Last modified on: April 15th, 2024
Today, many digital marketers, and especially content marketers write content to publish online. However, a valuable skill to have is understanding SEO writing.
Writing with SEO best practices in mind can increase the chance of ranking your content on search engines like Google and being found by your target audience.
SEO is a crucial marketing strategy that more and more businesses are trying to implement into their online presence. The reason is simple, better SEO means more exposure, more customers, more growth, and ultimately more profits.
What is SEO writing? Find out below, including how it works, business benefits, and how to improve your SEO writing so you can write more content that ranks.
What is SEO Writing?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. Generally, this term refers to the practice of adjusting the contents of a webpage so that search engines like Google give the page higher priority when displaying search results relevant to the topic.
The main purpose of SEO is to get a webpage or set of pages to rank higher on the search results page for a primary keyword and topic so that more people see it.
A website can earn such valuable priority by optimizing its content in ways that trigger Google’s algorithms to deem it “more useful” to people searching the related keywords when compared to other pages on the internet.
SEO writing is a type of writing that aims to create content that ranks in search engines while being helpful to relevant users. The ultimate goal of SEO writing is to help a website appear in the top results of a search page.
As such, we can define SEO writing as a form of copywriting that incorporates keywords and keyphrases into content while maintaining quality, value, and ease of reading. A person who does this is called an SEO content writer or SEO copywriter.
The Importance of SEO Content
This brings about the question: why is SEO so important? As we mentioned above, when the content of a web page or blog post is optimized, it has the potential to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
This means that people will generally see the most optimized and helpful website pages first in search engine results. The more high-quality, helpful, and relevant the content, the more priority it gets over other competitor websites discussing the same topic.
Higher rankings often lead to an increase in organic traffic to your website.
Here is an example. If you open up Google’s search page and type “milk alternatives”, you’ll see about 10 results on the first page.
Out of these 10 results, you would probably click on the first one or two, find what you're looking for, and call it a day. If you’re looking for more extensive answers or for entertainment purposes, you may go through all 10 results, but it’s unlikely that you’ll click on the second page of the results and even less likely to visit pages beyond that.
Just think about how many times this very scenario happened to you. Now, imagine thousands of people doing the same thing with your content. Unless you’re ranking high, your site traffic won't be nearly as high as it could be.
This is where SEO writing comes in. SEO content writing can help enhance a piece of content for completeness and relevant keywords. As a result, the content is more likely to earn higher rankings in search engines for the topics and keywords being targeted.
How Does SEO Writing Work?
When creating content for SEO, it’s crucial to understand how algorithms in the ranking system work.
According to Google, the order of the search results for content is determined by calculating a combination of many factors. The most important ones are:
- Content relevance: First of all, your content must be relevant to the search query and align with the search intent. If your page’s content doesn’t relate to the query, it makes sense that it doesn’t appear. Similarly, the more relevant your content is, the bigger the chance of ranking higher.
To achieve this by writing for SEO, your content should include related keywords with healthy search volume in the body text and headers. It requires a certain skill to do this while maintaining a good flow.
- Content quality: Besides incorporating relevant keywords into your content, you need to offer a decent level of value to the readers. If you only care about keywords without paying attention to the quality of the content, the content won't rank well.
To improve the reliability of your content, draw your content from experienced sources and individuals. When linking to other sites, make sure they’re authoritative and trustworthy for the topic. You can also get an idea of how your content resonates by sharing it on social media sites.
- Webpage usability: You may not realize this, but your website could have the best search-engine-optimized content and still not rank well because the site pages are frustrating to use.
Related: 10 SEO Tips to Boost Your Site Traffic
Web pages that are difficult to navigate provide a negative user experience and are likely to be promoted less. The usability of your webpage includes aspects like:
- Mobile-friendly or responsive web design so users can view your content on different devices (smartphones, laptops, PCs, tablets).
- Whether or not users can properly view your content on different browsers.
- How fast your web pages load.
Tips to Improve SEO Content Writing
Consider the following tips to create SEO-friendly content:
- Write content with your target audience in mind and in a voice/language they're most likely to understand and relate to.
- Use keywords effectively by incorporating them throughout different areas of a page, such as in the search title, meta descriptions, headers, body text, and image alt text.
- Avoid walls of text and stick to shorter paragraphs that break up the text. This helps busy readers skim through your content to hopefully find what they're looking for.
- When stating claims, try to support them with facts from authoritative sources.
- Try to incorporate images that complement your content.
- Make sure any site pages you link to are reputable and helpful.
- Use SEO content writing software to improve productivity.
Check out these 10 SEO content writing tips to learn more.
Content Writing for Search Engines
As you can tell by now, SEO writing is a skill in itself that can benefit websites and businesses more than many conventional marketing strategies.
By investing in your web pages and blog posts to rank higher in search results, you’re generating more traffic, more growth, and ultimately more revenue.
This is why it’s worth investing in skilled SEO content writers to make that happen. SEO writing is an essential digital marketing activity and a vital aspect of content marketing.
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