SEO in Content Writing: Grow Your Organic Traffic
Whether you’re a local business owner or an enterprise-level organization looking to write content for your website, ensuring it’s SEO-optimized is essential to getting it on that first page in front of your target audience.
Search Engine Optimization is a digital marketing strategy to increase organic traffic to your website. People ask, "Does SEO Work?" but it's you can simplify it down to this: Using SEO strategies to build your website content helps Google and other search engines understand your business and its offerings. In turn, they can serve your site’s content to the people searching for your expertise, products, and services.
There are several types of content used on a website, from blog content to product and service page copy. But today, we’ll focus primarily on SEO in content writing for blogs, how to build an SEO-driven content strategy, key ranking factors, SEO mistakes to avoid, and more.
Understanding SEO in Content Writing
There are various ways to optimize a site to improve its search engine rankings, but one key strategy for growing your organic traffic is through SEO-friendly, high-quality content, such as blogs or articles.
An SEO content strategy first considers your products and/or services and the target customer. What relevant content may your potential customers be searching for? What questions could you, the expert of your products and services, answer for those who need your product? Those questions are at the core of every SEO content strategy.
The Purpose of Content Writing: Beyond Information
Content writing serves a dual purpose in the digital realm – providing information to your audience and attracting the right visitors. Incorporating SEO into your content writing is a multipronged approach that focuses on writing for your audience while also employing optimization techniques that guide search engines to see your value.
SEO: A Practical Marketing Opportunity
Consider SEO as a practical content marketing approach. It's not about flashy campaigns but about ensuring your business is easily discoverable by individuals genuinely interested in your products or services. By optimizing your content, you create an organic pathway for potential clients to find you.
SEO content, such as blog content, is a top-of-the-funnel marketing approach incorporating your expertise to boost brand awareness, trust, and authority with potential customers.
Attracting the Right Audience: Quality Matters
In SEO, it's not about sheer numbers but about attracting the right audience. Quality content, enhanced with SEO strategies, ensures that your website is seen by potential clients who are actively looking to engage and convert.
Building Authority and Trust: A Business Advantage
Search engines favor authoritative content, and so do your customers. Implementing SEO best practices not only improves your search engine ranking but also builds trust with your audience. Trust is crucial for converting website visitors into paying customers.
How Do You Build an SEO Content Strategy?
To build a strong SEO content strategy, you’ll need to understand how your customers search for information and products in your industry. This requires keyword research, competitive analysis, and a bit of SEO knowledge.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is an integral part of building a successful SEO content strategy. It’s the best way to identify what your prospective customers and target audience are searching for.
Keyword research can be done in many ways, but to get started, we always recommend setting up your website’s Google Search Console. GSC is the source of truth regarding your organic performance on Google Search. From indexation to query data, it’s a great tool for growing your organic channel. Plus, it’s free!
For more in-depth keyword research, certain tools are essential to identify new relevant terms and keyword data to build a content strategy that resonates with your audience.
Some keyword tools include:
These tools provide keyword insights into monthly search volume, seasonality, and keyword search intent. You can even track various organic metrics of your website’s performance.
Keyword Intent
Not all keywords have the same search intent. In fact, there are several types of keywords that are defined by the searcher’s intent. Understanding keyword intent is so important when optimizing your site and writing content. It allows you to identify the appropriate keywords to optimize for in blog content versus the SEO copywriting and metadata of product and service pages.
Let’s take a look at the types of keywords and their search intent, so you can ensure your website is optimized appropriately for search.
Informational Keywords:
Informational keywords are often the keywords used to build a content strategy. The user's intent is to learn something. These queries are commonly referred to as long-tail keywords because they tend to be lengthier than transactional or commercial intent keywords. They usually incorporate words like: “why, how, is, when, where, vs., and are.”
Informational Keyword Examples:
- “is matcha caffeine free”
- “how often should I brush my hair”
- “when is the best time to take vitamins”
- “where should I put my air filter"
Commercial Keywords:
Commercial keywords are queries people often use when they are in their research phase of buying a product. They signal an intent to buy but not quite at the level of purchasing quite yet. They may include the words “best” or “versus” to learn more about their options.
Commercial Keyword Examples:
- “best online food delivery services”
- “bioidentical vs synthetic hormones”
- “ashwagandha powder vs extract”
Transactional Keywords
Transactional keywords have a high purchase intent. They’re keywords people use to search for products or services when they are further in their buying journey. These queries tend to be shorter and more direct to the product or service they’re searching for.
Transactional Keyword Examples:
- “all-natural shampoo”
- “sleep gummies”
- “payroll services”
Some SEO tools can be expensive and time-consuming to learn, which is often why people hire SEO content writers or SEO agencies that already have access to these platforms.
Competitor Analysis: Understanding Your Organic Competitors
One of the best tools in SEO is Google itself. If you want to know what content Google serves up on the first page for any query, just go search for it.
Let’s say you have an existing page that isn’t ranking well for its target keyword. Go search that term and see what is ranking well. Click through the results on the first page — do they align with the keyword type and searcher’s intent of your page? Are the top pages mostly informational blog content, infographics, or product listings?
You can think of search results as a guide post to what Google and search engine algorithms are looking for. There are many ranking factors that contribute to those pages being served, which is what we’ll look at next. But the main takeaway here is that Google Search is a fantastic SEO tool that gives you 24/7 free access to your organic competitors.
Ranking Factors: Priority Areas of Optimization
Quality SEO content is helpful for the reader (target audience) while also being optimized for search engines. Ranking factors are elements that bear weight in whether a page will rank for a particular search query. There are many ranking factors, but today, we’ll cover key elements of a webpage that are considered ranking factors and, therefore, will need to be optimized. Additionally, we’ll look at some primary signals and practices to consider when building SEO content.
URL Structure
Did you know your URLs can affect your keyword rankings? Even your primary domain can help you garner relevant keyword rankings. Think: weather.com
Beyond your domain, we recommend structuring your URLs with categories, like /blog/ or /product/, and a succinct URL string that matches the page’s target keyword.
For example, if our target keyword is “what is local seo”
A good URL would be: theadeptagency.com/post/what-is-local-seo
Using these best practices will provide more context to your website visitors and search engines.
URL Tips: Keep most URL strings evergreen. When you avoid using years or list numbers in a URL, it gives you a chance to always update the on-page SEO and content for years to come. This will help you to avoid unnecessary URL changes, redirects, and conflicting signals.
Meta Fields
Certain webpage meta fields provide vital context to searchers and search engines.
Below are the top fields to optimize that will strengthen your on-page SEO, boost click-through rates, and improve readability.
Title Tags
A title tag is the title meta field of a webpage that tells users and search engines what a particular page is about. What you put in your title tag field is the title that will appear on the search engine results page (aka the SERPs). Since it is a strong ranking factor, it’s important to ensure it’s optimized with your target keyword.
For example, if your target keyword is “types of berries,” then your title tag might read “15 Types of Berries and Their Benefits.”
Title Tag Tips: For best practices, we recommend a title tag that is 60 characters or less, otherwise your title may get truncated in search results.
Meta Description
The meta description is the text under the title tag in search results. They often entice searchers to click with a blurb describing the page’s contents. These days meta descriptions are often rewritten by Google with the most relevant or essential content on the page.
However, we still recommend writing an optimized meta description for all the pages on your site.
Meta Description Writing Tips: Use keywords relevant to the on-page content, incorporate a CTA of some kind, and keep it under 160 characters long.
Page Title and Headings
The page title is different than a title tag and is often referred to as the H1 or header. Your page’s H1 and the subsequent headings are important signals for SEO and should be optimized with relevant keywords within the keyword cluster of your target keyword.
The formatting of your page is important for search engines and users who land on the site. Using relevant, optimized headings and subheadings improves readability. Breaking up your text with images, videos, or infographics makes content more digestible and gives readers a break.
H1 Writing Tip: Optimize your H1 with your primary keyword, keeping it intact. Try to keep these around 60 characters as well.
Internal Links
Internal links are links throughout your site that lead users to another page on your site, whereas an external link takes readers to a different site.
Internal links serve multiple purposes that benefit both your website visitors and search engines. They help users find relevant content and products on your site, leading to longer user sessions, lower bounce rates, and potential leads or improved conversion rates.
For search engines, internal links can be leveraged to improve the crawling and indexation of your website. You can think of internal links as a guide for crawlers, helping them to get from one page to the next. The easier search engines can find and crawl your site’s pages, the greater the likelihood they will have visibility on the SERPs.
How does this tie into SEO content writing? By building a content strategy that covers relevant topics, you create opportunities for internal linking across your pages.
If you produce high-quality content and offerings with web pages that are optimized, internal links can be strategically placed to improve your topical authority and relevance in your industry.
One example of internal links is the navigation bar, where you typically link to the most important landing pages and directories of your site. Not only do they help users find their way around but they also send strong signals to Google of what you are prioritizing on your site.
Anchor Text
The anchor text you use is an important component of a good internal linking strategy. It’s a strong signal that informs search engines (and readers) of the topic and core keyword(s) associated with the page you’re referring. The more strategic you are with your anchor text, the more likely your pages are to rank for the appropriate terms.
Backlinks
Unlike internal links, backlinks are inbound links to your site from an external site. They are an important ranking factor because it's an external signal to search engines of your site’s value. You can think of backlinks like votes of confidence for your web page and site. The more high-quality domains with backlinks pointing to your page, the greater your page and/or domain authority becomes in the eyes of search engines.
You often garner backlinks to your site or web pages when your pages are valuable in some way, whether it’s a high-quality, insightful piece of content or a product that has caught some buzz. However, there are SEO agencies that offer link building as a service that can help you boost your backlink profile.
Industry Expertise & Google’s E-E-A-T
As search engines refine search results, their standards for content have risen. Both readers and search engines are looking for expertise these days.
Depending on the topic and industry, authority could be one of the primary ranking factors. For instance, not just any site can rank for medical questions like “what causes heart disease” or financial questions like “how to invest in stocks,” it takes time to build your site’s authority signals to show search engines that you’re an authority that can provide sound advice in these areas.
The more you can demonstrate your industry authority throughout your content using best practices, like authorship pages and E-E-A-T signals, the more likely you can improve your site’s industry authority in the eyes of search engines. And hopefully garner more backlinks to further boost your site’s authority.
This is a practice that not only feeds search engine signals but establishing authority in your industry helps you retain and convert target audiences as well.
Common Mistakes with SEO Beginners
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a common mistake made by beginners just getting started with SEO. It’s the process of unnaturally incorporating your target keyword(s) throughout a page and its meta fields, also called “over-optimization.”
Not only can this come across as spammy to your site visitors, but search engines can also snuff this out and potentially devalue your page and its ranking potential. So while it may seem clever to add a primary keyword everywhere possible on a page, it can have adverse effects on your rankings.
Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization is like competing with yourself; it’s what happens when there is more than one web page optimized for the same term. When two pages vie for the same keywords, it creates conflicting signals that can impede their ranking potential.
Every piece of content on a site should be optimized for its own target keyword to give it the best chance of getting indexed and served in search results. In turn, search engines will serve the appropriate pages in search results.
SEO Content Writing: Best Practices & Key Takeaways
- Keyword Integration: Seamlessly incorporate relevant keywords into your content. Research the keywords your potential customers might use when searching for your products or services.
- User-Centric Content: Craft content that addresses user needs. Provide value, answer questions, and solve problems to resonate with your audience.
- Consistency: Regularly update your content to stay relevant. Fresh and updated content is favored by search engines and appreciated by visitors.
- Mobile Optimization: Ensure your content is accessible on various devices, especially mobile. A mobile-friendly design enhances user experience and contributes to better SEO rankings.
The Path Forward: Take Action
From small businesses to corporations, it’s not just about the content you put on your site; it's about leveraging SEO to ensure your customers can find you! The more you understand how SEO affects your organic visibility, the better you can dish up website copy and content that will get you in front of your target audience.
By incorporating both SEO optimization techniques and best practices with your industry expertise, not much can stop you! However, an effective SEO content strategy takes time, SEO tools, expertise, and research.
If you're looking to enhance your online presence with SEO services, consider collaborating with SEO experts like Adept Agency, who can guide you through the intricacies of organic visibility. Get a free SEO consultation by submitting a form!
