Is it possible to get search engine traffic without knowing about SEO?
Of course, it is! But your chances of getting organic traffic are much higher when you know how to write SEO content.
SEO-friendly content writing does not start with keyword stuffing. As a writer, you are responsible for the content. You have to understand your audience and their needs and then answer them.
The biggest mistake that writers make is treating their content as an afterthought. The key to writing high-quality web copy for search engines is to start with a great understanding of your subject matter and then do proper keyword research.
Your goal is to provide valuable information to your audience through your articles, blog posts, and pages. So don’t forget that the main purpose of writing for search engines is to help people.
If your content is valuable, relevant, keyword-targeted, SEO-friendly, no one can stop you from ranking at the top of search results.
According to content marketers, 96% say strategizing content marketing correctly has helped build trust and credibility with the audience.
Today, content strategy is not bound to blogging; many other forms are used to satisfy searchers’ needs, such as video content, infographics, white paper, ebooks, and more. Among them, video content, blogs, ebooks are more powerful and have more engagements.
Image Source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/content-marketing-and-beyond/
Therefore, today we will look at the checklist for web content writing. We will point out the essential things a website owner, content creator, blogger, or else must focus on for ranking their website on the first page of Google.
Highlights of Contents
20 Points To Consider While Writing SEO-Friendly Web Content
Here is some SEO content creation strategy that you must follow to get first ranking and organic search traffic to your website. In short, these tips help write SEO-optimized web content.
1. Establish Your Search Intents Strategy.
The foremost thing, avoid guessing; instead, try to find out the searcher’s intent. Simply throw a series of questions to yourself:
- What is your target person looking for?
- What problem are they trying to solve?
- What solution do they want?
These questions will help you to step into the shoes of the searcher. There can be different types of searcher intent :
Informational queries: In this category, create educational-based content that satisfies this type of intent.
Comparison queries: For this category, write content that offers in-depth information about the terms so that searchers would easily figure out what solution is best for them.
Transactional queries: Here, your searcher is at the bottom of the funnel, and they are ready to buy, then offer content that influences them to buy your product/service.
Navigational queries: In this, searchers are known with your brand and want to know how they would reach out.
2. Perform Keyword Research
Keywords are one of the important elements in search marketing, whether you are doing SEO, SEM, SMO. For that, you can use a keyword search tool like Keyword Planner to find high-performing keywords that can be used in a title, subheading, body, or any part of the web page.
Note keyword research can win or break your whole efforts in digital marketing. Meaningful keyword research will help you achieve your goal of capturing leads, generating more page views, and selling products. Therefore, pay more attention to this section, pick a popular keyword, and keyword difficulty is less.
SEO-optimized content is not limited to keyword research; there are more to go; check out more different ways.
3. Create an Engaging Headline
When you are known with your target audience, searcher intent, and, keywords start creating a headline that attracts your audience and justifies the content intent.
For example, your content is about SEO benefits for marketers, and your headline is what SEO is? Then the probability of clicking your headline and going inside is almost zero.
Therefore, before starting writing, think about the post title and deliver the content you promise to serve with your tile.
4. Try To Include Primary Keyword In The Headline
When it comes to SEO-optimized content creation, it’s a great idea to use primary keywords (targeted keywords) in the headline. Using primary keywords in the headline of a blog post helps to get high search engine rankings.
The structure of keywords in a title should be primary keyword + secondary keyword. For example, you are writing a blog on reducing business costs, and Titling like this ‘ “How to Reduce Your Business Costs by Doing More with Less” will work well.
5. Maintain Proper Blog Length
This is the most important part of the SEO content writing checklist, where you have to write content on a particular topic. Get in mind that quality web content should be more than 300 words long. If your post is around 200 words, it doesn’t fulfill Google’s policy, and search engines will treat it as thin content. Search engines ignore thin content, and thus they don’t give any value to it.
What is thin content? Thin content means a piece of content with few words that don’t help the searcher solve his problem.
For example, someone writes a thin post on how to create an email account in Gmail. The number of words written in this post is less than 200 words. Then probably here you have either skipped some steps, which is not a proper answer to the user’s query. Hence, Google will find it worthless and never going to rank it.
Here is a glimpse of the blog post length that keeps changing over periods.
Image Source: https://databox.com/blog-post-length
6. Keep Your Content In-Depth
Since the main aim of content creation is to make the readers understand your product/service, it’s advised that you should write an in-depth article. Instead of writing a long story, break up the content into different parts, paragraphs, etc.
7. Include ‘Call To Action’ (CTA) With Your Main Contents
Every article should have a main point or reason why readers should come to your website. Unlike traditional blogs, you must have a Call To Action (CTA) at the end of your blog, which has a link that redirects users to the main page of your site.
When users click on the CTA button, they will be redirected to an external page that provides more information.
Adding CTA with your main entrance content helps the page understand what the reader came for and gives a clear message to find the most valuable information.
8. Summarize Your Content At The End Of Each Blog
When you have large content, it’s a good idea to summarize your whole article at the end of each blog. Summarizing the entire article content in a single paragraph would help people understand what you are trying to say.
With Summary, you can link the entire blog and encourage your readers to read other parts of your content.
9. Use Your Keywords As An Anchor Text For Linking To Other Blogs
When you are writing about any specific topic and want to share it with another resource, it’s advised that you use keywords as links.
Always use keywords as a link to another blog post while sharing my content on other blogging platforms. It helps to capture the attention of search engines and increases ranking position in SERPs.
Must Read: Top 10 SEO Trends You Must Follow in 2021
10. Use ‘SEO’ Keywords In Content, But Don’t Over Do It.
We have seen many bloggers who overuse keywords in the content. Putting a keyword more than two times feels like spamming to me, and it’s also not good for reader engagement. If your content is not interesting enough, readers will leave within seconds after reading the first paragraph of your blog.
If you are using specific keywords many times, it won’t sound good for readers and search engine crawlers. If the content is boring or has too much SEO targeting, readers will leave your blog and give a negative review on social media sites and forums.
The major aim of a blogger is to create an amazing experience for the readers that they would want to share their content on social media networks. If your blog posts get hundreds of social shares per day, it’s only because of your title and body.
11. Provide Proper Sources of Information.
Use citations to get more authority and credibility for your blog post. This is very important so that the readers will trust you, and through this, they will be able to find out further information by themselves when they want to know something related to your topic.
Keep sources easy-to-find links. It’s best to use hyperlinks that go directly to the source. If you’re using a visual tool like PowerPoint or Prezi or creating PDFs of your content, there will be no direct link option. In this case, provide a URL in the body where users can found all the full sources.
12. Use Direct and Indirect Quotes To Highlight Keywords
Quoting is a great way to share an idea from a credible source. When you quote someone, their words get linked to your keyword, too, thereby supporting both content and SEO objectives.
Keywords can also be used in bullet points, bold text, italicized text, and at the end of a blog post.
For example, in the below image keyword- top web design companies are highlighted.
13. Break Big Paragraphs Into Small Ones
Most bloggers write one long paragraph with 500+ words in blogging – that is not good enough from a reader’s perspective. Try not to make this mistake in writing your web content for SEO.
Regular breaks are important for improving the readability and usability of your content. Try breaking up different long paragraphs into 3-5 sentences each to read them easily. It also makes your text easy to scan, remember, share, and link to.
If you want to write an article longer than 1000 words, divide it into different parts.
14. Use Subheadings In Your Content
The use of the <h1>, <h2> , <h3> , <h4> tag makes your content easy to read, memorable, and fast for accessing on search engines. It helps in improving the ranking of a page that has lots of texts or long sentences.
Image Source: Google
When you add a heading tag into your content, it appears as a bolded text on the left-hand side of the page. This heading tag can also help you access your content quickly when you want to assign it into different sections through direct links.
If you are writing a blog post, titles and subheadings break up the text and make it easy to read to understand the content and make quick decisions for your business.
15. Break Long Paragraphs Into Visuals
Use images, charts, graphs, tables, and videos in your blog posts to make them more SEO-friendly. It makes your post-SEO-friendly because when search engines like Google or Yahoo crawl the pages, they give more value to content with images than text.
An image is worth a thousand words, so using an infographic makes it easier for the readers to understand your content easily and quickly.
Research shows that around 55% of users respond better whenever they see visuals in a post or page, and adding videos into your blog posts has around 94% better click-through rates than plain text posts. You can easily create lots of images, videos, etc., using free online tools like Canva.
16. Write Focused, Useful <Title> Tags For Each Blog Post.
Better heading tags will help you organize your blog post into different sections and assist users with quick comprehension.
Wrong use of heading tag or no use of it can easily confuse readers. So, the purpose should be clear from a header when someone clicks on it, whether they want to know something about an infographic or some text.
You can easily set a catchy title for your blog post by using descriptive words or phrases, which will help readers to understand what type of content they will find in the post before clicking through to read it.
The title is also an important factor that helps you rank better in search results. So, don’t use general, vague, or misleading phrases in your title, as it will not only confuse readers but also may harm your chances of ranking high in search results.
17. Include Primary Keyword In The First Paragraph
The first paragraphs are important for readers to understand the intent of your content easily. You need to hook them up with a catchy introduction; it’s also important to include relevant keywords that have the power to help you rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). It will help you get more backlinks also.
For example, the publisher included its primary keyword in the first paragraph in the below content. However, it is impossible for every content, but try to include it in the initial paragraphs.
18. Let Outbound Links To Open In a New Page
When you have created an engaging blog post that satisfies your target audience, it’s time to set outbound links in the text. Also, if you want to get more backlinks, this step is important for building quality links.
What’s the importance of setting outbound links? Setting outbound links opens a new page so that it helps to get more backlinks and traffic.
Setting outbound links is easy; you need to create an internal link by using hard-hitting keywords for the anchor text. So that search engines can understand that you are referring to existing content on your website or any other author’s website.
19. Optimize For Social Sharing
Add a social sharing area in the post but don’t make it look overcrowded. By doing this, your readers can take help of your content easily and share it with their friends on various social media accounts.
The social sharing box is organized above the ‘fold’ section; you need to design a creative layout to focus on your sub-heading and body content.
There is a new SEO trend on the Internet, i.e., cards. The websites with card-style are enjoying higher CTRs because of their appealing, interesting, and minimalist designs; moreover, they have a social sharing area, making them more popular on social media platforms among users.
So, if you can create a creative layout for your cards, you can use it as a social sharing area.
20. Bonus Point: Check on-page SEO
This is an optional step but necessary when you want to get higher search rankings in the SERPs.
According to Google’s PageRank, all elements from headings to links in a page contribute toward a website’s authority. So by using proper heading tags like H2 or H4 and relevant keywords for your content, you can easily capture the attention of search engines.
But this is not sufficient to get higher page rankings; you need to do internal linking and optimize your content for targeted keywords.
Also read, Increase Web Traffic And Get Links Using Skyscraper Content [ 3 Easy Steps]
Ending Words
We hope this post will help you create SEO-friendly content to get more pageviews, generate more leads, and increase your sales.
Writing SEO content has become an art, but it’s all about the basics: research your topic, select words that people will click on in search engines, and write for humans first. Keyword placement is very important to ensure that you get the greatest clicks from readers searching for your keywords.
FAQs
How do you write SEO content for 2021?
Here are quick tips you must follow to write SEO content:
- Choose the right keyword.
- Identify search intent.
- Create an optimized meta title.
- Be creative with your H1 title.
- Create an optimized meta description.
- Include graphs, photos, videos, or other visual content.
- Make sure your content is organized and well written.
What is SEO in content writing?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO content, in general, those that follow search engine guidelines. This way, it is easy for crawlers to recognize it to rank the web copy higher on the search results page more frequently.
SEO content writing is all about making sure that you write SEO-optimized articles, blogs, and web pages. Content must be easily readable, targeted, and relevant to the topic of your website. It should further be robust enough to attract users as well as search engines. Content is a very crucial part of the Search engine optimization process.
Is more content better for SEO?
In short, the answer is yes. The key to a high-ranking website that ranks well in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) relies on user experience design, keyword research process, the structure of content, length of content, etc.
