This guide is designed to help business owners with their SEO content writing. Having quality on your website is a major factor in how search engines rank websites. By consistently creating high quality content for your website, you can improve your website rankings in search engines and therefore your exposure to potential customers.
What is SEO content writing?
SEO content writing is the practice of creating website content with the intention of improving a website ranking in search engines. SEO content writing breaks down into two components:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): which refers to the practice of optimising a website to improve its ranking in search engines. The goal of SEO is generally to increase the number of website visitors from search engines that are likely to be potential customers. This is achieved by improving the websites ranking in search engines for phrases potential customers are likely to make.
- Content: refers to the information that is on the website. There is a wide range of content types found on websites. We will cover the types of conten further in the article.
In summary SEO content writing is the practice of producing written website content with the intention of attracting website visitors from search engines.
How it works?
As mentioned before, by regularly producing high quality content on your website, Google will improve your website ranking. However, there are probably only a few keywords that you want to rank for e.g. a Real Estate Agency in Sydney might just want to rank when people search ‘Real Estate Agent Sydney’. The Google search algorithm has the ability to figure out what a website is about, so if this real estate agency regularly produces content such as news and market updates, it will improve the websites ranking for phrases like ‘Real Estate Agent Sydney’.
Now, this doesn’t mean this business can just start writing anything and everything about Real Estate. You need to write articles people are going to find and read. The more people reading the articles on your website, the higher the chance of improving your ranking for your desired keywords.
In this article we are going to teach you how to find topics to write about that will yield the best results for your desired keywords.
Types of SEO content
There are various forms of content you can use on your website for SEO content writing. These include:
- Product/Services Pages: these are usually static web pages that provide users information about the product and services offered by a business. It is important to optimise these pages for search engines so these pages get found when potential customers are looking for them.
- Blog Posts: A blog post is an easy way to provide news and articles that relate to the product or service you offer. Blogs should be regularly written that relate to your industry as the Google algorithms rewards website that’s are regularly updating their websites with valuable content. Some ideas for website blog posts include, monthly newsletters, how to guide, lists, directories, reviews, articles, industry news etc. If you need some ideas for blogging it is best to look at a major website that relates to the your industry and read through some of their articles for ideas.
SEO content strategy
A problem a lot of people have with SEO content writing is they just try and write articles about anything they can think of with little to no strategy behind the process. To ensure your efforts yield the best results from search engine traffic, you will need to develop an SEO content writing strategy to guide you.
1.) Set your goals
As simple as it sounds your first step is to set you goals. Why do you want to get more traffic to your website, are you trying to promote your brand, attract potential customers or want to earn more from display advertisement?
- Promote Business: If you aim to promote your business, it is important that you blog very regularly about news in your industry. If you’re not necessary looking to find potential customers but create brand recognition you can provide useful information about things that relate to your industry. This will keep people coming back to your website so they eventually remember your business.
- Attract Potential Customers: If you want to attract potential customers with your SEO content it is important that you define your customer buying cycle and write articles that will answer questions in the research phase. For example, if you’re a real estate agent you could write articles that answer questions like ‘how to get my home ready for sale’, ‘how to choose an agent’, ‘five things to look for when buying a home’ etc. these are all questions potential customers would be seeking articles online.
- Earn more from AdSense: if you’re writing content to attract more visitors to your website and get paid though AdSense or your ad service provider it is important to write a number of articles each day, ones that are of interest and likely to get shared on social media.
2.) Understand your readers
It is important to understand your audiences wants and needs so you can write about things that capture their attention to keep them on your website. Google Analytics can provide you with a wide variety of information about the people visiting your website such as their age, the average amount of time they spend on the website, what pages they visit and where they are coming from. This is important to understand what has worked well in the past.
For example, if your audience is B2B you might want to provide detailed industry updates that helps with client’s research. If your audience is younger, you might want to use more images and videos and provide website updates regularly.
3.) Choosing what to write about
When starting to write articles it can be difficult to choose a topic to write about. We believe conducting keyword research is the most important thing when choosing your topic. With the use of Google Keyword planner, you can look up how many times certain phrase are searched in Google every month. When choosing a keyword to write about, it is best to choose long tail keywords. Long tail Keywords are phrases that generally have more that four words in them e.g. ‘Guide to selling your home’.
This is a step-by-step guide for finding long tail keywords:
- Ideas: First make a list of potential ideas to write about. The best way to do this is to make a list of questions you frequently get asked by your customers. If you can’t think of many examples you can visit popular websites about your industry to see what they are writing about. It is best to get a list of at least 20 ideas. It is important that the articles you write about are relevant to the product or service you offer, as relevance is an important ranking metric for Google.
- Keyword Research: Once you have created your list of ideas, login into your Google AdWords account, navigate to the Keyword Planner, select ‘get keyword ideas’ and enter in the a few of your phrase to get the search volumes and suggestions for similar phrases. You should get a report that looks something like this, which will give you ideas for more keywords as well as the average monthly searches and level of competition.
The image above has given use some keyword ideas for the phrase ‘Improve website ranking in google’. The phrase ‘improve website ranking in google’ is only searched 10 times a month so its not the best topic to write about. In this situation we would choose the keyword ‘Google Search Ranking’ as the keyword as it is search 90 times a month and has low competition. We would name the article something like ‘Google Search Ranking – How to Improve your websites position’ as it contains the focus keywords.
4.) Writing the Article
Once you know what you are writing about, it’s time to get to work writing the article. These are things to consider when writing:
- Keyword Density: your focus keyword will need to make up between 0.05% – 2% of the written content. For example, if your focus keyword is ‘Google Search Ranking’, this phrase will need to be in the article (unbroken) between 5 – 20 time for every 1,000 words. Anything less or more will be considered detrimental to your chances of ranking.
- Article Structure: It is important to use headings and paragraphs to break up the information to make it easier for your reader to understand.
- Quality: don’t just copy another article and rewrite it, you need to put effort into your writing. Google favours originalm quality content that engages users.
- Length: Although you can get away will 500 words for an article, from our research it is the longer articles (1,000+) that have the priority in ranking. A longer article implies that it is comprehensive.
- Links: be sure to include hyperlinks between your pages and external pages that relate to what you’re talking about. This will help google understand what this page is about.
Summary
Over the years we have seen bigger emphasis placed on the production of high quality content on websites for Google rankings. Content marketing is becoming more and more important for business owners who seek to generate more business online. If you have any questions or would be interested in us producing high quality SEO content for your business, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
