A Complete Guide on SEO Content Writing
Writing well for your blogs is important because it helps you communicate effectively and maintain your branding. The way you write also affects how readers perceive you. In other words, good writing makes you sound more competent and professional. Writings also play a crucial role in ranking your websites.
19% of companies achieved success with their content marketing efforts in 2021.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is crucial to every webmaster’s job. With proper optimization, your site will rank high in Google searches. It means less traffic and fewer sales. If you want to increase the number of visitors to your website, then you need to optimize your content.
Hence SEO writing is the thing you need!
But What exactly is SEO Content Writing? Let’s checkout!
What Is SEO Content Writing?
The term “SEO content” is used to describe any content that is written to rank high in search engines. It includes blog posts, articles, podcasts, videos, infographics, and a web copy.
Put another way. It’s any content that is optimized for search engines. |
But why worry about optimizing for a keyword? Isn’t it easier to rank for a keyword? These two should be synonymous. However, there are some cases where it makes sense to do one over the other.
For example, you should optimize a podcast episode for a specific keyword because you’re trying to rank highly. Or, write a blog post around a particular topic and use keywords throughout the piece to help readers find what they’re looking for.
But many experts believe that focusing too much on keywords can hurt your rankings. Keywords are essential, but they shouldn’t dictate your entire strategy.
However, most people need to realize that good SEO content can focus on something other than keywords. |
When we say optimizing for a keyword, it means using its variations and their LSI instead of keyword stuffing. There are other parameters such as optimizing headings, keeping the length of the sentences below 20 words, using short paragraphs upto 3-4 lines, etc., to make your write-up SEO friendly.
Quality Content Matters Most After Google Helpful Content Update
Google announced a significant change to how it ranks web pages. The quality of your site content could have an even more substantial impact on your rankings. It means that writing great content is more important than ever.
High-quality content is classified as snippet-friendly, NLP-optimized (often known as Surfer SEO Optimized Content), statistically driven and powered with an external link from high-authority domain sites. |
In addition to the quality of your content, other factors influence where your content appears in search results. Factors such as web core vitals, backlink profiles, etc., also play a vital role. (However, these are part of an effective SEO strategy that we will discuss in another blog).
Secret Sauces Goes into Writing SEO Content
Here are the essential factors that one should take into account before creating a masterpiece for SEO content:
· Define your goals
When creating SEO content, start with your overall goal. What do you want to accomplish? If you don’t know, ask yourself why you’re writing the piece in the first place. Is it because you want to increase brand awareness? Drive traffic to your site? Generate sales leads?
Ensure you’ve understood how each piece of content fits into your larger plan. Once you know how everything relates to one another, you’ll be able to make smarter decisions about where to spend your precious resources.
· Playing Around with SERP Presentation
Google’s featured snippets are becoming increasingly common. And just like the rest of Google’s algorithm changes, there are multiple types of featured snippets that rank differently.
These snippets are easy to rank for with excellent SEO writing copy. They are also likely to drive your organic traffic primarily as the users looking for specific queries will bump into your website through these snippets.
The SEO topics you choose to write must have been covered broadly or precisely in other blog posts.
With the help of featured snippets, you can expect to gain organic traffic to your website with your snippet ranking. |
The best thing you can do is learn which ones work well for your business and then create content accordingly.
· A Killer Headline
Headlines are one of the essential parts of any piece of writing. They serve as your content’s tour guides and decide where your content leads. So how do you make sure that your headline attracts attention? You start with a bang.
Every headline needs to stand out. And there are specific rules you must follow while creating a headline. These are the key points to remember about headings:
- Write your headline like a question.
- Use action verbs.
- Include keywords.
- Make it short and sweet.
- Be specific.
· Appropriate Mix of Keywords without Overstuffing
The way we write today is different from what it used to be. In the early days of the web, there wasn’t much competition. You could rank high without having to worry about how you wrote. But now, there are thousands of sites competing for attention. And the best way to stand out isn’t just by writing great content — it’s by knowing exactly what words people are searching for.
It would help to consider the keywords you use when crafting your content carefully. Use them sparingly. Instead, try to include a few key phrases in every article. That way, if someone searches for those terms, your page will appear at the top of their list.
· Use the right length.
If you’re planning on writing long articles, you should remember that only some read the same amount of text. Some prefer short pieces, while others enjoy reading lengthy ones.
So, before you begin writing, take some time to figure out what kind of content works best for your audience. Then, stick to that format. Detailed competitor analysis helps you to choose the right content size to compete with them on SERPs by adding all the relevant sections satisfying the user intent.
· Right Structuring of Content
When you look at the best content out there, you’ll notice something interesting: it’s structured. There are clear divisions within each paragraph and even within individual sentences.
This structure makes it easier for readers to understand what’s being communicated and helps keep things organized. So here are some tips for structuring your content correctly.
- Use subheadings to separate critical points.
- Keep paragraphs short–no more than three lines of text.
- Write as you talk. Don’t try too hard to sound smart. Just speak clearly.
- Be consistent. If you’ve used bolding and italics in one section, do the same throughout.
- Make sure everything adds value.
- Include a call to action.
- Add images where appropriate.
- Proofread before publishing.
· Focus on Reader-Friendly Content
Writing for Google is about much more than just keywords. It should be appealing to humans as well. Google guidelines suggest the content should be ‘By the people and for the People’. Hence, It should be something other than a machine-generated text manipulating the SERPs.
Instead, your content needs to be readable by both. If you want to rank well, your goal should be to write reader-friendly and search-engine-friendly content. Content that fails to engage attracts a higher bounce rate and signals back to search engines about its low quality.
· Know Your Audience
You can use survey data and analytics tools to learn more about your audience. This information can give you insight into the types of questions your audience is asking and where they spend their time online. Once you know what topics interest your audience, you can design content around those interests.
Excitingly presenting information is also effective in hooking your audience. For instance, if you sell health supplements, you should produce infographics showing the benefits of different vitamins.
Finally, make sure your site is optimized to work well on smartphones and tablets. Your audience will likely only browse your site on a desktop computer if it loads quickly enough.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How is SEO writing different from Copywriting?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) writing is the implementation of keywords and key phrases within web content. The SEO content writer and marketer use SEO to increase their sites’ organic visibility and SERP ranks. The best way to write content for SEO is to pair quality copy with targeted search terms because it considers how people look for information online.
Copywriting presents a large chunk of information in a few impressive words. It is often used in advertisements and website content to promote specific products/services. It is one of the crucial aspects of any advertising or marketing strategy.
An SEO copywriter focuses on what makes each piece unique, relevant, and valuable to the reader. SEO content provides a clear call to action and encourages action when done well.
2. How Long Does SEO Writing Take to Work?
Based on various industry studies and numerous of our experiments, here are a few things you might not know about how long it takes for content to truly “mature”:
It Takes About 100 Days At Minimum For Content To Mature |
Google is constantly testing and tweaking algorithms behind the scenes. So, what does this mean for you? If you publish great content today, you could see significant rankings drop over the next couple of weeks. But, if you wait another month or two, you’ll likely see consistent gains with continuous updation in such content.
3. How does SEO Writing help with Backlinking?
Backlinks are links from other websites pointing to yours. They’re essential because they help Google understand the most valuable pages to users. When determining page value, Google considers backlinks as one of the main ranking factors.
When you create high-quality content, you naturally attract backlinks. It is the case with most of the viral and high-ranking content.
Conclusion
SEO content writing is the key ranking factor in the modern world. If you have an online business, you should know the importance of SEO content writing.
It would help to consider hiring professional SEO writing agencies like Banter Marketo. We have a team of highly qualified writers to accommodate all your requirements related to SEO writing. Our affordable SEO writing packages aim at growing the businesses like yours together