How to do SEO Content Writing in 8 Simple Steps

New to the world of SEO content writing? Here’s a feast for you!

Marketers and bloggers have realized the value of creating content that is more easily found via search engines, as it saves their time and money.

But first know….

What is SEO Content Writing?

SEO content writing or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of gathering more traffic to your webpage by increasing its ranking in the search engines.

Your trump card is to build a website for your users and not spiders.

You can attract everyone once you’re on the world-wide-web, but you have to focus on gathering attention of those visitors who are genuinely interested in the products/services you offer.

Once you find the right people for your webpage, it’s time to increase their number to increase sales.

However, it is necessary to uphold a balance between the search engine rank and still being able to keep your targeted readers engaged.

Wondering how to write content for the search engines?

Let’s kick off!

8 Simple Steps to SEO Content Writing

Find your keywords

SEO content writing is like targeting the centre point of a dart.

You can’t just pick up a pen and paper and go ahead writing randomly.

You have to think what you want to write about. The choice of words/phrases should be broad enough for people to search and narrow enough to get ranked.

Read: How to do SEO Keyword Research Quickly?

Once you know what you’re going to write about keep the following basics in mind.

An eye catching headline

The headline of your content encourages prospects to either read your article or hop on to the next.

Your headline is the first encounter of the audience with you. So, how it must be?

• Include the keywords of your article
• Must not exceed 65 characters otherwise it’ll get cropped up by the search engines.
• Preferably have numbers. A study also reveals that titles which include numbers are shared more on Twitter and Facebook.

Create inbound and outbound links

According to Google’s Ranking Algorithm, web pages which have quality links appear higher. They are the building blocks of your webpage.

A great strategy for building links other than writing great content is using categories.

Besides,

• Link out to other helpful articles using anchor text with your keyword/keyword phrases.
• Get other people link to you, either by asking them to do so or by writing a great piece of content.
• Link to other articles on your site by embedding links directly into the text.

Use keywords wisely

Once you have found your keywords, it’s time to start keyword optimization.

It’s important to know where and how to use keywords in your content along with its organization.

Content should be organized in a logical way so that readers find it easy to get quality content.

Keywords should be used in:

• Title/heading
• URL of the post
• First 100 words of the article
• Body of the article
• Conclusion part of the post
• Alt-text of images
• Site’s metadata
• Post tags

Don’t write too little

Write relevant content for your potential customers. Look what they are expecting from you.

Don’t produce ‘thin’ content that ranks your website up and get clicks but disappoints your clients.

Writing content less than 300 words isn’t ideal. Your content for a blog post/article should be more than 1000 words or minimum of 300-500 words.

But it’s not all about the length because several detailed articles still struggle to rank and retain their position in Google search results.

Focus on frequency

Posting frequently (more than once in a week) teaches search engines to come back and check your website more regularly which will cause your pages to rank up over time.

Did I mention Metatags? You can’t afford to forget them

Search engines look for the HTML codes behind your webpage/post.

Hence, it’s important to make sure that your HTML codes contain concise content related to the main content through content management system.

Basically, it must include your keyword so that search engines get to know what your post is all about.

For instance, the title is seen by search engine as: <title> choco lava cake recipe </title>

Socialize or broaden your network

SEO content writing needs to be backed with links from social media networks. It’s important that the content gets shared via social media and gets attention from other bloggers in the same field.

Social media is a great platform that can lead people linking to you and sharing your content which will create more links. One of the best things after establishing quality traffic on various social media pages is that your customers will be the one sharing or promoting content for you.

Bonus tips for SEO Content Writing

Does this all sound like a laborious task?

We have come up with some thought provoking strategies for you to ease this process effectively.

Site Speed

If your website has interesting and useful content, but it takes long time to load your page fully, your visitor will leave due to bad customer experience.

2 seconds is the ideal time to load for a site on a search engine. If it takes longer, take steps to improve it. You can check your website speed with a free tool from Google, Page Speed Insights.

Meta-description

For SEO content writing, the meta-description should contain 150-160 characters. This gets a lot easier through WordPress – the widely used content management system.

Keyword frequency

Avoid on-page optimization mistakes like keyword stuffing or excessive keyword insertion. You can check this with free plugins like Yoast SEO or Rankmath SEO.

SEO content writing tools/resources

If you’re looking into SEO content writing, here are some tools I’ll recommend:

• Unsuck It – this is a free web app that will help you make your words, sentences and paragraphs go smoothly. You can replace technical jargons with fun words in five seconds!
• Co-Schedule Headline Analyser– this is a free tool that will help you determine the score of your headline- how appealing and eye-catching it is for the readers.
• QuickSprout – this tool helps you know why you are not getting enough traffic despite ranking your long-tail keywords.

Take Away Message

Good SEO work only gets better over time. It’s only search engine tricks that need to change when the ranking algorithm change.

~Jill Wahlen

I hope now you know how to make your SEO work smart enough to rank up in Google search results, and capable enough to persuade your targeted readers to stay for long.

Let us know in the comments how useful these tip on SEO content writing were.