Content creation for SEO is a very important task. Properly optimized content can help websites rank higher on the SERPs and get more exposure to the online market.
Digital marketing is now the mainstream method of marketing. Day by day, traditional marketing becomes less important as people prefer online shopping over going to shops in person.
You can understand how true that is when you learn that a whopping 76% of adults in the USA prefer to shop online. Naturally, this also means that companies have to move their marketing efforts online to attract these people.
One of the most effective ways of doing that is to use content marketing. In content marketing, brands create websites and blogs and hire content writers to create articles for them.
These articles are informative in nature and their goal is to provide valuable information to their readers as well as help the blog rank high on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
These are seven actionable tips that you can use to make your content writing SEO friendly. With better SEO, websites rank high on the SERPs and attract more traffic.
This is a very basic tip that all content writers should apply in their writing. When writing an article, they should try to incorporate a relevant keyword in its title.
This is very useful for SEO as it allows search engines to recognize what your content is about. This way, they are able to match it to the relevant searches effectively.
Consequently, this increases website traffic, because the article shows up in the relevant searches.
Content writing is very different from creative writing and literature writing. There is no need to use fancy words and verbose phrases here.
The objective is to provide knowledge to the general public, many of whom are not fluent enough to understand complicated writing.
To make sure that most people can understand your content, you need to write using simple and straightforward words and phrases. In the event you do end up writing something difficult, you need to rephrase it during editing to make it easier to read.
The most convenient way of doing this is to utilize a paraphrase tool, which can automatically rephrase the given text to make it more readable.
Paraphrasing tools are generally capable of increasing readability, but some tools have specific modes for doing so. When using such tools, your objective should be to maintain an easy readability level.
Images are important for SEO from both a technical and non-technical viewpoint. The technical aspect relates to image search. Image searching is very helpful for increasing website exposure. Approximately 19% of queries entered on Google are answered with images.
This basically means that you can get an increase in your website traffic by adding images to it.
From a non-technical standpoint, images are helpful because they are pleasant to look at, they break the walls of text, and they provide some visual stimulus to the reader. This can help with user engagement and result in better dwell times.
Search engines treat links with quite a bit of importance. If you are linking good content and credible sources, it will improve your reputation and SERP ranking.
The best way to do this is to add a link to your keyword or to a difficult term that leads to an article explaining it. You can also add hyperlinked stats that help support your arguments.
Not only this gives good signals to search engines, but it also results in better reader engagement. We already know that engagement is measured by dwell time, and the bounce rate, so any improvements in them will improve the SERPs ranking as well.
Formatting is very important when it comes to SEO. There are two major reasons for this. The first reason is that it makes your content more scannable.
This is good for SEO because search engines use spiders/bots to crawl websites and scan their content for indexing. When proper formatting is done, it allows these bots to crawl your content easily. When a page is indexed completely it has a much better chance of ranking high on the SERPs.
The other reason is user engagement. Nobody has the time or attention span to read large walls of text. However, if you break the content into headings, subheadings, and bullets this makes it easier for people to quickly skim it.
Now, this seemingly shortens the dwell time and that’s true. But in the long run, it lowers the bounce rate a lot more.
This is considered a part of local SEO and it is very important in several ways. It is understandable that not all businesses operate on a global scale and don’t have a global audience.
These smaller businesses need to rake in people from their own geographical regions. That’s why content writers hired by these companies need to incorporate geo-targeted keywords in their content.
By optimizing for these words, any searches related to that specific area will show that content higher on the SERPs. This is a great method for businesses to ensure that they can thrive in their geographical areas without getting steamrolled by monopolistic multinational companies.
7. Add LSI Keywords in Your Content
LSI stands for “Latent Semantic Index”. This is a technology of Google that lets their search engine understand the relation between semantically related words. These words are basically synonyms of the real keywords.
A really common example of LSI keywords is clothing. There are many types of clothing that are separated by age, gender, and even occasion. So, some LSI keywords for “clothing” would be “apparel”, “garments”, “dress” and so on.
By adding LSI keywords, content writers can make their content safe from keyword stuffing while still being able to rank for their targeted keyword.
Conclusion
Content writing for SEO can be a bit difficult, but you can make it easier by following the right steps in your approach. With these seven tips in your arsenal, you can ensure that any content you write does not hinder the website’s SEO but helps it instead.
These seven tips are not that difficult to implement since all they require is a bit of research on your part. Supplement your writing with these tips and you will be writing high-ranking content in no time at all.