January 13, 2023
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5 min read
Blogs are an important part of your website strategy. In fact, consistently creating valuable blog content on your website is one of the best ways to improve your search engine ranking.
While most businesses believe in hiring a blogging expert who knows all the important and tedious steps to optimize your blog so Google likes it and shows it to others, not everyone has the budget.
Before you start writing, download our free Website Audit Checklist. It’ll help you assess your website’s current SEO health and ensure your blogs are set up for success.
If you plan on forging ahead by writing your own blog content, then we want to give you a few helpful tips from a couple of SEO experts.
While many of the fundamentals still hold true, 2026 has brought in smarter algorithms, AI-driven search updates, and a stronger focus on user experience, meaning blog optimization now goes beyond just keywords and backlinks.
There are three simple tricks that will get you started: targeting low competition keywords, writing long-form content and completing your blog SEO.
We like to compare Google to a personal assistant. It sifts through thousands of pieces of information for you, saving you a ton of time. After it's done reviewing everything, it serves you the most helpful, relevant and reliable information first, based on the question you asked it. (Everyone needs a personal assistant as fast and as thorough as Google.)
Google uses signals to help determine if a website page or blog is helpful, relevant and reliable. One of the signals Google looks at is whether a website has a good reputation online and is consistently updating its website with helpful information for people in their niche.
Another signal is if other reliable websites link to your blog on their own websites. This further reaffirms to Google that you are an expert in your field and that your content is reliable and helpful for others.
In 2026, Google’s new “Helpful Content” and “Search Experience” systems now prioritize content that keeps readers engaged, meaning metrics like time on page, scroll depth, and interaction also matter more than ever.
One of the biggest mistakes we see is when small businesses launch their beautiful brand-new website and then do nothing afterward.
Google looks at your website and sees that you are the new kid on the block. Your domain is new, and there are no other reliable websites linking back to you. There are not a lot of signals telling Google that your website can be trusted. But if you take the time to research and write helpful content on your website consistently, Google will start to see that you might actually be an expert at what you do.
The more you show Google you are someone to look at, the more Google will want to show you to others.
Make sense?
Here’s the catch, though. Writing a bunch of words on a particular topic and posting them to your blog isn’t enough. You need to optimize your blog, which sends more signals to Google that you know what you’re doing.
As we mentioned earlier, there are a ton of things you can do to optimize your blogs for Google. This beginner’s guide will show you three of the most important optimization steps to get started.
Before you sit down and start writing a blog, you need to choose the right keywords. Your keywords will be what your entire blog is about and will be the same words your ideal customers are using to find your content. Google then uses this keyword and compares your content about it against others' content and serves the best blogs at the top of the page.
Some keywords have a lot of brands writing about them and others have fewer. The trick for small businesses just starting out in the blogging game is to choose keywords that have less competition. It means you have a higher chance of getting noticed by Google and ranking for them.
We recommend using a keyword research tool to find what people are searching for. Chances are, you will find dozens of keywords that you could write hundreds of blog articles about.
Take a look at various keywords and start writing blogs about the ones that have low competition and an average or higher search volume.
Pro Tip for 2026: Focus on semantic keywords and search intent instead of just exact phrases. Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google Search Console’s Insights now help identify topics people are exploring rather than just the words they’re typing. This shift makes your blogs more adaptable to how AI-driven search understands context.
While shorter blogs are better than no blogs at all, longer-form blogs are better than all the rest.
It all goes back to telling Google you are an expert at what you do. Experts know everything there is to know about the subjects they talk about. They go into great detail about the topic and do their best to provide relevant and helpful information. It takes more than 500 words to do that. We recommend writing blog content that is between 2,000 and 2,500 words.
In 2026, it’s not just about word count, it’s about structure and depth.
Make sure your content answers both beginner and advanced questions, since Google’s AI now breaks queries into “experience levels” and prioritizes blogs that serve multiple user intents.
Doing behind-the-scenes SEO work after your blog is written is so important. Here’s a great place to start with Google’s SEO Starter Guide,.
There are over a dozen technical components to optimizing the SEO on your blog before publishing, but we are going to cover the five that Google considers the most important.
New for 2026: Don’t forget schema markup, AI summaries, and voice search optimization. Adding FAQ schema can help your blog show up in rich snippets, while optimizing for conversational phrases like “How do I…” boosts visibility in voice search and Google’s new AI overviews. You can test your schema with Google’s Rich Results Test.
We said it once, and we will say it again: blogging is an essential part of your long-term website strategy.
Consistently updating your site with valuable content on keywords that your potential customers are searching for will eventually help your website begin to get noticed. However, just writing a blog is half the battle. You need to optimize your blog for SEO, too.
As a boutique branding and content marketing agency in Edmonton, Spark & Pony Creative specializes in on-site SEO practices and high-value content strategies for small businesses every week. But if regular blogging by us just isn’t in your budget yet, then use this beginner's guide to optimize your blogs.
Key Takeaways:
Remember to target low-competition keywords, write long-form content, and complete your blog SEO. Doing these three things will put you on the fast track to getting your content in front of the right eyes and new potential customers.
And in 2026, don’t just write for Google, write for humans who trust brands that teach, help, and stay authentic. That’s the kind of content Google rewards most.
Want expert eyes on your content strategy? Book a free strategy call, and we’ll walk you through how to align your blogs with your SEO goals for 2026.
We’ve recently updated this guide to ensure it reflects how SEO works in 2026, with smarter algorithms, AI-driven search, and a stronger focus on real user experience.
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