I am so proud of you! You followed my content writing checklist and wrote your first article for your blog. Congratulations, you did great! But you’re not done yet. You still need to submit your content to search engines. There are three steps you need to implement in order to achieve this. This is what we’re going to learn in this article about SEO content writing samples.
This article presents guidelines to a good foundation in content writing.
Uniqueness
Write unique content for your audience. You could risk a penalty if you scrape content from another website and change around a few words. Search engines can pick up on this.
Proper keyword usage
Did you know that the following type of content used to work?
“Would you like to buy these brown cargo shorts? Our brown cargo short store has all kinds of different brown cargo shorts. We have cheap brown cargo shorts and expensive brown cargo shorts.”
Keywords are like seasoning. Use too much and it ruins the dish; use just the right amount and the food is delicious. Use keywords wisely and sparingly, but always make sure to use them!
Write enough words
Writing a few sentences on a page with lots of big pictures, negative space and symbols is not an optimized page. While it may look clean and pretty, it will have a very difficult time ranking on the first page in the search engines.
This is because search engines – and people – need context. They need to know that your page will answer the query. Spacious pages may look nice, but don’t expect them to perform well for SEO.
At a minimum, try to provide at least 500 words of context on every page that you want to rank in search.
Solve for a specific need
When people search, they are looking to solve something specific. They have a pain or a question that needs answering. Your page should solve for this need.
A fierce data driven approach
Get comfortable letting keywords guide your content.
This sounds so boring! I know. But it’s not.
Think of it like this: When you are doing keyword research you’re researching the pains, questions and concerns of real people. In days past, when we had a question we would go to the library, call an expert or ask a friend.
Today, we ask Google.
Peel back the layer and the dry world of keyword research fascinates. When you dive into Google keyword planner, you are plunging into the questions and concerns of the collective minds of billions of people.
You then get an incredible opportunity to position your expertise as the answer to these questions and concerns. Provide that answer in a deep, thoughtful and helpful way, and stay on topic.
Here is a great guide to learn how to do keyword research like a pro.
Check out Keap’s Lifecycle Marketing Assessment to determine where your business stands among the industry’s top performers.
Key on-page optimization
The goal with on-page optimization is to give search engines crystal clear signals as to what the page is about.
The following three things are akin to Malibu beach-front property for search engines. This is the most valuable on-page real estate so make sure not to waste it!
Title Tag
Make sure that you include your primary keyword for that page in your title tag. Click here to learn more about title tags.
H1 and H2 usage
Use unique and keyword specific phrases in your H1 and H2s on your page. Don’t waste this valuable real estate on generic page titles that are duplicated across your other pages.
Image optimization
While not as important as the first two, taking advantage of naming your images according to the keyword direction is a good signal for search engines. Make sure that you optimize both the image file name and the alt attribute for the image.
SEO for a small business is hard work, there is no way around it. Integrate the above SEO content guidelines today to save yourself years of catch-up in the future.
It’s worth it.
Target Multiple Keywords
Choose and focus on writing topics that can target multiple keywords. This will ensure that your content can consistently drive traffic through search.
It’s conventional wisdom for content to target a primary keyword. However, many marketers forget to maximize their content’s potential by including and targeting secondary search terms (long tails). That’s often enough to amplify its ability to attract more organic traffic in an extreme way.
Just imagine how much traffic you can get if you have dozens of pieces of content that each rank for hundreds (if not thousands) of search queries.
Use Google’s Keyword Planner to identify keyword variations (with substantial monthly search volume) you can target for your content.
Strategically place your chosen key phrases on the key areas of your content:
- Title tag
- Meta description
- Header tags (H1, H2, etc.)
From the sample above, I’ve built a piece of content (a few weeks ago for testing purposes) that mainly aims to rank for the search term “SEO Philippines.” The topic itself is very broad (and could certainly be dull). So in order to produce something that can genuinely provide useful information to its intended audience, I incorporated specific modifiers such as:
- Consultants
- Experts
- Agencies/Companies
- Blogs
- Conferences
This made the content more robust in terms of utility and depth of information, thus making it more sound for search engines to rank the page for the primary keyword it is targeting (and more likely with its other variations).WHILE YOU’RE HERE
Improve Readability
Readability has a direct impact on user engagement metrics, which is one of the most important areas that Google looks into in ranking webpages nowadays. In the last Search Ranking Factors Survey by Moz, reading level was recognized by several experts as a mid-tier ranking signal for page-level keyword-agnostic features. But many things have changed in Google’s core algorithm over the past couple of years, and user experience is playing a much bigger role now.
Tips for improving your page’s readability:
- Format your content for skim readers.
- Use shorter sentences.
- Break long paragraphs.
- Highlight the most interesting parts of your content (through effective use of subheadings, bold texts, and whitespaces).
- Use active voice.
- Use transition words to give better direction to readers.
Install Yoast SEO, if your site is on WordPress. The plugin can guide you on how to improve your content’s readability.
Make certain to clean out spelling and grammatical errors. You can also use tools such as Microsoft Word’s spelling/grammar checker or Grammarly (a free Chrome extension) to make your content foolproof. This visual guide by Bid4Papers should also come in handy if you’re just starting to write for the web.
LSI and TF-IDF
As I mentioned earlier, Google has become smarter in processing and matching queries with relevant webpages from their indices. Latent Semantic Indexing, a process search engines use to understand words and term relationships, has also evolved over the past decade.
What does that mean for marketers? It’s vital to include more semantically related terms in your writing.
- Use more related nouns and entities (for example, mentioning popular brands or personalities in your particular space).
- Consider use of synonyms or other close variants (use natural language), rather than using your primary keyword multiple times within the content (for example, “cat pictures,” “cat pics,” “photographs of cats,” etc.).
- TF-IDF: Include terms frequently used by other competing pages ranking for your target search query.
You can use OnPage.org to identify related terms your competitors use. You might also take a look at 7 Concepts of Advanced On-Page SEO.
Format Content for Featured Snippets (Google Answer Box)
Include sections in your content that can directly answer question-based queries (“how to,” “what is” and “list of” queries).WHILE YOU’RE HERE
Google has different factors in play for this specific search listing (apart from the usual organic search ranking factors), but what’s more important is to ensure that your content is well-formatted and prepared to adapt to these sets of queries. Based on many experts’ observations, below are some of the key signals Google uses to determine which pages rank first:
- Provide the most logical and accurate answers to these types of queries.
- Number and quality of links pointing to the page.
- Engagement metrics matter (SERP CTR and time to long-click).
How to format and optimize your content for Google Answer Box:
- Include a section that states the question in a header (h2, h3, or h4).
- Provide a concise and direct answer or list of answers to the targeted query.
- Make sure that users and search crawlers will easily find this section.
Unexpected Hooks
According to last year’s internet statistics report, there are 2.7 million blog posts being published every day. With content saturation in almost every vertical, it has become more of a challenge for actual readers to find something uniquely valuable over the web these days. That’s why offering ideas or information that people will rarely find elsewhere is so important in this age of content.
The goal should always be to give your readers the thing they’d least expect to find in your content. This could be an element within your content that’s surprisingly practical, actionable, useful, or just plainly original.
I have been practicing this approach to writing ever since I started blogging back in 2010. I focus on incorporating the following aspects to make sure my own content will provide unique value (or perspective):
- Personal experiences
- Your own case studies
- Surveys
- Combining and connecting other publishers’ ideas (and stats) to create your own
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Aim to Convert
Every bit of content you create must have its own goal and serve a purpose. Most of the time, we build content to get our sites ranked for our campaign’s target keywords. We often forget what to do with the traffic we get from these efforts, such as:
- Attracting business leads, through exemplifying the brand’s expertise.
- Building relationships with other publishers and influencers, through citing their works.
- Strengthening readership and building your social following base, through consistent efforts to educate your target market.
It goes beyond that, too, because content ties together everything in the digital marketing realm.
Guiding principles to improve your content’s ability to convert visitors:
- Help readers actually solve their problems.
- Inspire and encourage readers to take action (include worksheets on your guides, printable checklists, provide relevant CTAs, etc.).
- Aim to educate—it’s the best way to influence people, and it’s certainly the best way to sell.
2.7 million blog posts are published every day.CLICK TO TWEET
Include Stats and Quotes from Credible Sources
Linking out, especially to highly authoritative sources or websites, is another signal that both users and Google use to assess if the information provided by a piece of content is accurate. It’s also essential for search algorithms, as this allows them to better understand relationships and associations among topics and web entities. The topical relevance of the linked sources can also improve your content’s relevance score to their target keywords.
Conclusion
As a content writer, you know that SEO is a big part of your work. Most of the time, SEO content writing is an additional task – and it should be – for writing non-SEO blog posts. Even though we recognize our future lies in this field, many writers either don’t know how to proceed or are not told how to optimize their content in the beginning. We also understand that in most cases, you are not hired to write SEO articles but for other types of articles. That’s what you know best! No matter what kind of articles you write, however, this is about the way you work with SEO writing.