Best practices for SEO content writing

Introduction

SEO content writing is one of the most important aspects of any inbound marketing strategy. However, knowing the best practices for SEO content writing can be hard, especially for rookies. To rank high in Google search results, your website and blog posts must include optimized content that is relevant to your target audience. 

 If you’re writing content for your website, it’s important to ensure you’re doing everything possible to optimize it for search engines. write content that is both informative and SEO friendly.

SEO writing practices you should be focussing on.

If you’ve already been introduced to SEO content writing but still find it hard to navigate what works and doesn’t stick around, the information provided in this article is for you. We will focus on the best practices you should focus on to ensure your content is search engine worthy.

Focus on brand authority

The pandemic and its effects on businesses, especially small ones, changed the trajectory of marketing strategies. Most businesses now realize the power of investing in an online marketing strategy, with gaining more organic traffic as the main goal for most.

For this reason, businesses must first focus on their identity and how they present themselves to customers. This is where branding comes in. Here are some best practices for SEO writing with a focus on building brand authority.

Use a singular voice

SEO content is both user-focused and SEO-friendly. For this reason, you must be careful about how the business is projected. Many businesses make the rookie mistake of assuming that company branding is the most important part of brand authority, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

Build your brand around a single person as the authoritative or central figure, preferably the CEO. People are more likely to trust content if it appears to come from a person of authority than from random persons in the blog. The more niche the content, the more optimal it is to use a singular voice.

Have experts write specialized content

SEO content can be highly specialized and requires experts with proficient knowledge of their niches. It is common practice to hire ghostwriters for this practice. The CEO or content strategist can provide a bullet-point outline for writers to write standardized content.

DO: Have different writers that are proficient in their respective topics focus on them. For example, a social media marketing strategist can write content surrounding social media marketing. 

It’s bad practice, however, to have a writer focus too much on content creation that is outside their area of expertise. This will reduce the quality of content created and may affect it negatively. 

Don’t byline writers as staff or make up names. Instead, publish all content under a high authority figure and have them represent the blog’s voice.

Employ the use of quality control

Building on our previous point, using quality control for all articles will help push single voice content. After writers have written content, use a quality control officer to review it and ensure it is up to the company’s standards.

You can employ a QC officer if it is within your operational budget or have the CEO review content before it is published to the public.

Use traditional PR approaches

Traditional PR approaches have been at the top of the marketing strategies food chain for many years because of their proven efficiency. Even with the onset of search engines like Google, a good marketing campaign through media still reigns supreme.

Invest in a digital marketing plan to promote your content to the world. Embed your web page’s content to your social media pages like Instagram and Facebook.

Understand your audience

You’re writing content for an audience, so they should be your first focus when it comes to content strategizing. Spend considerable time learning the demographic you want your content to cater to find out what practices appeal to them. 

Understanding the psyche of your target audience will help you build a winning content strategy. Visitors will interact with the content they feel solves their problem at hand in the most effective, easy, and straightforward way.

Know the goal of your content

You should understand the intent of your content before writing it. Understanding your target audience will help you identify the type of content you want to focus on and create sustainable goals.

Is your content meant for the top of the funnel, the middle, or the bottom?

Come up with a writing plan

Understanding your SEO content writing goals will help make the writing process easier to navigate. A writing plan will help you know how to distribute your content across the calendar, when to post new content, or when to update old blog posts.

A writing plan will help you track what needs to be done and when and help better manage deadlines.

Optimize your web content 

It doesn’t matter how optimized your website is; your SEO strategy will fail if your content is subpar. Search engines love optimized content and will reward good behavior in SEO.

As a content writer, there are a few on-page elements you can focus on to create optimized SEO content.

Keyword research

We cannot stress enough the importance of doing keyword research. Any web content focusing on SEO will always mention keyword research, and for a good reason. Keywords are the bridge between content and the audience.

People use specific search phrases to find content on search engines. Search engines use these search phrases to find matching the best possible matches to provide to users.

Here’s a list of go-to title tag must-do’s to optimize your SEO content writing

• Focus on low-volume keywords that are easy to rank. Our list of free keyword research tools will help you along this process.
• Place your keywords strategically within the content. keywords should be placed in the title tag of the content, the meta description, and within the content on your page.
• Do not stuff content with keywords. Keyword stuffing can be detected by search engine algorithms and can lead to penalties.
• Do competitor analysis to know what keywords your competitors are ranking for.

Title tag

In the words of David Ogilvy;

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

David Ogilvy on advertising `

Here’s a go-to title tag checklist for SEO content writing.

• Keep it short. The recommended word count for title tags is 50-60 characters. Google truncates everything after this to ensure that the title tag conveys the content’s message within the count provided.
• Feature numbers. Title tags with numbers get 35% more clicks than titles without. you do the math.
• The same study as above also discovered that titles with brackets and parentheses have a 38% higher click-through rate.

Meta description

Think of meta description as free advertising on SEO content writing. Meta descriptions give a brief overview of the webpage’s content. A great meta description;

• Is between 100-300 words.
• Contains the focus keyphrase
• Answers the searcher’s most immediate query. It indicates that the content in the webpage has what the searcher is looking for.
• Has an ask. e.g. asking the reader to visit your page for more information.

Title tags are one of the strongest signals for search engines to explain what the page is about. Consumers scan through a web page first before committing to reading its content. The <title tag> should capture the content you’re writing about enough to capture a reader’s attention.

Understand SEO Content Types

A variety of SEO content types are written, each with its own rules and style of writing. As an SEO content writer, you must determine the type of content required and how to write it.

Here is a list of SEO content types you can leverage

• Lists. Focus on a numbered classification of items or ideas under the same topic or group of topics.
  • Example: “15 best keyword research tools that are not Google.
• Guides. Guides give an in-depth understanding of the content on a specific topic. They can span several pages. Moz’s SEO guide dives into more detail.
• Articles. This could be interviews, news, or features – commonly published by news publications.
• Videos. These could be bite-size clips or long-form videos explaining a topic comprehensively. (Tip: YouTube is the second-largest search engine and has its own SEO structure for optimizing video content.)
• Blog posts. Blog posts answer your target audience’s questions, which can also target specific keywords or queries.
• Infographics. These visualize data and help capture organic traffic of searchers looking for quick answers to their queries.
• Product pages. These offer product descriptions while also serving as landing pages for PPC campaigns.
• How-to pieces. Such a piece of content is applauded for being actionable in answering a search query step-by-step.
• Images and slideshows. These could be anything from supplementary and explanatory graphics to a PowerPoint presentation.

Create an editorial calendar and content briefs

With your list of target keywords and topics ready, take the time to organize them in a publishing schedule.

Add a due date and an assignee with each topic – someone who’ll take over the content writing. This could be an in-house writer or a freelancer.

 Publish and track results

Once you hit publish, take the time to review the results.

For example, monitor Google Analytics to understand your posts’ traffic, how long visitors stay on the page, and what they’re clicking on.

To ensure you’re tracking progress correctly, pre-select the metrics to monitor based on your goals. Every quarter or so, review progress against these metrics.

Finally, an important piece in the SEO content writing strategy puzzle: keep refreshing old, evergreen content.

The Google algorithm loves fresh content and prioritizes it when ranking results. Be sure to add this step to your content marketing workflow.

Pay attention to emerging SEO content writing trends

The SEO landscape keeps changing, and you should keep up with the changing times. Follow SEO information websites to keep refreshing yourself on SEO guides provided by search engines such as Google.

On top of changing SEO methods, update your writing skills to keep up with the latest trends. Research proper terms and how they are used, check what content combinations bring in more traffic, and the ideal word count. Keep writing; practice makes perfect!

The difference between SEO content writing and regular content

Not all content is SEO content. Some content is not created for SEO and does not rank organically. Before writing anything, know the difference between the two types of content and the differences between them.

SEO content requires attention to search engine requirements for ranking. Content has to satisfy 200+ ranking factors, requiring the writer to know the industry.

Final word

Best practices in SEO content writing are less about paying attention to the content you’re working on and more about your overall SEO strategy. Content writing is a major part of SEO strategies; Bad content will not be ranked despite an optimized website.

Pay attention to your strategies and how you implement them and remember;

Where people aren’t having any fun, they seldom produce good work.”

 David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man