line of no". Organic traffic, on the other hand, can have the opposite effect. And this is the main strategy we use to grow the Ahrefs blog to more than 220,000 monthly search visitors. 

Now, I'm not telling you to stop emailing your list or reduce your PPC ad spend. What I want you to extract from these examples is that billions of people are searching for informational content. And if you have a blog, you have to make it your purpose to satisfy the needs of search engines and in return, get the traffic you deserve. 

That said, let's go straight to Step 1, which is coming up with topics that have been proven to generate traffic. Now, there is nothing wrong with creating content about what you ate for breakfast. But it's about how you frame it. For example, if you had a recipe blog, how many people do you think would search "what did Sam Oh have for breakfast today?

" None! People turn to Google for solutions to their problems. Therefore, as you generate topics to write about, you need to focus on the reader, rather than yourself. Here's an example: Instead of creating a post called "My kids love these fluffy blueberry pancakes," go for a helpful approach like "How to make fluffy blueberry pancakes you. 

But actually, you can find how many people are searching for any keyword using Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. Let's do a search for our main topic, "blueberry pancakes." Next, I'll go to the Phrase Match Report to find keyword ideas on this topic. Right away, 

you'll see some great keyword ideas like "blueberry pancake recipes," "how to make blueberry pancakes," and "vegan blueberry pancakes" along with keyword metrics like search volume next to them. 

Now the thing about search volume is that it can be a bit misleading. For example, "how to make blueberry pancakes" receives 1,000 searches per month in the US alone. Now if we click the SERP button and look at the traffic column for the top-ranking pages,

 

you will see that these pages get significantly more traffic than the estimated search volume. And this often happens because these pages rank for hundreds or even thousands of keywords. Now if you look at the SERP for the keyword "vegan blueberry pancakes

" you will see the opposite effect. Top ranking pages only get about 27% traffic compared to search volume for the main keyword. That's why it's critical to analyze the total traffic potential of a topic so that you can get the most out of your investment. 

Now, this is just one topic you may want to write about. You can generate a full list of content ideas by entering a more general topic related to your niche. So let's change this to "recipes". And so you have a list of over 2.4 million keywords that contain the word "recipes." Let's narrow this down to a few low competition topics with high search volume.

I'll set the keyword difficulty filter to show the keywords that have a high score of something low, like 10. And then I'll set the search volume filter for the keywords that have at least 1,000 monthly searches on Google. 

From here, it's just a matter of clicking the SERP button and analyzing the traffic potential of each topic that might be worth creating a post about. Another thing you can do is search for topics that will generate traffic for your competitors, and then create content around those topics as well. So since I have a recipe blog, 

I will go to Ahrefs Site Explorer and enter one of my competitor's domains. And they seem to get around 874,000 search visitors per month! Next, I'll go to the top pages report to find out which pages are driving the most search traffic for them.

 So looking at this report, I can see right away that chocolate chip cookies, lo mein, and cooking tofu can all be good topics to write blog posts. And, as you can see, it's not hard to find topics that people are interested in searching for. Just be sure to check the total traffic potential behind the topic, so you don't waste time writing content that people aren't interested in reading. 

Let's move on to step 2, which is very important and is for evaluating search intent. Search intent represents the reason for the search engine's query.  Probably recipes, right? But what if someone searches for the query "slow cooker"? What are they looking for? Do you want to buy one? 

Read reviews? See a list of recipes or something else entirely? The good news is that the search intent is really easy to identify. All you have to do is search for the keyword phrase you want to rank for on Google, and the search results will reveal what I like to call, 

"the 3 Cs of search intent." The first C is the content type. This can generally be categorized into blog posts, product pages, category pages, and landing pages. If you look at the top 10 "how to make pancakes" results, you can tell from the titles alone that they are all blog posts. The second C is the content format. 

When it comes to blog posts, some common formats would be "how-to" guides, step-by-step tutorials, list posts, or opinion editorials. There are many different formats, but this should give you an idea of what to look for. The final C is the content angle. 

The angle is often described in the title as the "benefit" of why someone should click through and read your article. So this page is talking about creating "perfect" pancakes, this one is pushing the "easy pancakes" angle, and this one here is about "fluffy pancakes.

" Generally speaking, you don't want to stray too far from the angle that the top 10 results take, but keep in mind that angles will vary from topic to topic. Now just to show you how important this step is, just type in "slow cooker" into Google. Immediately, you will see that the search results are dominated by the eCommerce category pages. If you don't have a similar page on your site, 

you probably shouldn't be targeting the keyword, because your chances of ranking will be slim to none. We have a full tutorial on how to do keyword research, assess search intent, and also find out how difficult it will be to rank for in Google, 

so I highly recommend watching that tutorial that I will link to. For now, let's move on to step 3, which is writing a data-driven schema. A data-driven schema might sound strange but listen to me. A page does not rank for a single keyword. So when you are building your outline,

 

it will be worth knowing for which keywords the highest-ranking pages are ranked so that you can get the most out of your blog posts. To do this, go to the Keyword Explorer and search for the target keyword that you want to rank for. 

Then scroll to the bottom of the page where you will see the top 10 ranking pages along with their SEO metrics. And unsurprisingly, many of these pages rank for thousands of keywords. To see the keywords this page ranks, let's click the number in the corresponding row, which will open the organic keywords report in Site Explorer.

Now, to keep these keywords relevant, let's set a filter to show only keywords that rank 1-10. This will remove a lot of irrelevant keywords that we don't need to target. Some interesting words that come to me are "from scratch", "recipe" and "dough". 

Now, instead of trying to include these keywords in your post, it's better to think of them as subtopics. You can also use them to solidify the angle you want to take for your post.

 So I can take the angle of creating homemade pancakes from scratch. As for the subtopics, it would probably have a section on "making the dough". And under the captions, I can include descriptive words that people search for, like "yummy and fluffy."

Finally, just add a few dots under each of the captions to make sure you stay on a topic once you start writing the draft. Speaking of which, let's move on to step 4 and that's writing your first draft. Now the purpose of this step is not to write a perfect blog post that everyone will love. It's to show your thoughts on screen and in complete sentences. If you've created a detailed outline, 

it's just a matter of looking at your vignettes and making them flow together. These are two tricks I use that work particularly well for me. First is the Pomodoro technique. For example, my average typing speed is around 115 words per minute. 20% efficient. This translates to around 575 words every 25 minutes. Now, the key to succeeding in us.

 

The Pomodoro Technique when writing blog posts is to not hit the back button due to misspellings or rephrase the sentence 15 times before finding the perfect wording. After the first 25 minutes have elapsed, take a 3-5 minute break and rinse and repeat until complete. 

This step is all about efficiency and you don't want to do anything to stop you from reaching that goal. In the next step, you need to edit your draft. From my experience, it's best to take some time out of your piece before editing it. Usually, there are two parts to this. The first is to fix spelling and grammar problems. 

This is pretty straightforward and tools like Grammar can help make the process easier. The second part is making sure your blog post flows and provides value to readers. Common blogging advice is to "write as you speak,"

 so reading your post out loud while editing can definitely give you some perspective. If you find it sounds unnatural, robotic, or whatever, make any necessary edits. Remove anything that is fluffy or add snippets to provide additional clarity or evidence. One last tool that I recommend is the Hemingway Editor. 

Just paste your post there and it will give it a readability rating. Now step 6 is my favorite part of writing blog posts and that is getting honest feedback

And it's what allows us to consistently get positive feedback from various online communities. This is how we do it at Ahrefs. Josh, our resident blogging teacher, is responsible for ensuring that every post that goes to our blog is absolutely epic. But the epic is subjective. So for every post you write, my job is to provide feedback, question any claims, and offer suggestions where relevant. 

Now, my job is to create videos that always bring value to you, our viewers. So Josh will review and provide comments as I do on his blog posts. And to add an extra layer of quality control, we included Tim and Nick to make sure everything we post is top-notch. 

I cannot recommend this step highly enough. Ask your colleagues, friends, or anyone to review your content, so your team can consistently produce its best stuff. The last and final step is to create your final draft. At this point, all the feedback should have been given. 

Now it's your job to take that feedback and make decisions about what goes into the final version and what doesn't. Go through each touchpoint, and once all the points have been resolved, you just need to do a final reading. Then upload post, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

 

Now if you liked this video be sure to like, share, and subscribe, and if you have any questions about the writing process, please leave a comment below and I'd love to help you. So keep working and I'll see you in the next tutorial.