If you want to be a strong content producer, you have to know how to write good content for SEO. My background is in writing. Growing up, creative writing was one of my favorite pastimes. I thought I knew all the tricks and clever ways of putting more eyes on my stories, but I had no idea how much more there was to learn. The internet has totally changed how we read, what we read, and how we find it.
Good content has become less about us as producers and more about the people we want to target as consumers and customers. For me, learning how to write web content was like learning how to write from entirely different points of view.
SEO still leaves room for plenty of creativity, but you there are unique parameters that define just what makes SEO content good and rank well in search engines. Here’s how to write the content that people want and will read.
Write What Your Audience Is Looking For
It might sound simple, but it’s true. Lots of business owners know they have to have digital content, but they don’t know why, and they don’t know how to do it the right way. Content for its own sake likely won’t be discovered, or if it is, it will be quickly forgotten.
For content to actually work the way it’s meant to, it has to be written for the people who will buy from you. If you know the personalities and habits of your customers, then you already have a great base from which to pull content ideas.
When brainstorming potential blog topics, ask yourself questions about your audience:
- What do they like and dislike?
- Why would they buy from me?
- What are their anxieties and problems?
- What excites them?
- What do they want to learn?
As the content producer, you also need to ask yourself why people ought to listen to you and not your competition. Assess your own business with questions like:
- Why do customers buy from me?
- What do I know that they don’t know?
- What makes my company unique?
- What types of products and services do my customers want the most?
You’re the industry expert, and content is your key to acting like one. It’s another way of helping people, which is really what it’s all about. Writing a blog that’s educational and entertaining is easy when you have the interests of the customer at heart.
When SEO was still evolving, content producers weren’t always acting in good faith. Search engines like Google were much easier to manipulate than they are now. As a result, a lot of content was written just for the sake of manipulating the algorithms of those engines to work in their favor and boost their rankings. Whether the content was actually helpful to people who found it was secondary, but in many cases, it wasn’t.
Search engines are much smarter nowadays, and they are hypersensitive to garbage content that exists solely to trick it. The only way to climb the ranks of Google and attract web traffic is by writing content that people actually want.
The key to quality content really is that simple: Write for people, not search algorithms.
Choose a Good Keyword Focus for Each Piece of Content
For all the evolutions that SEO has undergone, the keyword still remains its heartbeat. Keywords are the words people enter into the search bar of Google. They pull up those web pages that have the most clicks and views. They tell Google that a blog is relevant to a word people are using to help them find the content they want.
As we’ve discussed before, content and SEO are inseparable. Without keywords, your content will struggle to help Google understand why people should care about it. Center every web page you publish around a well-researched keyword focus.
Even if you’re struggling to decide what you should write about, keywords can serve as entire topics and spawn more ideas. They aren’t an afterthought or an add-on, they are the crux of each new blog and page. Keyword research is more about just helping your content rank better, it’s about finding what you should write about.
When digging through keywords related to your business and industry, make a list of the words you can most easily capitalize on. A keyword already being fought over by lots of other companies might not be of much use to you as one that doesn’t have as much competition. You want words that you can easily rank for and will also attract substantial traffic to your pages.
Keywords don’t just come out of thin air. Google has mountains of data that tracks what people are searching for, and that information is accessible to anyone who wants to look for it. Keyword research is the first step to content creation, and still one of the most important ones.
There are a lot of tools available to you that help you mine those keywords. Google Keyword Planner has been the favorite of many bloggers and content writers for years, but plenty of competing resources exist that may, depending on your needs, exceed the possibilities of what Google offers. Here are a few:
Keyword focus makes the path to writing, editing, and finish the blog very clear. As long as the content stays true to the keyword, and the keyword is relevant to your industry, your business, and your audience, it is destined for success.
Insert the Keyword Into Your Content
This sounds simple enough, but placing the keyword into your article takes some skill to do it the right way. A lot of web writers have trouble avoiding common on-page SEO problems, but they can be avoided.
When you integrate a keyword with your content, it needs to be placed in specific areas:
- In the title tags
- In the meta description
- Near the introduction of the article
- In the article URL
Placing the keyword into the body of your article should be easy and natural. If it feels like you’re forcing it into the content, you need to reevaluate the tone and direction of the article and edit it in a way that helps it better focus on the chosen keyword.
If you’re including images in your article, make sure it is paired with your chosen keyword phrase:
- In the alt tags
- In the file name
Coupling the keyword phrase with an outgoing link to an article that’s related to the keyword can enhance the value of your SEO. Relevant outgoing links have a place in Google’s search engine algorithms and, if it determines the link is relevant, will boost the page’s rankings.
Format Your Content for the Internet
A huge part of how Google assess the quality of a piece of content is how it is formatted for the ways we read web pages on the internet. The structure of your blog is equally important to the words you write, and in some ways, it dictates how you write those words.
The first step to putting eyes to your content is persuading someone to click on the page. When the link to your page shows up in a list of a bunch of related links on a search engine results page (SERP), it has to outshine those other links. You can make your page the catch of the day with a few perpetually reliable steps:
- Create a title for the web page. This sounds self-explanatory, but inserting title tags into the content tells Google the name of the web page, and it shows up in the SERPs. Without title tags, Google has to guess the name. Make sure it’s no longer than 60 characters so that it doesn’t get cut off.
- Write a meta description for the page. Do you see that text under the title in the SERPs? That’s known as the meta description, which is an extra way of telling search engines users what the page is all about. This helps them more easily make a decision about whether they want to click your page. If you can write a strong meta description in 160 characters or less, you have them hooked.
- Insert the keyword in both the title tags and the meta description to help Google understand what this page is about and to strengthen your search engine rankings. When people see the keyword in their results, they’ll know it’s legitimate.
Persuading someone to click the link to your web page is one step, but keeping them engaged after they click is another one, and it requires a lot more planning.
The internet, and Google, in particular, has cultivated a culture of instant gratification. People want what they want now, not later. The last thing anyone wants to do–you and I included–is read a huge slab of text on the internet. Writing for the internet will change the way you write if you’re new to the industry.
When you write online content, write concisely. This means crafting sentences and paragraphs that can be quickly scanned and still be understood. Write in short, punchy sentences that readers can quickly understand.
Don’t make try to wow them with clever or flowery wording. Web readers will retreat at the first feeling of confusion.
If you’re reviewing your work to discover that you wrote a lengthy paragraph that takes up half a page, break it down by:
- Dividing it into extra paragraphs
- Listing it as bullet points
- Removing unnecessary words
The structure of a blog matters a lot when you want people to read your content through the end. If you’re writing worthwhile content, then you should have a lot of different talking points within paragraphs. Distinguish those different parts from each other.
Group similar paragraphs together and put them under a header. You probably noticed that this blog has been divided into several sections under multiple headers. These sections help you readers understand what it is they are going to read about. It makes scanning your page easier and boosts reading comprehension.
We’re writing words here, but visuals can elevate your content from good to awesome. Placing images or videos alongside your paragraphs can not only inspire people to continue reading, but it also makes your content more memorable. As Hubspot found, people retain 65% of the information they hear and read 3 days later if that information is paired with a visual.
Write Long-Form Content That Will Last
Sounds kind of like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? If people have short attention spans and want to find information now and not later, why would long-form content be worth investing in?
The internet is a staple in our lives not just because it offers entertainment, but also education. We use the internet to learn and explore topics. And if people learn a lot from your content, there’s a higher chance they will share it with others.
When you educate people, you give them value. Content always has to be valuable if you want it to stand the test of time. Short blogs of 500 words or less don’t usually generate that long-lasting value. When you write, aim high. SerpiQ found that the average content length for the top 10 results for more than 20,000 keywords was around 2,000 words.
The parameters that define long-form content differ, depending on who you talk to, but the consensus is that pages of 1,500 words or more qualify as long-form. Having a large word limit gives you room to explore topics in depth.
One of the biggest goals of content production for most businesses is establishing themselves as an authority in their industry. If you’re writing lengthy, in-depth pieces, then you command more attention than a competitor who is only churning out 500-word pieces. Use a word limit like 1,500 or 2,000 to dissect the problems of your audience and then provide the solution.
Long-form content is also much more adaptable for other marketing purposes than short-form content is. Repurpose your thoroughly-written article through a number of ways:
- Turn one point your article makes into an image or video.
- Summarize the different points of your article in an infographic and distribute it on social media.
- Turn your article into an entire marketing campaign to collect email addresses and generate leads.
All of this said, quality still beats quantity. Don’t draw out your article with fluff just to reach a word count. Content for its own sake will likely fail. That’s why it’s so important to research your topic thoroughly before you begin typing. People and search engines will know if you’re trying to fill them, so don’t bother.
The more value you provide in a single piece of content, the more people will come to you before they visit anyone else. That’s why industry leaders always leverage content.
As a business owner, you have a lot to say about your specialty. Why not share your knowledge with others? Content marketing lets you influence people and win them as customers just by teaching them what you know and how it helps them. Build trust, win new clients, and make more profits.
If you’re struggling to write good digital content that translates into more web traffic, more followers, and more customers, let’s have a chat about what we can help you do differently. Our content marketing strategies marry in-depth, educational content with smart and strategic SEO practices for small businesses like yours to establish you as an industry leader both online and offline.
