A study made by Search Engine Journal back in 2020 indicates that websites placed in the rank one position of the SERPs have a click-through rate of 25%. This figure goes lower for the 2nd and 3rd placers and even lower for the other seven websites. This statistic shows how difficult it can be for other pages after the first position to gain traffic. If you’re not on the first page, your website’s chances of receiving organic traffic are significantly lower. How can you solve this?
One way to improve a page’s search rankings is to optimise its written content for search engines in the form of SEO content writing. It is a combination of content writing and SEO, intending to curate written content that fits the standards of search engines. Unlike investing in advertising, SEO writing is cost-effective and will be more likely to drive traffic to your website in the long run than a short sprint of an ad campaign would.
What is SEO Writing
SEO writing is a form of writing content with the primary goal of ranking first on the results page of a search engine. This writing process involves optimizing content in favour of search engines like Google. Also referred to as “writing for SEO”, this type of content writing involves planning for things such as targeted keywords, search intent, and headers.
Instead of simply writing content, SEO writing revolves around the quality of content and how you can optimise it to bring value to the reader while hitting the ranking factors necessary to appear on the search engine results pages.
The people who write content with SEO in mind are called SEO content writers. They aim to bring value to readers by educating them. There are also SEO copywriters whose main goals involve writing content to convert traffic into leads, which eventually results in sales. The only difference between an SEO content writer and an SEO copywriter is their writing goals.
Why is SEO Writing important?
One of the best-proven ways to gain organic traffic through a website is by curating high-quality content that matches what the users are looking for. Writing content simply for the sake of it just won’t cut it. SEO writing is the way to go if you want to market your business online through blog posts, guides, and other helpful content.
Search engine rankings play a significant role in SEO content writing and SEO copywriting. One of the most important ranking factors is optimised content, and complying with this standard is a non-negotiable if you want to appear on the first page of Google.
Ensuring that your website is search engine optimised is a much better way to send users or customers to your website than paying for advertising. Writing for SEO is also an excellent way to target specific customers you want to connect with, helping your content rank organically.
10 Must-Do Tips & Techniques in SEO Writing
SEO writing involves a lot of extra steps, so you’d need the writing tips below if you want your SEO content to appear in an ideal position in the search results of search engines like Google, YouTube, and Amazon (yes, those two are search engines too.) These writing tips can also help you bolster your career in digital marketing.
1. Generate topics
Writing for SEO starts not by writing a single word but with planning. If you want your website to gain a considerable amount of traffic, then you need to make sure that both your SEO strategy and content strategy are on point. Before you start writing blog posts, you must conduct quick research first and generate ideas that align with what the users are looking for in Google.
Generating topics for your blog posts may sound challenging at first, but the entire process could be much easier if you know where to look.
One way to generate an ideal topic for your content is by using Q&A tools. Since you want to match the user’s intent, you need to identify what questions your target audience is asking. Why is this important? Not only does generating suitable topics for your articles improve your website’s click-through rate, but you also prime your content for the consumption of the right people you want to get attention to.
Q&A tools like Reddit and Quora can give you decent topic ideas, but it will take considerable time. You can instead use a free tool called Answer The Public to get keyword ideas you can use as topics for your content.
2. Consider the audience
We’ve already stressed the importance of matching the user intent when writing a piece of SEO content for Google. Content writers need to know their target audience if they want to drive more traffic to their website. Google or any other search engine prefers to display the most relevant content to the user’s query, so you must ensure that your content is pointed toward the right audience.
If you want to write for a specific group of people, consider creating an SEO persona. It doesn’t differ much from the classic persona used in traditional marketing. What an SEO persona does is describe a fictitious model that represents the type of users or customers that would be interested in interacting with your content and products or services. Creating such a character forces you to put yourself in the position of your users and therefore understand what keywords they are more likely to choose for their search queries.
Aside from targeting the right people, you should also do your best to ensure that your piece is comprehensible. One of the most common mistakes SEO writers commit is writing for Google. It’s not entirely wrong, but you need to remember that humans are the ones who will read your content, not search engines. With that in mind, you should try your best to make your content as understandable as possible to your readers.
3. Write compelling content
Here’s the fun part about SEO content writing. Chances are you’re not the only writer who has thought of using content to propel their website’s marketing. Countless other content and SEO copywriters are eyeing a spot on the first page of the search results. The competition is fierce, so you must write compelling content that stands out among the rest.
There will be many blog posts similar to yours, so you need to make sure that you produce a compelling piece. High-quality content must be magnetising enough to make the reader stay for the whole ride. By doing so, you’re increasing your page’s average time spent.
Here are some tips to consider when writing content for SEO purposes.
- Address the pain points of the reader
- Use bullet points to similar group ideas instead of compiling them in a short paragraph
- Provide readers with value instead of writing for the sake of it
- Structure your article using subtopics as headers
- Avoid writing walls of paragraph
If you’re an SEO copywriter, then it’s your job in the first place to write compelling copy that can convert readers into customers. We’re sure that you’ve heard the adage “content is king”, and while it has become repetitive, it still holds true, especially for search engines like Google, which emphasises giving users value.
4. Include keywords
Another element that separates typical content writing from SEO writing is keyword research. The whole point of writing SEO content is to rank for specific keywords. When looking for keyword ideas, pick a seed keyword since they’re the most important keywords you should be targeting. Once you’ve selected your target keywords, make sure not to cram the exact keywords over and over into your content, else Google will penalise you for keyword stuffing.
One of the best ways to obtain keyword ideas is to use SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Ubersuggest. But if you don’t have the budget for paid SEO tools, then you can use free tools like Keywordtool.io, AnswerThePublic, and Google Keyword Planner. Use these tools to find your content’s appropriate long-tail and short-tail keywords.
PRO TIP: Keyword research alone is not enough. You must also learn how to strategically place target keywords in places like headings, titles, and the first paragraph of the content.
5. Use related words(LSI)
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords are conceptually-related terms that help search engines understand the context of your content. While it’s proven that Google algorithms don’t use LSI keywords, SEO experts still believe that Google pays close attention to the related terms in your content and uses them to rank your page.
If you want to use LSI keywords to improve your SEO, ensure your most relevant keywords are in the opening part of your text. The sooner those keywords appear in your content, the better. It would help if you also strived to use related keywords on your text so Google could figure out the overall topic of your page.
6. Optimise meta description, title tags, and alt texts
One of the core elements of on-page SEO is optimizing the meta description, title tags, and alt texts. Here’s a quick refresher of the three meta tags we’ve just mentioned:
Meta Description.Webmasters use this meta tag to sketch the idea of their content briefly. Meta descriptions are HTML elements with a 155-character limit and are typically used to give a brief summarization of the page.
Title Tag. This is an HTML code tag used to give web pages a title. You may find title tags both in the title bar of your browser and on the search engine results pages.
Alt Tag. Often referred to as “alt attribute” or “alt description”, it contains the alternative text (alt-text) used for images on a web page.
To optimise these tags for Google, you need to ensure they contain a target keyword. Writing for SEO involves optimizing content and the other tags that are crucial in helping Google understand the context of your page. You must realise that placing a target keyword on meta tags and meta descriptions doesn’t affect web rankings, but they play an indispensable role in keeping your readers glued to your page.
7. Header tags should be structured-well
Keeping your header tags neat and organised will help readers grasp the general outline of your written content without having them read the entire post. But from the perspective of Google, header tags are crucial in giving context to what you just wrote. Utilising the header tags properly will allow the crawlers to quickly analyse your page and index it in their own SERPs.
Try to think of the crawlers as lazy readers just skimming your blog. They’ll want to know what your article is about, so you’d like to strategically use your header tags so you can give these crawlers what they want.
Understanding the different purposes of headers is essential so you can properly use them in your articles.
- H1: Page title (use only once)
- H2: Core points or main topics (use as many times necessary)
- H3: Subtopics of the main topics
- H4: Sub-subtopics; would go down to H7 (rarely used)
Aside from adequately structuring your header tags, you should take advantage of their strategic position and include high-intent keywords on them. Using the right keywords will help you shine a spotlight on your content for the right audience to see, which could give you a much higher chance of winning on the SERPs. Once users visit the keywords they used on their search query on your headers, they’re more likely to stay longer on your page.
8. Compress multimedia
Did you know that unoptimised multimedia is one of the most notorious culprits for slow website speed? High-resolution images consume tons of bandwidth, and it generally needs some time to load. If your post contains multiple heavy photos with sizes of over 100KB each, then they can drastically impact your page speed. If you want to avoid this issue, then it’s in your best interest to optimise your images.
Google favours pages with considerably fast loading speeds. To achieve this, you must compress the images used in your articles. You can still upload high-quality images, but you need to compress them first, so they don’t slow down your webpage. Luckily for you, there are free tools out there like Squoosh app that can compress images without compromising their quality.
It’s also important to understand that image format is an essential consideration for multimedia content. JPEG images are naturally smaller than other image formats like PNG or GIF. If you suspect your website’s ranking is affected because of low page speeds, head over to PageSpeed Insights to get a free website speed analysis and performance diagnosis.
9. Use internal links
One of content writers’ most common mistakes is not including internal links in their blog posts. Most of them only utilise external links without knowing how equally critical internal links are. While external links are believed to impact a page’s search engine rankings significantly, internal links help search engines and users better navigate your website.
Internal links are essential for SEO content because it helps search engines crawl your website more effectively. Think of them as bridges that connect a particular page to another of your website’s pages. If your article contains these links, then the crawlers would have an easier time crawling your website.
Remember that strategically using these links (placing them in the correct places, using relevant anchor text, etc.) can send link juice to the critical pages on your site.
10. Promote the content
SEO writing doesn’t stop with writing content. After creating an article, blog post, guest post, or whatever type of SEO content, you need to find a way to promote it to the public. SEO may differ from content marketing, but they work closely to fuel a website or business’s success. We recommend three methods you can leverage to promote your content to the masses: social media, Google Authorship, and link building.
Social media has reached the height of popularity these past few years, and leveraging its power to promote your content is not a “nice-to-have” anymore – it’s non-negotiable. Share your content on social media platforms and forums so it can gain more traction from interested audiences. Try your best to curate compelling descriptions and call-to-actions to convert more users.
Another way to promote your content is through Google Authorship. Google may have discontinued this program, but some of its elements are still visible on the SERPs in schema markups. Scheme markups are microdata that allows you to distinguish the type of information your content has. With the correct schema markup, you can have a rich snippet you can use for personal promotion.
A proven-and-tested way to drive traffic to your pages is through link building. SEOs view backlinks as the holy grail of search engine optimization, and you must do your best to obtain them. There are many ways to get backlinks, such as using HARO, digital PR, and business association links. Remember that getting backlinks is no easy task, but it sure is rewarding for your website’s search rankings!
Conclusion
Every content writer who aspires to be immersed in digital marketing must learn how to do SEO content writing efficiently and effectively. SEO and content writing is a potent combination that, when used correctly, can drive higher traffic and engagement to your website. Remember that the whole point of SEO writing is not just to appease the search engines to rank in the top spots of the search results but to write content that brings value to the readers. You can do so by including the ten SEO content writing tips in your SEO content strategy and applying them to the best of your abilities.
