SEO writing: Five foolproof tips to secure you the first page

The essence of SEO writing

But what happens to the rest of the content?

This content falls at the edge of the earth and it will never get an opportunity to be read by your target audience.

Oppositely, writing SEO optimized content will help you boost your traffic and get more potential leads to your website.

To be able to create such well-optimized content, you might need a powerful team of professional writers. You can build your personal in-house content writers department or hire a freelancer who would satisfy your content objectives.

For instance, here is the progress of Visme blog for the past few years. We have grown our blog from ~800 to ~488K monthly visits.

To create SEO content you must understand what people are searching for on Google. Consequently, you must align your content per your audience’s needs.

You might wonder how to write content with SEO in mind?

To help you out, review the following three steps that you should consider before starting the process of writing.

Explore keywords with traffic potential

Let’s say, you write a piece of content for a website that sells sports nutrition. Your seed keywords would be “sports nutrition” and “sport supplement.”

The next step is to identify keyword phrases and questions that would be based on your seed keywords. You can use Keywords Explorer tool and review a few reports.

The first report is “Questions” which suggests to you all possible questions that contain seed keywords.

The same analysis you do with your seed keywords using “Phrase match” report. This report lists the queries that are sorted by the monthly search volume.

Identify search intent

Google chooses what content to show people according to their search intent. Search intent is what the person wants to find behind a query. In other words, you must understand all possible “why” and “what” that your content must cover to satisfy a user’s needs.

To make sure your content goes in line with the search intent of your target audience, you should fulfill the next three conditions:

• Choose the correct content type

The most straightforward way to understand what type of content you should put money on is by exploring the top positions on Google. It will tell you what type of content ranks well and you should take it into account. 

For example, if your target keyword is mainly used across interrogative queries like “what is the difference between organic and paid search“, you will get such content types as blog posts, articles, or videos.

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However, if your target keywords don’t have informational intent, you won’t rank for blog posts. You will rank for video content or attract your target audience to your product pages.

• Think about content format

It won’t be hard to understand what content format you’re willing to create. There are a few standard formats to choose from – listicle, how-to guides, expert roundups, etc. 

• Work on exploring content angle

Content angle reflects the purpose of your content. To put it simply, you must understand what message you want to send. To give you a clear idea of what it means, let’s analyze this very post per these three aspects. 

1) Content type is “blog post”

2) Content format is “guide”

3) Content angle is providing concrete actionable tips on SEO writing for the beginners

Keep in mind these nuances and move forward with implementing the next tips. 

Proceed with the determination of subtopics

You already have your target keyword. You know what type of content you’re going to write. You know in what format content will be created. Plus, you decided what angle content will take. 

What is the next step?

The next step is to figure out subtopics for your future writings. Three ways will help you here. Let’s review them:

• Analyze your competitors’ content

Must admit that this is a cool idea to analyze content created by the competitors. Just type your top priority query on Google and review the top pages it suggests. Afterwards, review the outline for each post paying attention to headings. For instance, this post on explainer video covers different subtopics that you could cover in your content as a separate topic.

• Review “People also ask” section

“People also ask” section can provide you with more topic ideas. These are the variations of what people might also be looking for on Google based on your primary keyword. 

• Explore what your competitors might rank for

If you want to be ahead of your competitors, you must explore other possible keyword ideas and topics they rank for. One of the best ways to do this is by using Content Gap tool. Just paste your competitors’ URLs and hit the “Show keywords” button.

Review the results and compare them with each other. Focus on those keywords that are used by all the competitors you’re analyzing. 

Once all the preparations are done, you can start writing the post. Nevertheless, continue to read and you will find out five SEO writing tips.

SEO writing tips

It won’t be hard to guess that SEO writing aims to create content that would rank high on Google and attract traffic to your website. Consequently, without knowing some SEO tips you won’t be able to write optimized content right off the bait. 

Here are five tips that will help you drastically.

Create a perfect title

Without a proper title tag, you won’t get neither traffic nor CTR from your target audience. Hence, review the titles of the pages from your competitors and think about how you could write the better one. 

You must use a target keyword in the title tag + keep in mind search intent you have identified at the beginning stage. Try to make every title tag unique that would make people never bounce back from the page.

Short URL

If you want to create SEO-friendly content, you should start with the URL of the post first. Basically, any URL must be simple and easy-to-read. It must include a primary keyword and you should keep it short.

Work on featured snippets optimization

Being featured in “featured snippets” is a wonderful opportunity for your content to be easily noticeable by a target audience. To be able to optimize your primary keyword snippet, you must understand the exact format that would meet the requirements of a future featured snippet. Afterwards, create content accordingly.

Internal links

Internal links are one of the on-page SEO elements you should never ignore. Plus, these links are good for user experience. Remember, you can’t cover everything in one topic. All additional subtopics related to the main topic can be covered in separate posts on your blog. Internal links help your target audience to navigate on your blog reading information from other articles thereby. 

Add images

Images make your content more engaging for your audience. It helps people to absorb information visually. Just imagine if you read this very guide without images and screenshots. I bet you would leave it without compunction.

Conclusion

Summing up everything mentioned in this post, SEO writing is not about using the right keywords, ranking, and traffic. These elements are just a part of the game. The main course of the process is creating readable content that would help the audience to solve the problems.

As a bonus for your efforts, you get traffic to your website and ranking positions.