It is a challenge for any content marketer to craft high-quality, reader-friendly content that also ranks high in search engine result pages. Here, we will discuss a few useful SEO content writing tips that are highly relevant in 2023. Before I enlist some really useful SEO content writing tips, I must give a detailed account of the subject and its significance for brands all over the world, migrating on a large scale towards e-commerce, daily with the advent of the digital age.
What is SEO?
The first step to understanding and applying the very useful SEO content writing tips and increasing your consumer engagement is to first have a crystal clear impression of what Search engine optimization is.
For instance, when you want to know about a topic or subject, the Google search engine comes to your rescue. After typing about the topic at hand and pressing enter, you get search results with links to many relevant web pages. Usually, you will click on the first few links displayed in the search engine result page and consume relevant content on these web pages.
Did you notice your behavior? You automatically get attracted towards the higher ranked links to the web pages in the search engine result page. These websites are said to have optimized or highly effective content.
When you search for a subject, what Googlebot exactly does is that it crawls through virtually all the relevant web pages present online and assigns them to rank depending on the quality, relevance, authority of their content.
The words and phrases that people generally use to learn about a particular topic have some common pattern to them. These words and phrases are called keywords and key phrases. Google assigns ranks to web pages depending on their authority and relevance.
The relevance of a webpage gets measured by how strategically these keywords and key phrases are placed throughout the content. The Authority of the webpage, on the other hand, gets measured by Google based on the number of quality and trustworthy links that a webpage contains.
So, if a webpage wants to secure higher ranks, it needs to have a good stand on its relevance and authority from the point of view of Google bot.
In a nutshell, Search engine optimization is a useful practice in the field of commercial web publishing that consists of workable tactics that eventually attract more traffic to the webpage to increase consumer engagement for a brand.
What is content writing?
Content writing is a tool of content marketing that aims to craft high-quality, valuable, engaging content usually for online businesses of all scales and nature. Content writers develop relevant content for websites, blogs, social media handles to build a strong online presence for a brand.
Gone are the days when customers could be manipulated into making a hasty purchase. Consumers of the digital age believe in conducting well-rounded research about products or services they wish to buy.
The sales of a brand are strongly dependent on the quality, relevance, and usefulness of the content that is present on the internet about its products and services.
What is SEO content writing?
SEO content writing is all about crafting high-quality, engaging, and relevant content, keeping in mind the needs and desires of the readers which also ranks higher in search engine result pages.
It is usually a challenge to keep a balance between best SEO practices and creating captivating, valuable content that holds the reader’s attention.
You have to understand that your readers still hold a higher priority than the search engine algorithm. The overall objective of your content should be to attract the readers and finally solve their problems.
How to meet both these goals? How to maintain this balance and craft content that appeals to people and also ranks higher in search engine results? Here, I list a few very useful, workable SEO content writing tips that will help you reach the objective of your business, irrespective of its scale and nature.
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Keyword research
There is an inherent pattern to the words and phrases people usually use to search about a topic, subject, or event in a search engine. Conducting well-rounded research for the right phrases or words is one of the first SEO content writing tips to craft highly optimized content.
Having the correct knowledge of the keywords and key phrases empowers you to craft content that contains these words and phrases which, in turn, increases the relevance of your webpage as google bot crawls through it with the objective of presenting the best relevant material for its users.
You can get a detailed report of the most commonly used keywords using Google’s Keyword tool. Again, one of her best SEO content writing tips is to carefully notice how much competition is there and how many searches were made for that phrase in the last 30 days.
Keyword Frequency
Once you know about the relevant keywords and key phrases, you have strategically decided how you are going to place them throughout the write-up in a way that does not sound mechanical, repetitive, and annoying.
You have to make sure that these words and phrases naturally fit in and do not affect the readability and engagement of the readers. Placing these words and phrases naturally in headlines, sub-headlines, meta-headlines, links and the actual text body of the content is one of the best SEO content writing tips that will help you reach your objective.
It is highly advisable to maintain the keyword density between 1% to 3% of the total word count. This keyword density is quite favorable from the point of view of google bot which measures the relevance of the content of the webpage by how often these keywords crop out throughout the write-up.
However, if you unnaturally stuff the content with these keywords and key phrases way beyond the standard limit, Google Bots will penalize your page. This brings us to one of the next SEO content writing tips; Avoid keyword stuffing!
Site speed
Site speed has been one of the most important factors that decide the ranking of your web page. If the load time of your page is way beyond the accepted standard, people will abandon your page. Even if the content is useful, engaging, and valuable, the webpage will never rank higher in search engine result pages.
People will leave if the site speed is not up to the mark because they have a short attention span. So, the next point in our SEO content writing tips is to use Pingdom’s website speed test to learn what is the load time of your webpage.
This again brings us to one of the most important SEO content writing tips; take steps to improve your site speed. You can do this by clearing your database of all the useless clutters and decreasing your page size.
Headlines
The importance and effectiveness of catchy, captivating, concise, and truly creative headlines cannot be emphasized enough. You can have the best content out there but if the headline is not up-to-the-mark, the page will not attract enough traffic.
One of the best SEO content writing tips is to first craft an amazing headline that attracts the attention of the reader and then work to create the rest of the content.
Even if you rank higher in search engine result pages, but your headline is not captivating enough, readers will not visit your page more often compared to the webpage that has a catchy headline.
One of the most important components of a good headline is that delivers a message that works best with the search users. It is generally observed that headlines with numbers and figures steal the show and attract more readers.
Links
To increase the authority of your webpage for google Bots, you must include relevant links in your write-up. Inclusion of internal links that direct to various sections of your website or external links that direct readers to other relevant and valuable web pages are one of the highly recommended SEO content writing tips.
Strategically placing these links throughout the write-up delivers an important message that you are connected, sociable, resourceful, and also value other people’s effort that goes into creating effective content.
Applying this tip to your work helps you reap awards from Google for helping it achieve its mission of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible.
Valuable content
One of the most obvious SEO content writing tips is to understand the needs, desires, and behavioral patterns of your end-users. This, in turn, will empower you to craft high-quality, engaging and valuable content for your readers.
The most crucial aspect of the content should be to address the fears of your readers and also provide a solution to their problems through innovative ways.