There is certainly no shortage of consumable content these days. With an influx of blogs, podcasts, videos, articles, and more there are hundreds of different ways to get your questions answered, learn something new, or simply entertain yourself. Despite the abundance of it, however, content is more important than ever before. When it comes to your business, having fresh, relevant, and well-written content on your site is a key indicator to Google, and other search engines, that you are a good source for information to answer their questions or provide them with products and services. That is, if you do it right.
Strong content is a huge factor that plays into your SEO success, so it is important to strike while the iron is hot and make sure that you are adding the most SEO friendly content to your site. Whether it is SEO friendly articles, blogs, or any other form of SEO friendly content, it is not enough just to write and upload content. The content must be relevant and important to your business but, more importantly, in the eyes of potential customers and Google. That is why we have put together a guide on how to write SEO friendly content. We have boiled it down to five steps to help you take your content from just words to SEO friendly content that can help you gain loyal, trusting customers.
Step 1: Planning your SEO Friendly Content
Before you dive into writing, it is important to go in with a plan. Simply adding random, irrelevant content to your site is not what Google is looking for, and will unfortunately not be rewarded. The content must be relevant, interesting, engaging, and optimized. It is all about identifying opportunities and capitalizing on them.
Your company should be writing about things that are relevant to your business and your customer base. This doesn’t have to be limited to exactly what products or services your company offers, but it should tie back to your main business goals and values. For example, if I own a wedding dress shop and am creating a blog for my site, my content does not have to exclusively be about wedding dresses. It can also include topics that potential customers (in this case brides) may be searching for like tips for getting ready on your wedding day or the must-have accessories for any bride. While these topics do not directly deal with wedding dresses, they are searches that brides are making. If these brides find your content interesting and useful, they may just look at your wedding dress options next- and you may have found yourself a new customer!
A fun way to decide if your potential topic is fit to create SEO friendly content about is to ask yourself if the content is “HOT.” HOT being an acronym in this case scenario.
H: Helpful for potential consumers
O: Optimized for Google
T: Topical for your business
Is your content helpful for potential consumers? Is it optimized and fit for Google? Is it topical for your business? If your response is yes, yes, and yes then your content is HOT and you are ready to move on to the next step in creating your SEO friendly content!
Step 2: Keywords- The Key to SEO Friendly Content
The importance of keywords cannot be emphasized enough when it comes to successful SEO. At the end of the day, all roads lead back to keywords. Essentially, once you choose an overall topic that your SEO friendly article or content is going to focus on, it should be written around keywords that you carefully select. The key to choosing the best keywords is to make sure they are relevant to your topic, feasible for your company to rank on, and have the right intent in the SERPs, or search engine results page. You should perform keyword research in order to find keywords that best fulfill these factors.
We will talk more about how to include these keywords throughout your writing in the next step, but understand that selecting the right keywords is the foundation for good SEO friendly content.
Step 3: Write the Content!
It may seem silly that it took two other steps to get here, but you are finally ready to start writing your SEO friendly article or content piece. There is A LOT behind how to write SEO friendly content, so this part is the make it or break it for its success. Don’t worry though, we will break this step down further into pieces.
The biggest factor to consider when writing your content is the use of the keywords that you carefully selected in step 2. Once you have selected the keywords that are most fitting to your content, it is important to include them throughout. It is also important to understand how to use SEO keywords. The trick here is to include the keywords frequently, but naturally. Don’t spam your content with keywords to the point that it feels unnatural, but they should be used throughout the content frequently enough that Google will easily pick up on what information you are providing and what questions you are answering.
With that in mind, you can compile the research that you have done and the knowledge and expertise that you have to create a solid piece of content that will be helpful to consumers. If the content is helpful and applicable to readers then they will be happy, you will be happy, and Google will be happy that their searchers found what they were looking for. It’s a win-win-win!
Tips and Tricks When Writing your Content
While not included in the five steps to teach you how to write SEO friendly content, here are some additional tips and tricks to consider when in the writing stage of your content creation.
- Length– Length is a huge factor to consider when writing your content. It is not enough anymore to write a short blurb of a couple of hundred words and call it a day. Both consumers and Google are looking for detailed, thorough content that will provide the answers to all of their questions and more. Look at your competitors and see what their word count is or see what industry averages are. Otherwise, a good rule of thumb for SEO friendly articles is to have at least 1,000 words in your content piece.
- Break Up Content– No one likes to read one giant paragraph of information. Use pictures, headers, lists, graphs, or any other means to break up the text and keep readers engaged and intrigued to go on.
- Lists– Including lists in your content is a great way for Google to pick up on the information that is being conveyed and makes it even more easily shareable. Lists also present a big opportunity to rank in featured snippet positions that may be available. Google will simply display the lists that you have created in these featured snippet positions to try and present the best answers to consumers faster than ever.
- Internal Linking– Use your content as an opportunity to internally link to other important pages on your site. Maybe it is another blog that goes into more detail about a mentioned topic, or maybe it is a product page for a product that you are writing about. Whatever it is, including these internal links is another great way to send a signal of significance to Google.
- Bonus Tip: Try and use strong anchor text when internally linking rather than just “click here to learn more.
Step 4: Optimize, Optimize, Optimize
If you thought that you were done with the use of your keywords at this point, think again. Not only are these keywords important to use throughout your content, but they are essential to use when optimizing the rest of your SEO friendly article or piece. Anything that can be optimized with keywords, should be! This includes metadata like the meta title and the meta description, header tags (H1, H2, etc.), alt tags (the text used to describe images), and even the URL for your article or content piece!
This is a big chance to use your keywords to attract searchers and organize your content in the most helpful manner possible. Plus, Google uses these attributes to crawl the content and determine what it is about, and ultimately, if and where it will be useful in the search results. We said it once and we will say it again, keywords really are the key to success when it comes to SEO friendly content.
Step 5: Review Your Content
This may be a trivial or obvious step to mention, but its importance should never be overlooked. There are a lot of factors that go into creating a strong piece of content, and it doesn’t usually happen in the first draft. Review your content for spelling, grammar, and overall helpfulness and readability. And once you have done that, review it again. It’s never going to hurt to look over your work one more time to make sure that you are creating the best content possible.
It’s not all about spelling and punctuation, though. Make sure that the piece of content that you have created reflects the brand voice that your company presents so that it fits well with the overall message that you are trying to send. Remember, you are using content as a way to help consumers, but also to build trust that your brand or company is who they want to do business with or where they want to get their information from.
Step 6: Consider Typical Ranking Factors
Now that you have created and fully optimized your SEO friendly content, remember to consider that typical SEO ranking factors still do apply. These factors include page speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, security, if the page is indexable to Google, and other technical SEO factors that normally play a big role in your site’s SEO success. Having strongly written, informative content is pertinent to your content’s success, but it could be all for nothing if the content you have created cannot be read, crawled, or indexed by both consumers and Google.
You’re Finally Ready to Create SEO Friendly Content!
With these steps, tips, and tricks in mind, you are finally ready to write the SEO friendly content that you seek to create. A lot of times, creating good content can be trial and error and hit or miss- so don’t give up! With these steps in mind, you will be on your way to creating content that will look good to Google, hold relevance to your company, and hopefully, attract and convert new customers for your business!
If you are seeking additional help to create SEO friendly content for your business, reach out to Techwood today for more information on how we can best serve you!