Writing Tips to Maintain SEO Friendly Content

We have compiled these articles to assist you in writing SEO-friendly content. Do not give up on your writing efforts. Keep trying until something works for you!

Optimized Content

^[1]Optimizing for both search engines and users is one of the most important things you can do for your content.

However, creating SEO-friendly content often requires time and effort. But in the end, you can expect them to pay off – if you do it right.

Many people think that SEO-optimized content can’t be user-friendly. This actually happens to be a total misconception because well-optimized, high-quality content essentially improves your chances of ranking higher in search results.

To help you get your content ranking better in search engines, check out this set of SEO rules and tips that’s I’ve collected in this article.

1. Carry out a keyword research

Although SEO is leaning towards encouraging users to create thought-leadership types of content, keywords still play an important role. Finding the right keywords will help you dominate the search results and satisfy your target audience.

While choosing your target keywords, define the following:

• The volume of searches for a particular keyword in a given timeframe. Using the wrong keywords will lead to a waste of your time and budget.
• Understand the searcher intent behind keywords you want to use.
• Research resources to create competitive content already shown up in the search results.
• Focus on long-tail keywords. They might have a low search volume, but they still give a high possibility to rank on the SERPs. People usually use longer keyword phrases to find out more specific information about a particular topic.

^[2]2. Research Your Topic

In SEO, writing great content is the key. However, to write great content, you need to know two things:

• Who your audience is. (Our guide on finding your target audience can help)
• To know what topics matter to them. If you’ve already defined your audience, you need to start planning to answer their questions and provide them with solutions.

You can use our Topic Research Tool to help you get started. The tool helps to find your audience’s interests and shows a wide range of related topics, popular article titles, and questions people ask for your primary keyword.

Sticking with our “music festival” keyword, you can get further insights into your audience’s needs when searching for a keyword.

You can see data related to the subtopic volume, difficulty, and topic efficiency. There are also proposed headlines and related questions to that specific keyword.

Topic Research is an excellent resource for SEO writing. It can help you take keywords you’d like to target and then provide you with ideas to help build out what content to create.

3. ^[3]Optimize the length of your article

Back in the day, most blog posts you’d read would have up to several hundred words. It was a numbers game. The more posts you’d publish, the more traffic you’d get.

These days, it’s rarely the case. Even on the GetResponse blog, you’re reading right now. So you’ll mostly find articles that are 1,500+ words and published less frequently.

That’s because, in the last several years, Google has shown that it gives higher priority to longer, higher-quality content. In addition, they aim to provide their users with the best possible answers, which often boils down to having posts that provide the most thorough answer to the user’s query.

It’s not enough to write 300-word articles anymore. But it’s also not about watering down your content.

Take a look at your Google Analytics reports and see which posts generate the highest engagement for you. For example, which ones are visited the most and which ones are read for the longest amount of time? And then, which ones generate the highest conversions, e.g., newsletter sign-ups.

4. Optimize your images

Images are essential to making your content interesting and shareable. People are far more likely to purchase from a company whose website has attractive and relevant photos.

You can optimize the photos by adding keywords to the image files and providing the ALT tags.

Make sure you also optimize the size of the photo. Pictures that are too large will slow down the load time and hurt the SEO.

Make the image as small as possible without compromising the visibility or quality. Many image editors will let you do that with their in-built features. If yours hasn’t got it, an alternative is the Squoosh app, a free tool that lets you resize and compress your image files quickly.

5. Make the content shareable

So, you’ve successfully managed to write an SEO-friendly, content-rich, interesting article that people want to read. The next step is to make it shareable. Websites like ShareThis and AddThis make it easy to add social media buttons to your website so people can share the content easily.

6. Write high-quality content

This one should be pretty self-evident, but it isn’t always applied. The best way to get people to read and engage with your content is to write useful and entertaining content. Search engines reward sites that have high-quality, relevant content. Quality is more important than almost every other factor on the list.

Once you have a strong idea in mind for how you’d like to write and format your content, consider using some of the following tools to simplify and improve the writing process.

7. ^[4]Update Old Content

Search engines prioritize fresh content. As previously mentioned, freshness is the fourth most heavily weighted content ranking factor. Therefore, updating old blog posts with better, more helpful, and authoritative information can boost rankings and traffic drastically.

In fact, when HubSpot made updating old content a priority on its editorial calendar (optimizing multiple posts per week), it saw an average increase in organic search views of 106 percent per post.

Here’s how to execute this strategy yourself:

1. Identify blog posts with the potential to rank higher for keywords that have substantial search volume.
2. Update or rewrite the post to improve accuracy and thoroughness.
3. Implement on-page SEO best practices and optimize for conversion with relevant in-line and end-of-post CTAs.
4. Publish the optimized article—make sure to change the publish date so that search engines re-crawl and re-index the content.

8. Apply the Skyscraper Method

The Skyscraper method is the process of identifying content you want to outrank and creating something better. It is both a content-writing and link-building strategy, but we’ll focus on how to execute it in terms of writing for this blog post.

Once you find the piece of content you want to outrank, you should:

1. Think about why Google has prioritized this page in its results. Chances are, the ranking piece of content is comprehensive, goes in-depth, and provides high value to the reader. Understand why the content is performing well to take your piece of content to the next level.
2. Create something better than the ranking article. You can do this by adding length, depth, and freshness and improving the user experience.

Be strategic and intentional about the improvements you make. Anything you create should, first and foremost, add value. Ahrefs cautions writers that “adding 25 mediocre tips to an existing list of 25 excellent tips isn’t an improvement. Sure, your new version might be lengthier, but you’re not adding any real value.”

When executed correctly, the Skyscraper method generates results. For example, Brian Dean of Backlinko could double organic traffic in 14 days by using the method.

9. Prioritize High-Quality Inbound and Outbound Links

Links tell search engines and users a lot about your content’s value, reputation, and quality. When linking to outbound sources in your blog posts and pillar pages, make sure they trust quality websites. When seeking backlinks, target websites that are authorities on the topic you’re writing about.

Remember those backlinks to your content are one of the most heavily weighted Google ranking factors, dictating 20.94 percent of what ranks versus what doesn’t. So high-quality links can drive up rankings and traffic just as much as low-quality and spammy links can hurt your ability to rank.

^[5]10. Monitor your activity

Stay on top of your SEO-friendly content by monitoring your efforts. Google Analytics is an easy and free way to track your page views and the average time spent on a page. Check things like your bounce rate and time on site to get an idea of how users interact with your website after landing on your content. If you see a high drop-off in addition to a low average time spent on the page, that’s an indication that your content wasn’t relevant to what they were looking for, or worse, wasn’t interesting. Also, take a look at the number of social interactions (shares, likes, etc.) to get an idea of the virality of your post. Just looking at these simple metrics can give you a good idea of which content pieces are well-received and liked so that you can replicate that type of content down the road.

Both SEO and content writing are important pieces to the puzzle, so it’s important to use quality techniques to ensure higher traffic and engagement on your website. If you have any questions about SEO, content, or how they work together, feel free to contact us for more SEO writing tips!

Conclusion:

Following a precise methodology when using keywords for writing is difficult but effective. But do not forget, write for readers, not search engines. People are the ultimate consumers, not robots.

Should you need assistance in writing, please get in touch with hughesagency.ca today.

Article compiled by huesagency.com

Reference Article Links:

1. https://mention.com/en/blog/how-to-create-seo-friendly-content/ ↑
2. https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-to-create-seo-friendly-content-with-semrush/ ↑
3. https://www.getresponse.com/blog/tips-and-tools-to-write-seo-friendly-content ↑
4. https://www.smartbugmedia.com/blog/seo-friendly-content-writing-tips ↑
5. https://www.titangrowth.com/blog/capitalize-on-content-10-techniques-for-seo-content-writing/ ↑