The structure and information you include in your blog content is important to making pages that are more valuable and useful to your readers. Every piece of content you create for your website should include these things!

The THINGS included in this article are going to be essential because it’s going to do a few things for you. 

It’s going to make it easier to scan.

It’s going to promote the inclusion of key elements, things that end up impacting your user experience. Like how you use images and call to actions. 

And it’s going to build authority and trust in you and your brand as you get to be the person who’s presenting this content, which is highly valuable to your audience.

So, there are 10 key things that make up a good blog post. 

These are going to be things that apply universally to any type of blog. 

If you implement these things into your writing, you’re going to have a better time bringing in new traffic and converting the people that you actually get on the page.

Keep in mind, we discuss these things in more detail and even provide blog post templates you can use to craft better content of your own in our SEO and Blogging Course for Photographers. Check it out!

So, without further ado, let’s look at the 10 things we can do to make a good blog post.

1. A Useful and Valuable Topic

Of course, we can do many things to make our blog post stand out and be more compelling, but the most important thing begins with the actual topic that we’re going to be covering. 

We always want to be covering content that’s going to be relevant to my audience, and while this might seem like a no-brainer, it’s also an area that we see photographers often struggle with.

To give you an example, in the past, we’ve done a website audit for a photographer who specializes exclusively in boudoir. 

Most of this person’s website was great from top to bottom. 

They had recently gone through a major rebrand and had compelling copy and visuals throughout their site. They also took beautiful photos, so there were no glaring issues from the product side of things. 

But then, the most striking area where we found some disconnect was when we went to their blog and immediately we were exposed to a variety of content that, at face value, wasn’t necessarily bad, but the content was not targeting the right person, necessarily. For example, going through the blog roll, we were exposed to content about how to plan senior portraits and other things that wouldn’t necessarily be appealing to the people they were really trying to attract, which, in their case, was exclusively clients looking for boudoir photos.

Another thing to consider when we’re thinking about creating useful and valuable content is thinking about how wide or niche we decide to approach a certain topic from. 

To give you an example, we could create a blog post about the best wedding venues in my state. That would certainly be fine. But someone else could niche down a little bit more. Say they’re a wedding photographer, but they specialize in a specific type of wedding, like luxury weddings. 

They could take that same concept and instead approach it from the angle of showcasing the best luxury wedding venues in the state. 

In practice, both of these things are useful and can be created. In fact, if you’re a luxury photographer, you could potentially even make both of these resources. 

But the point remains, we want to challenge you to think about who you’re creating this content for and is there anything you can do to make your content resonate even more with the audience you’re trying to attract.

2. A Compelling Title

A good title is going to do a few things. 

It’s going to be SEO-friendly, so make sure we include our keyword for search engines in the title. 

The title should also be informative, so when somebody reads it, they should know what the content of the post is going to be about.

The title should also be catchy. It should be something that grabs the reader’s attention. 

Sometimes writing compelling titles can be challenging because we have to balance all three of these things, but the end result needs to be compelling so people actually want to read our content.

3. An Engaging Introduction

Often, the most important parts of your blog content are going to be how it starts and how it ends. This is because people are naturally drawn to certain parts of the content. 

To make an introduction good, there’s a few things we can do. 

We should have some sort of hook. 

For example, you could start your post off with an interesting fact, question, or statement that draws readers in. 

As part of this first introduction area, you’re also going to want to make sure you’re incorporating your SEO keyword. 

Your introduction should also set the stage for what the rest of the post is going to be covering, providing some context. This helps inform the user of the content, so they know if the content is going to be right for them and what they’re needing to learn about. 

4. Clear and Organized Structure

One of the most important things a blog post needs is to be organized well. 

A lot of this organization comes down to how you format the content. 

We’ve run into many photographers’ blogs where a lot of the information being shared is actually good, but a big problem is that it’s virtually unreadable because of how it’s laid out on the page.

If it’s unreadable to me, it’s probably unreadable to our clients.

And if we’re wanting to use our blog content for SEO marketing in particular, it will make it harder for search engines to read through our content and make sense of it. 

If you can create a more organized blog post, you’re going to see better results both in terms of your content ranking better, and your users being able to engage with your content better and ultimately take additional steps to reach out to you.

To organize our blog content better, there are three major things you should be doing. 

• Use headings correctly and well. This helps you break your content into manageable sections. 
• Use shorter paragraphs. As a general rule, I don’t like to have paragraphs longer than three sentences on my blogs. This enhances readability and makes it easier to skim through the content. 
• And use bullet points or numbered lists where it makes sense. If you have a list of things you want to share, adding them with bullet points makes a world of difference for how somebody can interact with that content.

5. Visuals and Multimedia

This is our opportunity as photographers to really shine because we have a lot of image content that we could be using throughout our posts. 

It’s natural for many of us to use these photos in posts like we might do when sharing a session or a wedding we’ve done. 

But, you should make sure you’re integrating this sort of content into other blog posts you’re making as well. 

By including images (and even other graphics), it can help to break up text and illustrate points. 

Try to choose images related to the things you’re talking about when at all possible. 

For example, if I’m talking about a particular wedding venue, I will include a picture of that venue or at least from that venue. 

If I’m talking about helping someone plan for their headshots, I’d want to include some headshot photos as examples and so on. 

Can you think of any times where you read blog content online and the images used didn’t feel like they matched the content you were reading? 

How did that make you feel as a reader?

Infographics are something you can also create for your content. You can use a tool like Canva to make this particularly easy since they include a lot of pre-built templates for content that you can customize to your heart’s content! 

You can also incorporate videos and GIFs where it makes sense. These can further engage your readers and add some variety. 

When it comes to all the media you add to your posts, remember to Include alt text as this will add descriptions of our visual content, so search engines and people with certain disabilities can make sense of them. Alt text is a topic covered at length in our SEO course!

6. SEO Optimization

This is where we’re going to want to pull on all the SEO tools we have. 

Incorporate your keyword naturally and when relevant throughout the content. Include your keyword at least a handful of times through any post you create. You don’t need a specific type of density. 

Use your keyword in some of the subheadings. 

The use of a keyword multiple times throughout a page reinforces to search engines what your page is about. 

If using the exact same word or phrase doesn’t feel natural, use different variations. 

Fill out your meta descriptions and optimize these as well. 

Use internal and external links to provide resources to your clients and improve the overall SEO performance of your page. 

SEO is a major area of consideration when creating blog content.

If you need help learning more about SEO and actually implementing it into your website and business strategy, we go into great detail about it in our SEO course!

7. An Engaging and Authentic Voice

Your blog content has the opportunity to really shine and stand out from what others can create. 

Any photographer could make a list of wedding venues in your area, share their thoughts on the differences between a first look and not having a first look, or give a guide to styling for a session. 

But no one can make it the same way you can or share the same insights you can! 

This can help separate your content from what others are saying, giving it more personality and making it more approachable and authentic. This is something that builds trust and connection with readers, which can translate into making people more likely to click that button to go to your contact page and reach out to you. 

Finding this voice might not be easy for everyone, but it’s easier with clarity on your brand. 

Knowing your audience, having a client persona, and a brand vocabulary are essential. These are things we cover at great length in our Branding Course, if you haven’t gone through that yet!

8. Including Call to Actions

If you went through our Website Course, you’d know one of the key things we want to see on all of your pages are clear CTAs. 

In the context of our blog posts, this is not going to be any different. 

But it’s also one of those things we see a lot of photographers don’t seem to know about, forget or otherwise avoid. 

By having a clear call to action, we can encourage users to take the next step. 

On my website, at the bottom of each of my blog posts, I include a CTA section that refers people to my contact page. 

I know that if somebody’s gone through the effort of looking through an entire blog post that I created, I want to give them something to do once they get to the bottom, and that thing I want them to do is contact me. 

While your primary call to action is getting people to your contact page, there are other opportunities as well. 

Refer people to other pages on your website that may be relevant to them. It’s important to be mindful of what we’re drawing people’s attention to, but most importantly, it’s important that we’re making them do something, anything. 

If they just come onto a page and there’s no call to action, they might leave your website, even if they find the content beneficial. This is easy enough to address just by adding a CTA or two on the page.

9. A Conclusion

At the bottom of every blog post, I make an effort to summarize the content I just created. 

This is helpful to the user because it makes it easier if they just happen to skim through the content to remind themselves of what it was about. It can leave your users with a final thought and give them some next steps, usually through a call to action.

10. Proofreading and Editing

One of the hardest things when working with photographers to help them create better businesses and better blog content is going through their content with a fine-toothed comb and making sure it reads well. 

I’ve been on a number of websites where, even if it was laid out well and they had great photos, if I encounter issues with spelling and grammar or a lack of clarity in the content, it can be distracting and potentially turn off a potential client from wanting to work with you. 

That isn’t to say that if you have a mistake here and there, it’s going to be the end of the world because that’s definitely not the case. 

The main focus is to make sure you’re thinking about questions like…

Does my content read well? 

Is everything spelled correctly?

If you do a lot of your writing in something like Microsoft Word, most of these major problem areas are taken care of with spell check and such activated.

Conclusion – Bringing it All Together

So, as you can see, there’s a lot of things that make up a good blog post. 

Most of these things are quite simple, actually, but often enough we see them overlooked or not implemented well.

By taking a step back and giving some real consideration to how you are stucturing your blog content, and why you are including the things you are including, you can add some significant intentionality into your content – which gets better results.