Optimising your website's content for better ranking is one of the essential aspects of SEO. You need to write SEO content that resonates with your audience and appeals to search engine bots and crawlers. For this to happen, you will need high-quality content and follow SEO writing best practices.
If your content is valuable and relevant to users, search engines will rank it well. The SEO ranking process starts with Google crawling your website and ends with indexing your content.
When learning how to write content for SEO, here are the things you can do to ensure content is relevant and ranks on search engines:
Target keywords most users are looking for
Match the users' search intent
Optimise the on-page SEO components, such as title tags and headers
After integrating SEO writing into your content creation, your website will:
Attain steady organic traffic
Offer readers more information to motivate them to take action
Attract new audience who have found satisfying answers to their queries in your article
So, how can you ensure you are writing great SEO content and ensure your website yields great results?
What is SEO Writing?
SEO content writing, also known as search engine optimization writing, is the process of creating content and optimising it for search engines. The main goal is to improve your website’s visibility on the search engine results pages for your target keywords or phrases.
Optimising your content will help you attract more organic traffic, resulting in higher conversion and sales.
By incorporating various SEO practices when writing content, you can give search engines more insights into what your content is about. Search engines will then use these insights to determine whether your content is relevant to the users' search questions.
Tips for SEO Content Writing
Whether you want to grow your brand or increase visibility, the below tips will guide you through your SEO content writing process.
1. Write useful SEO content for humans, not Google
When writing SEO content, your primary focus should be writing for humans. Google recently made this a ranking factor. When you write for humans, you align your content strategy with answering real questions, ensuring people get the most relevant and valuable content.
User-friendly content should be written in a natural language free from keyword stuffing. You should structure your content in a way that is easy to consume, ensuring you have clear headings, concise paragraphs, and include multimedia elements to enhance comprehension.
To write content for humans first, you need to understand your audience’s needs and behaviour. This means understanding their struggles, concerns and pain points. When you prioritise users in your SEO content, your content will rank well, building trust and credibility for your brand.
2. Ensure your content meets user search intent
When writing your SEO content, it’s important to match it to the search intent. This is a principle in SEO content writing that helps you create content that resonates with your target audience and delivers tangible results.
Matching the search intent in content writing involves writing content that addresses the different types of search intent users may have when searching on the search engine.
There are four types of search intent:
Informational: the user is searching for information on a specific topic. For example, how to tie a tie.
Navigational: the user is searching for a specific website. For example, amazon.com
Commercial: the user is searching for product options. For example, iPhone vs Nokia phone
Transactional: the user is searching for a specific product to buy. For example, buy Nike shoes.
Here are some reasons why you should match the search intent:
Enhances user experience: When a user clicks on a search result and finds content that aligns with their needs and ends up taking the desired action, such as purchasing or subscribing to a newsletter, it leads to positive experiences that benefit your brand's reputation and contribute to improved rankings.
Improves your website performance: Search engines aim to deliver users the most relevant and useful content. Therefore, when your content aligns with the specific intent of a query, search engines are more likely to rank it higher in the SERPs, helping you increase your organic traffic.
Helps you tailor your content to your buyer’s journey: Whether users are in the research or purchasing stage, understanding the search intent can help you write content that guides them through the buyer's journey and addresses their specific needs, increasing your chances of conversion.
So, how can you make sure your content matches the search intent?
First, search a query on Google and look at the results it returns. For example, when you search for “Best baby food”, the SERPS return results showing a commercial intent as shown in the image below.
Therefore, when writing content that targets “best baby food,” you should write baby food product reviews to match the search intent for the query.
3. Add relevant internal and external links
When writing your SEO content, strategically using internal and external links plays a great role in improving the quality and effectiveness of your content.
These links serve different purposes and understanding their importance is crucial for your content performance. They both enhance user experience, add credibility and signal topic authority.
Internal links
Internal links are hyperlinks pointing from one page on a website to another page on the same website. Using internal links in your content helps you create a network connection between different pages and articles on your website.
These connections enhance user navigation and offer them easier access to related content. Using internal links in your content brings about a lower bounce rate, increased engagement and increased dwell time.
Internal linking also helps distribute the authority of your high-ranking pages to other website pages. This means when you link a high-ranking page to a less authoritative one, you pass along some link juice, helping these pages improve their ranking on the SERPs.
Below is an image showing how an internal URL structure looks.
Image source: Search engine land
External links
External links, on the other hand, also known as outbound links or outgoing links, are hyperlinks that point from one webpage on a website to a different website. When adding external links to your website, ensure the links are relevant and from reputable websites.
Relevant external links benefit both the readers and your website ranking. This helps you provide valuable references and supporting evidence, signalling you have done thorough research by providing authoritative and trustworthy information. Your website, on the other hand, gets associated with reputable websites, helping you build trust and credibility.
4. Keyword Research
A thorough Keyword research is the foundation for writing any engaging article. When doing keyword research, you should choose the most relevant phrase and understand its search intent.
Search engines use keywords to understand what your content is about. This is why you need to use relevant keywords in your content. Doing this will help increase your organic traffic.
Ensure to use both primary and secondary keywords and to distribute them naturally throughout the article. The primary keyword is the main keyword you would want your content to focus on, while secondary keywords are keywords that support your primary keyword.
Ensure you use your keywords naturally in your article without keyword stuffing, or Google will penalise you.
Use tools like Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush to find the most relevant keywords for your piece of content. Choose your most suitable keyword by looking at the search volume and keyword difficulty. If you produce content for a less authoritative website, targeting keywords with less keyword volume and low keyword difficulty would be best.
5. SERP Analysis
SERP analysis plays a major role in SEO content writing. It will guide you to align your content with user intent, helping you to optimise it for search engines.
For example, if you want to create content around the keyword “best smartphones,” doing a SERP analysis will reveal if other users are looking for product reviews, price comparisons or specific smartphones.
The image above shows the keyword “best iPhone” return product review content. Therefore, your content should follow suit, offering in-depth and high-quality reviews for iPhones.
Also, you should check the interactive multimedia elements like images and videos the top-ranking pages have included in their content to include in your piece. From the above example, you can see images as elements to include in your content.
When you understand the SERPs, you will write content that addresses the user queries and that is optimised for specific content formats and elements that resonate with your audience and search engines, giving you a high chance of ranking.
Here is how to do a SERP analysis:
Google the query you are targeting.
Take note of the top ten search results.
Look at the type of content the top competing websites published to understand their approach and guide you with details to writing your content.
Check if there are SERP features you should include in your article.
Check if competitors have graphics, videos or images to include in your content.
Challenges and Misconceptions in SEO Content Writing
There are a few challenges you might face when writing your SEO content. Understanding how to overcome these challenges and misconceptions is essential to creating effective SEO content that ranks.
Here are some of the challenges:
Balancing keywords
Getting the perfect balance between using keywords for SEO while maintaining readable and natural content takes time and effort. Overusing keywords might affect user experience. You should always make sure to use your keywords naturally throughout your content without forcing them.
Algorithm changes
Google algorithms are ever-changing. So, keeping pace with the changes and adapting your SEO content accordingly can take time and effort. Therefore, it’s important to be on the lookout for new updates and adapt to them for your SEO efforts to remain relevant.
Content saturation
Most niches are highly competitive, leading to content saturation. You need a well-thought-out SEO content writing strategy to stand out from the crowd.
Content updates
You need to update old content frequently to maintain its SEO relevance. While this is time-consuming, ignoring it will lead to declining rankings.
SEO content writing misconceptions include:
Quantity over quality
Quantity does not guarantee improved ranking on Google. High-quality, relevant content brings about improved ranking on the SERPs. Google prioritises content quality over quantity.
Keyword stuffing
Many people think that stuffing keywords helps improve SEO. This strategy will only result in penalties from Google and result in poor user experience.
SEO is all about keywords
Even though keywords are vital, SEO includes many factors such as user experience, SEO technical optimisation and website structure all play a vital role in your SEO performance.
SEO guarantees instant results
Since SEO is a gradual process, the results take time to materialise. Therefore, you must continuously and consistently implement your SEO strategy and be patient.
Wrap Up
Implementing these SEO writing tips will help you to optimise your content for search engines and help you improve your ranking, become visible on the SERPs and attract organic traffic, resulting in more conversions and revenue.
Remember, you also need to stay informed on SEO best practices to maintain long-term success in your SEO content writing efforts.
Download SEO Content Writing Guide for Visibility and SEO Readability under the image below or visit our blog for more resources.
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