Getting organic traffic is an important part of any Digital Marketing strategy. And the best way to increase your traffic is by getting better rankings on Google.
A solid SEO strategy will help you with that, but there’s more than applying on-page and off-page SEO rules to your blog.
SEO writing is a must, and it will guarantee that you’re not neglecting the user experience on your pages. After all, the page experience is one of the most important ranking factors.
If you want to better understand SEO writing, keep reading!
What Is SEO Writing?
Why Is Writing for SEO Important?
What Are The Basics of SEO Writing?
7 SEO Writing Rules
What Is SEO Writing?
SEO writing is the process of writing content with the goal of ranking on the first page of search engines like Google. This is achieved by researching relevant keywords and creating optimized content that answers the user’s intent.
Google, for example, uses “spiders” that crawl content to see what it’s about. During this crawl, they learn a lot about the web page through the language used on it.
SEO writing optimizes the content on the page so that search engines will more easily crawl its content and judge it favorably. When it is judged more favorably, it is given a better placement in the SERP.
If the content is created without SEO in mind, it may not appear to be search engine friendly, and the crawlers may not even figure out what the page is about.
Why Is Writing for SEO Important?
SEO writing is done to help content rank better on Google. If the content is not optimized, it will come up several pages back in a search.
And why is it so important to get on that first page?
A study found that the number of clicks that pages get depends not only on getting onto that first page of search results, it also depends greatly on getting as high up on that page as possible.
The first result on the first page gets clicked on by more than 28% of people doing the search. After that first result, the percentages go down with each spot on the page. So you need your site to be one of the first results that people see.
Writing for SEO is also important because it is a marketing technique that keeps going for the life of your website.
Many people do well with PPC advertising, but if they stop paying for that advertising, it will no longer bring traffic.
Good SEO content keeps working for your website no matter what else you do to market your site.
What Are The Basics of SEO Writing?
SEO writing is fairly straightforward, but it isn’t always easy to do.
There is no magic formula for ranking the best in search engine results, but there are several parts of the Google algorithm that we do know about. Content should be written with those aspects in mind in order to rank better.
One of the most important aspects of SEO writing is using the proper keywords. This means knowing what people are searching for when they are looking for sites like yours.
This requires the SEO copywriter to do some keyword research and create a list of words and phrases that need to be included.
It’s also important to use related words in the content. That means words that go well with the keywords that were researched.
Google looks at whether there are a lot of words related to the main keywords to be sure of what the content is about.
Using these related words is called latent semantic indexing, and it helps tremendously with SEO.
The crawlers also assess whether the content is written for an audience or purely for SEO.
This is why SEO copywriters have to avoid keyword stuffing — or putting the same keywords in over and over again so that the content isn’t meaningful for a human audience.
The balance that must be struck is for the content to appeal to human readers as well as search engine spiders.
The use of complex language is another factor in search engine crawls. If the language is too simple and uses too few unique words, it is not assessed as being of high value.
SEO writing has to flow well and be complex enough to impart a lot of information on its topic while using language naturally.
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1. Write for Humans
Know your audience and write for them.
SEO copywriting is only one part of SEO. Another important part is backlinking. The content you write must attract backlinks from other sites in order to improve its SEO.
Therefore, the copy that you write has to be written for a human audience first. If it sounds too robotic or is keyword-stuffed, a few sites will want to link to it later.
2. Understand Google’s Algorithm
Understand the latest algorithms of Google. As the largest search engine, it is important to know how to drive more traffic to your blog.
They tweak their search algorithm regularly so that the best-quality pages get ranked more highly. Google is concerned about wanting the search engine to be as effective as possible.
When you understand all that the search engines are looking for, you can better deliver it.
3. Know How to Find Keywords
You have to know how to perform keyword research and how to pick the best keywords for the content you’re writing.
This includes being able to assess how popular the main keyword is and how to choose long-tail keywords.
Often, the main keywords for a topic have far too much competition for the first few places in search engine results.
This makes it necessary to go for keywords that have a lower search volume. An SEO copywriter has to be able to assess the amount of competition for each word or phrase and choose the best ones to use.
4. Write Long Content
The Google Panda 4.1 algorithm update was put in place to reward longer, more informative content and to penalize thin content.
A good rule of thumb is to have each page contain at least 1,000 words of high-quality content. Shorter pages may simply not have enough complexity for the current algorithms.
Writing longer content also gives you the freedom to serve up information in a number of ways such as lists and tables.
You need to pack a lot of information into each page, and having some varied methods of presenting information can be helpful to both people and search engines.
5. Make Every Sentence Unique
Search engine algorithms all reward unique content. If parts of a page are copied from another web page, it may get marked as spam and give a poor ranking.
Using sites like Copyscape can help you to make sure that every part of your SEO copy is unique.
If you find any duplicates, reword those parts while keeping the copy sounding natural.
6. Use Related Words
The latest algorithms look for common words that accompany the keywords that you use.
That lets the search engine know that the content is really about that topic. It usually isn’t necessary to research which accompanying words to use, as they are generally the basic words that something about that topic would use.
If you aren’t sure how to use these companion words, study latent semantic indexing and put that knowledge to use.
7. Link to High-Quality Sites
Using links as information citations is a common way to show where the information came from.
However, your site should not be using information from low-quality sites. If you have links to spammy sites, the information on your page will be assumed to be spammy as well.
Always link to high-level websites that are popular in their own right.
The overall goal of search engines is to make good information universally available. When you link to good sites, you show search engines that you are connected to other sites and that you get your information from useful sites.