We often talk about “great content”, but what would be an example of a truly great blog post?
Here is an example of a great blog post I’ve come across recently while working on something –
https://heritagedesigninteriors.com/how-interior-design-impacts-your-mental-health/
The article is a general post on interior design and mental health – and the piece is an example of a perfectly crafted strategic blog post.
I’ll go over several aspects of this post’s quality, and there are three major layers I want to point out to you. I can single out the Human, the SEO, and the Strategic aspect why this post rocks.
The Human aspect of great content
First and foremost, it’s a well-written article that’s fun to read. There are details, vivid metaphors, the word count is not inflated by repetitions.
It’s one of those pieces that you can skim through and find a section you like the most and start reading from it. Well-formatted and breathing, easy to read with quotes, bulletpoints, headings, and frequent paragraphs.
The post is avoiding all the bad practices of cheap content, it has a recap at the end that’s positions as tips and not “final words” or “conclusion” (btw if your writer uses these – fire them), and it has a converting call to action with a phone number.
An article like that would definitely cost north of $300 to create at the minimum. Don’t expect to get a $20 article an This only makes a point on the importance of strategic content planning – since you need to be investing into proper content, make sure you minimize guesswork.
SEO Dimension of great content
The post is quite a unit SEO-wise. According to Ahrefs.com it picks up 246 keywords, and you know the true stats that website owners can see on their Google Search console are way higher than that.
The post is over 4K words long, has multiple headings and images (relevant alt tags).
There are several outgoing links and citations that boost the topical relevance of the post – and they actually link to meaningful stuff like research and psychological magazines, not Wikipedia definitions.
“Interior design” + “mental health” is the main keyword combo here and the variations of it are consistently used in the URL (it’s important that your URL does not touch more than one large topic and remains scalable)
The page is an SEO powerhouse and it accounts for 34.8% of the whole site’s traffic according to Ahrefs.com:
Clearly the idea and the implementation contributed to a great result.
Imagine if the company continued with that content strategy and produced 10 more posts like that.
The strategic dimension of a great blog post
We’re a content strategy agency first and foremost, and not an SEO or a copywriting agency, that’s why this is the cherry at the top.
Great blog posts are not just fun to read and rank well on Google. What matters most is how strategic they are, i.e. how much they are positioned for growing your business and getting you closer to your goals.
Here’s what strategic content means in practice:
Strategic content is exploring new topics
Note that this article is written using what we call the broad to narrow content creation approach – it takes the larger topic of mental health effects of interior design and mentions everything under it either briefly or in some detail.
The article goes on about colos, sunlight, spaciousness, plants, at, natual elements, and so on. Some of these sub-topics can become separate posts – and they should eventually!
This is the type of an article tht produces tons of useful, rich data duing content audits.
Check out how many new potential topics the article picks up thanks to being long enough and properly written:
Each of these needs to be analyzed and can become a separate dedicated post, that’s ultra-targeted to specific market’s needs.
Strategic content helps you find opportunities and grow. That’s exactly how we design content strategies for our clients too.
Your blog is your chance to run quick and effective experiments – blog posts are fast and easy to produce and most blog posts outperform service pages. Use this opportunity the smart way and run experiments often.
Strategic content can be repurposed
This one is huge.
Note how with very little effort an article like the one we’re reviewing can be turned into content pieces for many other platforms.
This blog post can easily become 20 tweets, 5 LinkedIn posts, 20 instagram descrtipions, and five YouTube videos – all with minimal effort and costs, using all the mentioned topics as sources for the new content.
Each time you produce a large and foundational post like that, think of how much it can be repurposed. Put your blog posts togethe in such a way that they can be split into meaningful snippets.
5 Practical tips for creating great content
Let’s pack the great post example we’ve just reviewed into a simple tip list:
- Pay for quality content. Make sure your writer actually cares to be read and liked, find a writer with a great ego and give them proper briefs. Detailed meaningful articles win. Format your posts to be readable.
- Optimize your content properly. Have the main topic and the respective keyword. Have a short URL, proper headings, alt tags, and all that.
- Strategic content is the best content. Every article is a robust unit explores the interests of your target markets and looks for ways to grow.
- Make sure the content can be repurposed. Instruct you writers to build the article using meaningful clusters that can become snippets shared all across social media. Again, pay for quality content.
Want to produce content pieces like that? We can help – get in touch with us and let’s talk!