SEO Writing: Take Your Content Creation To The Next Level

Learn everything required to ensure that the content you are writing will appeal to both search engines and users alike. Today we'll walk you through the things that will ensure your content not only ranks, but also catches the eyes of your users with the shear value you can provide them just by following the tips below!

What Is SEO Writing?

SEO writing is the art of writing content that communicates with both search engines and users at once. Writing articles or content in the hopes of ensuring it is optimized means that you are doing thorough research before you start typing.

Search engines like Google have patents dealing with the various aspects of the algorithms that control how search results work. By utilizing the information in these patents you begin to understand what techniques, formats, and writing styles drive the needle in search results. Writing content that ranks is very much dependent on researching Google's patents and utilizing what is discussed therein.

When writing content this way you'll research into things like the types of keywords that are profitable for your business, which competitors rank for the primary keywords you need to target, and the type of content they have that helps them rank for those keywords. When writing an article, you'll hone this research in slightly to udnerstand the content that helps them rank for those specific pages. This research will help you compile and design a thorough resource that is more complete than any other resource available for that topic.

Why Is SEO Writing So Important?

Optimizing your content is vital because without the proper due diligence, you'll be unlikely to get in front of any users, to begin with. Meaning, that if you don't do your due diligence in the beginning - before creating your content - no one will likely see your articles in the first place.

The reason researching and gleaning information from these patents is so important is because these things will help you write content that not only ranks, but that will be more interesting to your users. We'll cover more about this later in the article.

How Is SEO Writing Different From Normal Writing?

SEO writing differs from normal writing in that the content you create is direct, pure in context, and very deliberate. Nothing is written on a whim. You have thorough topical maps, established content calendars, and you understand which pages should link to one another, and which pages shouldn't link to one another.

Everything down to which pages link to which pages, the keywords each page is targeting, the URL structure you'll follow, and much much more are designed before you even begin writing your first article.

Typically, writers do not put nearly as much detail and deliberation into their efforts as this, and this is the primary difference between the two writing methods.

How Writing Optimized Articles Differs From Normal Writing

When it comes to writing articles that are optimized it comes down to thorough research, competitive analysis, and an understanding of Google's patents.

Research

Before writing your articles, you should understand which aspect of your topical map you are fleshing out with the article you are creating. You should understand which primary keyword you are targeting, and the additional keywords you need to include, allude to, etc.

You also need to keep in mind the keywords other sibling pages are targeting so you can avoid linking out to them with exact-match link text. It's fine to use exact match 1, 2, or even 3 times. But any more than that and you're risking getting penalized.

Competitive Analysis

You should also ensure you carry out thorough competitive analysis to ensure your articles are more complete & helpful than the resources of your top competitors. For instance, you should plan your headings out based on the headings that competitors have. This type of content planning ensures that you find the content gaps your competitors have so you can fill them. Utilizing this type of research ensures that you will create a page that is far more complete, helpful, and rich in unique information than any of the pages you are competing against.

Google's Patents & Your Process

Reading & studying Google's patents ensures that you will be in their good-graces and that you'll write content that effectively communicates with them. In addition, the benefits of researching into their patents goes further than this, because they've spent billions of dollars understanding the type of content users enjoy consuming. Meaning, by utilizing the information in these patents, you'll be indirectly gaining more of an understanding of how to make your content enjoyable for your users as well.

What Should You Prioritize When Writing For SEO?

When writing optimized content, the main things you should prioritize are relevancy, content quality, and SEO best practices. There are more things to consider than this, but they exceed the scope of this article.

Relevancy

Ensure the article you create is relevant to what your website is about. In addition to ensuring the article is relevant to your business/website, you'll also want to ensure that the article remains relevant to it's main topic.

You do not want to wander. Wandering sends signals of poor content quality to search engines, and it will irritate your users.

In addition, you want to ensure that if there are other topics it makes sense to cover in your article, you don't give too much text to explain them. Briefly touch on them, and then link over to a page that is specifically about that topic for your users to learn more.

Content Quality

Content quality is incredibly important. You can rank without building a single backlink assuming you create enough quality content. In order to write quality content however, it requires much due diligence and research before you begin writing. We've got a resource walking you through how to create quality content.

Best Practices

When writing your content, ensure you follow best practices in terms of SEO. This will ensure you don't get penalized and that you stand the best chance possible to rank for the keywords you're targeting.

16 Tips For Improving Your SEO Content

These are the 16 tips we'll share in this article for improving the content you create. There are many more than 16 tips, but for the sake of this article we're only going to cover 16. However, we'll include one bonus point as well!

1. Keyword Research

Thorough keyword research ensures that you aren't wasting your time creating content geared toward keywords that won't convert. With proper keyword research, you ensure that each page you create has the potential to drive sales, customers, and anything else that matters. Search intent is a good example of something you'll uncover during your research.

2. Understand Search Intent

Search intent refers to what users are wanting out of their search. Sometimes users are looking for a specific brand, other times they are looking only to answer a question, and sometimes they want to purchase something. Determining which search intent makes the most sense for the page you're creating determines how successful you'll be.

If you're just wanting to educate your users that are at a certain step in the customer journey, targeting an informational keyword makes sense. However, if you want users to purchase something, you'd want to target a transactional keyword instead.

Once you understand the search intent of the keywords you're gathering, you need to figure out which one you'll primarily target.

3. Identifying Primary Keyword

Once you have done your keyword research now you can determine which keyword will be your primary keyword. You'll utilize this keyword in various places like your H1 tag, your URL, alt tags, etc. You don't want to spam however. You'll use this keyword in context, and in a way that adds value and provides additional context.

4. Competitive Research

Once you determine your primary keyword, you can start carrying out your competitive research. Figure out which pages rank already for that keyword you've decided to use as your primary.

5. Competitive Comparison

Now that you have the top 3-10 competitors, you'll compare them to one another. Gather the heading vectors of each competitor to start looking for things like content gaps, topical coverage, the amount of images each competitor is using, are they using video content, etc.

Once you've fleshed out what types of resources competitors have ranking, you'll have a good understanding of what you need to include if you want to rank.

6. Recognizing & Taking Advantage Of Competitor Content Gaps

Now that you know the minimum length of your article, the minimum amount of pictures you need, videos, etc., you can begin fleshing out your article. Your goal should be to look for topics that you know are important, but none of your competitors have included. Filling content gaps is all about including additional information that is important, but that no one ranking currently is mentioning.

7. Heading Creation

Now that you know what content gaps you need to fill, you can begin compiling your research into your heading structures. Your goal is to improve all aspects of the heading structure to make an article more complete, relevant, and pure in context than any competing pages.

You'll look at their heading structures and figure out how you can improve the order to make it more logical in terms of the order the topics are being presented to your users. You'll also want to figure out where you can introduce the topics that your competitors haven't covered so that it remains logical in structure.

8. Main Content Organization

You'll want to include the main parts of your content in the main content section. You'll give this section the Semantic HTML tag of "main", and it will also be the main part of your article. We realize this tip might be confusing without an understanding of web development, but we will make articles explaining this in the future.

9. Planning Media Usage

Once you understand the average number of images, videos, infographics, and other assets your competitors use you'll be able determine how many of each type you should use as well. Your goal is to have more unique assets than your competitors do. While this usually isn't a big deal, for certain styles of content this might require you to make dozens of unique images. Media usage is easily one of the most taxing additions to your content, but it will help add context, utility, and benefit to your users.

10. Supplementary Content Organization

Ensuring you keep all headings that slightly differ from the main topic of your page to the supplementary content sections is vital to ensuring you don't harm the scope of your article. If you spend too much time talking about something that is off-topic, you will hurt the relevancy of your article, and you'll start to make the article about that topic instead of your primary topic. In addition, if you include these lesser topics in the main content section, it will hurt the relevancy of the rest of the content.

11. Creating Quality Content

Utilize these tips, and the tips given in our content page to write quality content that catches user's attention, and ensures your content will rank.

12. Internal Link Building

In order to ensure that your users can find related resources when reading your content, plan out your internal links so that only similar pages are linking to one another when relevant within the content. You'll also want to ensure you avoid manipulative link-building practices by avoiding the same keywords or phrases to the same pages. Meaning, if you have a page talking about ice that is trying to rank for the term "ice", don't have 50 links with the anchor text of "ice", or else you'll get penalized. Try to switch the words and phrases up. It's fine to use "ice" once or twice, but then use "frozen water", "water's solid state", etc.

13. Semantic HTML Usage

We briefly touched on this earlier in this article, but Semantic HTML is a huge help to search engines. They already have to parse through your website to understand these things, but if you yourself give everything Semantic HTML tags, now your website is easier to parse and will waste less resources for the algorithms. The less resources you waste, the higher you'll rank.

So, by understanding Semantic HTML and utilizing it, you make it faster and easier for algorithms to scan and understand your content, and you'll rank higher because of it.

14. Optimizing URL

One of the most important places to use your primary keyword is the URL. But, it won't always make the most sense to utilize that exact keyword. If you utilize proper URL optimizations, it might be redundant to use your exact keyword. For example, for this page I'm targeting "SEO Writing". However, the URL ends with writing and doesn't mention SEO.

Why? Because, in my URL structures, I already include SEO. So search engines when going through my URLs will see that it is about SEO, but more specifically, On-Page SEO. More specifically even still, the URL shows that it's about on-page content, and the final URL says it is about writing. Meaning, it is about writing content for on-page SEO.

This might seem complicated, but this is the level of detail search engines go through when determining the quality of your content. You don't want to slap everything into a blog subdirectory if you can help it. You can still rank, but search engines typically analyze your URLs before they go through the actual content. Meaning, if your URLs don't look like they are structured properly, you're less likely to have your content scanned and crawled as well.

15. Optimizing Title Tag & Meta Description

After you determine your URLs, you'll want to ensure you include your primary keyword in your title tag and meta description. You want to do so in such a way that it is compelling for your users when they read those pieces of text. You want them to click through to read and engage with your articles.

16. Outreach (Building Backlinks & Sharing Your Content)

Once you've created your articles, building backlinks is a great step to ensure you rank. You don't necessarily need to do this step, but in competitive search results, you'll most likely need to. However, if you didn't want to, you could build out hundreds of pages a month this way and as long as you remained consistent, you'd rank without backlinks just fine. But in reality, most of us cannot sustain that type of content creation for free.

17. Continual Content Monitoring

Once your articles are created and they are increasing in their ranking it's vital to ensure you check back on them every so often. You'll want to add content periodically, and you'll want to ensure that any issues are resolved. If you find out something you've written is incorrect, go back through and edit it. If an update in your topic comes out and you can expand it, write the additional content and get it published.

Google doesn't just rank good content. Google ranks good content that is cared for. If you care for, maintain, update, and improve your content, Google and other search engines will notice that & take it more seriously.