Writing high-quality content for readers has become less of an effort in a crowded world where everybody is a content writer. In spite of this, 91% of all online content does not receive any traffic from search engines.
The content you write for your website must also be optimized for search engines to stand out from other websites. In order to do that, you need to write for search engines specifically. How to do that? Well, that is exactly what we will discuss in today’s blog post. So be sure to read until the end as we explain different strategies to write content that appeals to search engines and readers.
Why is SEO Content Writing Important?
Let’s first understand what SEO content means. Basically, it means optimizing your content for search engines using different strategies, which we will discuss later. If you do not optimize your content for search engines, you are unlikely to rank highly on SERPs. If you rank lower, you may be less likely to attract and engage your target audience. As a result, your content may appear ineffective and not valuable.
According to First Page Sage’s study of 2024, websites in position one on search engine results pages (SERPS) have a clickthrough rate of 39.8%. For websites in position two, the clickthrough rate drops to 18.7%, and for websites in position ten, it falls to 1.6%. This number drops even lower on page two of Google.
In other words, if your website is not on the first page, there is little chance that consumers will locate your website organically. The fewer visitors you have to your website, the fewer opportunities you have to generate leads and revenues.
Your best option is to invest in advertising to attract those users. If you do not have a large budget, why not devote some time to SEO content writing instead? This method is free and is likely to produce traffic for a much longer period of time than an advertising campaign. Here are 10 strategies you can follow for writing SEO content that ranks and gives traffic.
10 Strategies for Writing SEO Content
Ideally, you should consider SEO content writing guidelines to make your content more search engine-friendly without sacrificing quality. Using these strategies can help you move your blog posts to the first page of search engine results so that your users can find them.
- Do Research to Understand Your Audience
Before you can write great content, it’s crucial to know who you are writing for. You should become familiar with your audience, the topics they discuss, and the words they use.
You can use these terms more effectively in your content and communicate more clearly. Consequently, your readers will value your understanding and reward you with their loyalty and trust.
There is no doubt that Google puts its readers first.
In order to study your audience, you can take a few steps.
- Analyze market and customer data based on your target audience to create buyer personas. Creating customer profiles can help you gain a deeper understanding of your readers’ demographics, preferences, and challenges, enabling you to write in a manner that speaks directly to them.
- Furthermore, you can analyze your website’s and social media analytics and survey data to better understand who your audience is and what they need.
- Check out online forums like Reddit or Quora to learn about customers’ concerns and demands in your market.
When you follow the above strategies to select keywords, topics, and content formats based on a well-defined target audience, you ensure that you start on the right note.
- Make Sure Your Keywords Satisfy User Search Intent
A successful piece of content satisfies the search intent. Honestly, it is quite simple. Provide users with what they seek, and they will respond positively. Readers are spread throughout the buying process, encompassing four major stages: awareness, consideration, decision, and advocacy. It is important to note that each stage has different needs and objectives.
When you write or manage SEO content, it is important to consider the search intent of your keyword and to structure your content appropriately in the buyer’s journey to satisfy that intent.
- Informational intent
The informational content means that they have a problem or need. Specifically, they’re looking for general information, educational content, and solutions to their problem.
This is an example of an Informational Intent;
- Navigational intent
Navigating search intent involves evaluating different options in order to meet the user’s needs or problems. Consumers generally look for comparisons, reviews, and expert opinions at this stage. It is important to take into account the user stage here.
Here, the reader is more solution-oriented and is considering taking action. Top 10 lip balm brands
- Transactional or Commercial intent
Users are now ready to make a commitment to a particular solution, product, or service. Their main goal is to get detailed information, pricing, testimonials, or case studies. This is a decision-making stage and the customer might buy the product or hire a service they need. Here is an example:
Satisfying Search Intent is Important
When you produce promotional content for users in the awareness stage, you may fail to deliver information that meets their needs, resulting in a poor user experience. This shows the search engines that your content is irrelevant, which negatively impacts your rankings.
You can use some online tools to help identify the type of keyword required for each intent like, Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Surfer SEO, Clearscope, etc. Each of them has a feature that can give keywords according to user search intent.
- Add Relevant Keywords to Your Content
There is no limit to how good an article you can write. It may be very informative and engaging and answer all the users’ questions. But it won’t matter if the audience can find this content on the search engines. To write a good piece of SEO content, you should conduct keyword research to identify the most appropriate words and phrases that your target audience uses when searching for information that you are about to write.
Adding these keywords to your content can help search engines understand the context and depth of your content. This allows you to rank higher in search results and attract more organic traffic.
The following tips can assist you in conducting keyword research manually and identifying keywords that are semantically relevant.
- Check out Google Trends
Using Google Trends, you can also see what keywords are popular at any given moment. Seeing a steady decline in searches over time for a particular keyword indicates you should probably not target it for your marketing campaigns. In contrast, rising trends are the opposite.
- See ‘People Also Ask’
Google search results include a feature called “People Also Ask”, which displays questions that people frequently ask about your topic. By doing so, you can determine which long-tail keywords to include in your content and which subtopics to cover.
- Check ‘People Also Search For’
In the search results of Google, there is a list of related searches at the bottom. Your topic may benefit from these suggestions as they provide insight into other relevant keywords as well as the search patterns of your target audience.
- Use SEO Tools
The most effective and best way to find related keywords is to use SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Keyword Everywhere, Moz, etc. These tools not only provide related keywords but also tell the accurate search volume and their ranking difficulty, which helps a lot in deciding which ones to use in the content.
- Include Keywords in Your Headings
The headers in your blog post help Google understand what the sections within it are about. Crawlers are similar to readers who skim your blog. You should provide a brief overview of the content of your article. The H1 is your main topic/main heading, followed by the H2s, H3s, and H4s, which further divide the topic into subtopics.
Therefore, Your subheaders should be consistent with the content in the body and contain high-intent keywords you have searched and written about. Using the right keywords, i.e., those used by your target audience, will increase your chances of ranking on the search engine results page.
In your subheadings, you can include related keywords and variations to help search engines understand your website’s structure and context. Google and other search engines place a high priority on headers and URLs and expect relevant keywords to appear there as well.
You may use the following headings and subheadings if you are writing a blog post about “How to Lose Weight”:
H1: How to Lose Weight (page title topic)
H2: How to lose weight in 6 simple steps
H3: Eat Healthy
H3: Get Enough Sleep
H3: Drink Plenty of Water
Using keywords in the headers also provides relevant information to your readers, allowing them to easily find what they are looking for in the article’s outline. This ultimately helps you rank higher in search engines.
- Write for Humans Not Search Engines
There are many SEO guidelines out there, and it is easy to forget that users are searching for answers when they search on Google. A high-quality blog post will increase your chances of ranking.
Some qualities of good SEO writers are that they write for the users and not the search engines. How do they do that? By writing answers to users’ queries in a thorough way, with readable sections, organized subheaders, and relevant images.
Be mindful of your buyer personas and their interests, challenges, and motivations. Additionally, it is important to select topics that will resonate with your potential customers and offer solutions to their problems.
Several SEO tools can assist you with the technical aspects of your site, but you can also rely on content writing tools to help you write articles that are correct, concise, and engaging for the reader, such as Grammarly, Surfer SEO, Yoast, etc.
There are several tools that can also be used to measure content engagement and readability, such as the length of time spent on a page, the number of pages visited, or the amount of time spent scrolling down the page. Some examples are Google Analytics, Hotjar and Contentsquare.
You can also add relevant images to support your content. Many tools, such as Canva, Freepik, and Getty Images, allow you to create copyrighted images.
- Add Targeted Keywords Into Metadata
Your meta description can significantly improve your content’s visibility in search engines as well as its click-through rate. A meta description containing your target keyword is one of the four main areas where search engines look for relevance along with main title, headers and overall content in the body.
Make your meta descriptions more effective by following these SEO writing tips.
- It is important to limit your meta description to 155-160 characters to ensure the reader can see the entire description without any information being truncated
- You can entice readers to click through to your website by using persuasive language that conveys the value of your content.
- Make sure that you include related keywords and search phrases so you will appear in the search engine results for a broader range of search queries
- Don’t use clickbait or keyword stuffing to convey the value of your website.
- Link Internal and External Resources
Including relevant internal and external links on your pages is an important SEO practice. It is beneficial to link to new pages so that search engines can find and index them easily. Anchor texts should contain descriptive content to convey the purpose of the linked page.
Furthermore, internal linking allows users to access additional content that can enhance their educational experience and help them move further along in the buyer’s journey.
A link to an external website is a link you include on your page to support the information you have included on your page, such as statistics, studies, or examples. It may be beneficial for your readers to access external links in order to learn more about your topic, which may be beyond the scope of your existing content.
Search engines count on external links to indicate the trustworthiness and quality of your content, so choose sources that add value and context. In addition, by doing so, you will be signaling to search engines that the linked content is relevant to your blog posts.
- Develop Content Hubs on Your Website
It is not sufficient to write an article or two for SEO purposes. In order to understand your position on the topics you write about, Google relies on E-E-A-T factors and looks for credible content.
The easiest way to achieve this is to create content hubs in your subject area that strive for topical authority. Hub pages provide an overview of the topic and are linked to related subtopic pages.
The benefits of creating content hubs are that they enable you to comprehensively cover different aspects of a topic, making your website a valuable resource for users. This approach also helps search engines recognize your website as a reliable source of information related to the subject matter, which results in a higher search ranking.
The best SEO content example of a hub is the Hubspot blog, where they have categorized content on different topics separately and linked it with one another wherever necessary.
- Don’t Write Using AI Tools
We all know that artificial intelligence has progressed, which means that more blogs are now generated by AI tools.
However, artificial intelligence is not so advanced yet, and humans and search engines can easily understand a blog written by AI. Therefore, search engines are flagging AI-generated content, which can seriously hurt your search engine rankings.
Consider using AI as a tool to speed up your creation process and check for SEO instead of letting AI create entire blogs for you. For instance, you can use AI tools like ChatGPT to create an outline for your article using the keywords and instructions you provide, which you can begin to write afterwards.
Also, you can use ChatGPT to check your content for any errors, or grammar mistakes or verify whether the information added is correct or not.
- Add an FAQ section at the End of your blog
A search engine rewards content that provides direct, easy-to-understand answers to frequently asked questions.
On Google, for instance, a section called “Quick Answers” links to blogs with authority that answer questions. The best way to utilize this in your blog is to clearly pose questions and then provide the answers at the end of the post.
Be sure to answer questions concisely and optimize them for search engines as well. In addition to adding FAQ sections, you can also update an old blog with new FAQs to improve its SEO.
Conclusion
Writing SEO-driven content is an ongoing process that involves developing new content and optimizing it over time for better results. Using these guidelines will help you write content that will contribute to the performance of your content rather than simply producing the same content as everyone else.
The most important thing to remember is to follow search engine guidelines and what factors they consider when ranking a piece of content. The quality of content, which means that the information written should be correct and relevant to the user’s queries. Other factors include the technical SEO, user experience of the website and E-E-A-T guidelines.
SEO is a long-term strategy, so it’s important to monitor your content’s performance, update it as needed, and stay informed of industry changes to attract, engage, and retain your audience while building trust and authority in your niche.
