One of the best things you can do to increase the likelihood of your website ranking with search engines is to create a blog. Even better, a blog that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence using AI writing software and SEO tools.
Using AI for small business marketing makes running a business easier and more productive than ever. For example, when you blog using AI writing software you are able to create posts faster and with less errors. And by adding AI SEO tools you can increase your website search engine optimization better than ever before!
In this article, we will discuss the steps to creating a blog, the benefits of using AI writing software, which SEO AI writing software tools to use, and why creating a blog is one of the best things you can do for your business website’s SEO.
There are several tools discussed in this article. The core three you’ll want to get started with are:
What are AI writing software and SEO tools?
AI writing tools are simply AI-powered software that leverages machine learning, natural language processing, and other AI technologies. These tools can help you to automate tasks, including SEO, content creation, and content marketing.
Nowadays, power bloggers are using AI-powered software tools to write their blog posts in specialized AI editors, writing and fine-tuning with the AI as they go until they have the article written, optimized, and ready to be posted.
Once the article is fully written by you, with AI assistance, and optimized for search, it is then ready to be developed into a blog post on your website.
What is a search engine optimized blog?
First, let’s define what a blog is. A blog can be an entire website or just a portion of a website. Blogs consist of periodic, usually chronological entries (posts) about one or more specific subjects.
Blogs can educate customers about a product or service, announce news and events, or build customer loyalty by providing valuable content.
A blog can increase your website traffic, improve brand awareness, and create leads and sales.
A search engine optimized blog is a blog that has been optimized to increase its search engine rankings. This is done by using techniques such as keyword optimization, backlinking, and on-page optimization. By optimizing your blog in this way, you can increase the visibility of your website and bring in more traffic from search engines.
Blogging helps improve your website's SEO in several ways:
- Blogs are a great way to produce fresh content for your website, which search engines love.
- Blog posts can be optimized by using keywords in the title and body of the post, as well as adding meta tags to each blog entry so that search engine crawlers know what topics they cover.
- Blogs allow you to increase the number of inbound links to your site from other websites which increases the likelihood that your site will show up in search results.
- Blogging can help to establish you or your website as an expert on a particular topic.
Using AI writing software and SEO tools is one of the most efficient ways to create a blog that will help improve your search engine optimization.
How to create a blog using AI writing software
Many business owners shy away from blogging because they don’t think they have the writing skills to blog or they don’t have enough time to blog regularly.
AI writing tools help bridge both of those concerns. By using AI software you will speed up your blog post creation and significantly reduce writer’s block.
In this section, we’ll go into the specifics of how to set up your blog and produce high-quality content, as well as which AI writing tools you can use to use to create content that search engines love.
The steps below will help you to:
- Determine the best topics to write about to increase your website ranking
- Understand search intent and how search engines work
- Develop a outline templates to speed up blog post creation
- Choose user-friendly AI-powered writing software
- Choose AI-powered SEO tools to help your blog rank quickly with Google and other search engines
Now that you understand the plan, let’s break it down.
Step 1: Determine what to write about
When you think about creating content in your blog your goals should be:
- To write key-word driven, quality content
- Publish content frequently
- To answer the questions your target market is asking.
For example, if you’re a flower shop, your blog posts should be answering questions that customers would be asking in their Google searches. Questions such as “what flowers are in season now?”, or “Best flowers for a casual wedding.”
By answering the most popular queries people are asking search engines, and optimizing your blog posts strategically, you increase the likelihood that your online content will rank high in the SERPs (search engine results pages.)
The trick here is to know what keywords and phrases your target market is searching for when they set out to find answers on Google.
Free AI Tools to find what your target audience is searching for:
Once you know the popular questions and topics your target market is keying into Google, it’s time to start creating blog posts around them.
Step 2: Understand search intent
When you are considering what to write about you’ll want to keep in mind the search intent behind your potential customer’s search query. What search terms are your target audience members searching for when they are looking for a business or service such as yours?
Search intent is a term used to describe the purpose of an online search. In other words, the reason why your potential customer is conducting that specific search.
According to Google, there are four distinct search intents:
- Informational intent – The searcher wants to answer a specific question.
- Navigational intent – The searcher is looking for a specific website. (For example, someone wanting to visit a businesses website types in the business name instead of the exact website address.)
- Transactional intent – People who are searching to buy something at that moment.
- Commercial investigation – people who are looking to buy soon and are using the web to do research.
Which search intents are the best for blogging?
For your blog, you’ll want to focus on only two of the search intents— Informational and Commercial.
It may seem counterintuitive but you don’t want your blog post to focus on a transactional intent. This is because Google doesn’t consider blog posts relevant results for a transactional query. Transactional searchers are ready to make a purchase. Google interprets blog post readers as readers who are still researching and not yet ready to buy.
Transactional intent search queries are going to produce products, not blog posts. For example, if you search for “hiking boots” the results pages are going to be filled with products, in this case hiking boots. Google thinks you want to buy right away, not read a blog post about “the best hiking boots.”
This is all to say, try to use the exact keyword-phrases your customers are likely to be using when researching a product like yours they want to buy.
Refer to the image below. Both queries were for hiking boots. The query on the left, “hiking boots,” is considered a transactional intent, and the longer one on the right, “Best hiking boots for flat feet” is a commercial investigation intent.
Can you see the difference in the search results?
Step 3: Develop outline templates for your blog posts
To write your posts faster while keeping a clear focus, it’s a good idea to create blog post templates. Even though you’ll be using AI to help write your blog posts, you’ll want to stick to a planned writing format or template to help you write future posts faster and with more clarity.
Let’s explore a blog post template you might use for both Informational and Commercial search intents.
Informational
Users with an informational intent want an answer to a specific question. How-to posts are perfect for creating blog posts using a template. So are “Idea” posts. For example, people who are potential florist customers might be asking Google questions such as:
- How to choose my wedding flowers?
- What are some good centerpiece ideas for a garden party?
- How can I make floral bouquets last longer?
These questions all have answers that can be explained in a step-by-step or list format and therefore are ideal for using a template.
At its basic structure, your Informational blog post template might look like this:
- Title (with an H1 tag)
- Introductory paragraph (with an H2 tag heading)
- Explanatory/informative paragraph (with an H2 tag heading)
- A step-by-step guide or list (each step or item on the list starts with an H3 tag)
- Explanatory/informative paragraph to segue from the list to the conclusion
- Conclusion
Commercial
A commercial intent search is made when someone is researching a purchase they are considering. A blog post that starts with “Best” is a good way to answer a commercial intent query. Using our florist example again, these types of queries might be:
- Best flowers for a funeral
- Best floral decor elements for a wedding
- Best ways to say I love you with flowers
Your blog post template for a commercial intent query might be similar to the informational intent template, but instead of a step-by-step guide, you’ll have a “list” guide.
The simple blog post template structure described above it’s just a guideline for helping you understand the templating approach. Your actual template may be different depending on your niche and how long your blog posts will be.
Step 4: Choose your blogging software
This section goes over the exact AI-powered writing software you can use to create your blog content and optimize it for search engines.
Whether you already have a blog or you need to create a new one AI writing software is going to be a huge help for creating content. If you don’t have a website you can learn how to build a WordPress blog as either a stand-alone blog or part of a personal or business website.
Both AI writing software and AI-powered SEO tools can help businesses save time and increase their web traffic.
When most people think of writing blog posts, or any long-form type of article, they usually think of the traditional way of writing—open up a text editor software program, create a headline, piece together the document outline, and begin writing.
But in this blog post we’ll look at an AI writing software workflow. This workflow includes an AI-powered writing tool, grammar checker, and search engine optimization tool.
Using AI writing software to create your blog content
AI-powered writing software such as Jasper.ai can help businesses automate time-consuming tasks like blog writing. The software can read the blog topic keywords, write blog posts based on those keywords, and generally help relieve you of writer’s block, too.
You guide the AI, but it does much of the writing work for you. It can offer blog post title suggestions, write opening paragraphs for you to choose from, and compose the body of your blog post with intermittent guidance from you.
Jasper.ai
Jasper is one of the best content creation tools you can buy. By automating the writing process, AI writing software tools like Jasper can help you produce high-quality blog posts quickly and easily. This is important because it means you’ll be able to publish more blog content regularly, which is one of the most effective ways to improve your SEO.
Additionally, using an AI writing tool like Jasper will help ensure your blog posts are well-written and error-free, which is another factor that search engines take into consideration when ranking websites.
Jasper has many more benefits included in its monthly price such as templates for writing product descriptions, social media posts, creative stories, headlines, even crafting emails. The Jasper tool/template we will be using for blog posts is the long-form assistant.n
The Jasper website has a great video tutorial to get you started. In only a little over 6 minutes they cover how to use Jasper for a variety of tasks, including writing blog posts.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a fantastic AI tool that can be used to improve blog posts. It has basic features like a spell-checker, word count tool, and grammar tips, as well as advanced features like sentence rewording and plagiarism checker. Using Grammarly helps to ensure your blog posts are polished and professional.
Grammarly is integrated directly into Jasper making the Grammarly/Jasper workflow seamless. As you are writing, or as your AI writing software is doing it for you, Grammarly checks for issues on the fly. If your grammar, punctuation, or wording is incorrect Grammarly lets you know immediately and offers suggestions to correct the errors.
When an error appears in your writing Grammarly underlines it in red, and when you hover over the underline Grammarly provides a tip for how to correct the error.
Non-AI options for writing blog articles
Google Docs
Google Docs is a cloud-based software that is free to use for anyone with a Google account. It has the basic features you need for blog writing such as a word counter, formatting, and spell-check.
The disadvantage of using Google Docs is that it’s not an AI writing tool like Jasper is, so you need to do all your content creation yourself.
Microsoft Word
Many people like to use Microsoft Word to write their blog content because it is a familiar program and has many features that are helpful for writing. Like Google Docs, Microsoft Word also has a built-in spell checker, word-count tool, and formatting tool. And again, like Google Docs, Microsoft Word is not an AI writing tool, so you need to do all your content creation yourself.
Lack of AI aside, if you are short on funds and long on time, Google Docs and Microsoft Word might be a good place for you to start.
Step 5: Choosing AI-powered SEO tools for your blog
When creating a blog post, it is important to use SEO software that will help your website’s search engine optimization. There are many different SEO software platforms available, each with its own set of features, but the two detailed below are all you’ll need for now.
AI has emerged as a basic component of major search engine algorithms. With AI-powered SEO software, you can do things more quickly and effectively, such as helping you spot trending topics or discover gaps in your content.
AI-powered SEO software analyzes your website, then provides you with a detailed report and specific recommendations on how to improve your website’s ranking.
AI search engine software can help you:
- Determine relevant keywords for what you want to rank for
- Conduct keyword research, including researching your competition
- Optimize your blog title and meta description
- Help search engines discover your site faster
- Help you find relevant content for your site
- Optimize your blog page’s content and your entire site content
- Increase your domain authority
Best AI-powered SEO software
Surfer
Surfer is an SEO tool that uses AI to help analyze your blog post and the blog posts of others.
With Surfer, you can research keywords, analyze your competition, and get suggestions for improving your blog content. Surfer will give you insight into what other blog posts are doing well, how they are structured, and how many keywords they contain.
Surfer also offers keyword suggestions for your blog post topic. This is important because using these suggested keywords in your blog post makes it more likely that people who search for those terms will find your blog first, which means more traffic to your website.
Important benefit! Surfer integrates into the Jasper software platform with making it convenient and easy to use
Other AI-powered software to consider:
SEMrush
SEMrush is a major player in search engine optimization tools. It’s similar to Surfer in that it offers a wide variety of capabilities for businesses to improve their website ranking, but SEMrush is more a comprehensive Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tool whereas Surfer is more of a web analytics tool.
LinkStorm
LinkStorm is an internal linking tool that helps SEO agencies and publishers manage their internal link optimization. It uses AI and semantic analysis to help suggest internal link opportunities, and it can identify and fix link issues to improve your site structure and user experience for better SEO rankings.
Rank Math
Rank Math uses the latest artificial intelligence technology to help you improve your website’s SEO ranking. It is a Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress, so if your website is not created on WordPress then Rank Math won’t be the tool for you.
Rank Math is easy to use, and it is a plugin that you can install on your WordPress website in just a few minutes.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a software platform used for analyzing your competitors, link-building, doing keyword research, tracking your SEO ranking, and doing site audits.
Ahrefs is a great tool for SEO analysis, and it can help you improve your website’s search engine optimization and increase your ranking in search results.
But Ahrefs isn’t the same type of SEO software that Surfer is. The main differences between the two are that Ahrefs is a tool used for analyzing your website and competitor websites to find opportunities for improvement, while Surfer is software that helps you create and publish your blog content.
The winning combination—Jasper, Grammarly, and Surfer
There’s a variety of AI blogging software these days, some more effective than others, but the three listed below are my top three picks for overall blog creation and SEO success.
Not only are they three of the best, but they all work together seamlessly to create your blog content—no need to jump from program to program.
- Jasper (AI writing tool)
- Grammarly (AI grammar tool)
- Surfer (SEO tool for ranking with search engines)
These three software platforms work independently as well as together as one cohesive tool. You can write in Jasper, with your grammar being checked in real-time then, in the same window, you can turn the SEO Mode on and use the power of Surfer to optimize your post right there.
This is the entire software setup you’ll need to write SEO-friendly blog entries.
Final AI considerations
There are several compelling reasons to use AI-powered writing and SEO tools when writing blog posts. But the top two reasons are this:
- AI-powered writing tools can help you to quickly create well-written, error-free blog posts that are properly formatted and include the correct keywords.
- An AI tool for SEO can help you ensure that your blog post is optimized for search engines, which will help you to get more traffic to your website.
Worth noting: The monthly combined cost for the writing tools I’m recommending—Jasper, Grammarly, and Surfer— is about $120/month. If you need to keep the cost down, the first program to scratch off your list is Surfer. Replace Surfer with RankMath.
Rank Math is an SEO tool that provides SEO insights directly on your website but is only $59/year compared to Surfer’s $59/month (or $49/mo with annual plan). To be sure, Surfer is a much more robust program than Rank Math, and worth the money, but Rank Math has some solid basic features that will get you started.
One caveat, if you are truly a gifted writer and can whip out a well-written article as easy as taking a walk, then you should drop Jasper and keep Surfer. This is only if you’re trying to keep costs down. To be clear, all three programs working in tandem are the ideal setup.
Once you’ve fully edited and proofed your post you’re ready to build out the post on your website.
Your next steps:
Decide where your blog will live: Depending on how you have created your website (eg. WordPress, Wix, or other site builder platform) this step will vary. If you are blogging for business keep your business branding basics in mind to retain a consistent look.
Start building: Find a good step-by-step tutorial to guide you through building your blog site. If you are starting from scratch, there are many excellent tutorials on how to build a blog using WordPress.
If you already have a website through another platform, there are tutorials for virtually every platform, so simply do some Google research and find one that’s best for you.
Get the word out: Ideally, organic SEO will be enough to bring people to your blog, but that can take some time. Other marketing methods include social media, paid traffic, traditional outbound marketing, as well as digital marketing methods. There are AI marketing tools that can help, several are covered in this article already.
Purchase:
- An AI writing tool such as Jasper for your blog content creation.
- Consider AI design software tools for visual content.
- A good SEO tool such as Rank Math for back-end SEO and Surfer for front-end
By using AI-powered writing, content creation, and SEO tools you can quickly create blog posts that rank higher in search engine results pages. And as we all know, the higher your post shows up in the search results pages the more likely people will read it!