SEO content writing is a craft, and like any craft it takes time to master. The best way to learn SEO content writing is by reading the work of writers who have already mastered it. In this post, I’ll share some of my favorite SEO copywriters and what they do right in order to help make your own writing more effective.
Hiring writers familiar with SEO is essential.
As a director of content writing, I’ve worked with countless SEO copywriters—many of them very talented and experienced. Sometimes, though, it can be difficult for me to know if a writer is going to be able to deliver the type of writing we need at our company. Some folks are able to produce amazing prose that might be well-suited for search engine optimization (SEO), but doesn’t resonate with people who read what they write. Other times, I find that someone has a great grasp on making content useful and readable by humans while also being optimized for search engines. Which one do you want?
You want both! When hiring an SEO copywriter or team of writers, make sure they have experience doing both kinds of content creation so that your site visitors get what they came for (relevant information) while Google sees the value in ranking your pages highly when key words are typed into its algorithm.
SEO content writing is about solving problems.
SEO copywriting is all about solving problems.
It’s not just about writing a good title, or a good description tag, or even using the right keywords in your body text and headings. SEO copywriting is about helping people accomplish something they want to do – whether that’s buying a product or signing up for a service – by providing them with the information they need to complete their task as quickly and easily as possible. When we write content for search engines, our goal should always be to make it easier for people who are searching online for our business or products to find us on search engines like Google and Bing in an effort to satisfy their needs (more than anything else).
SEO content writing requires empathy for the audience.
To be a good copywriter, you need to understand who your audience is and what they’re looking for. This means knowing what it is that they’re looking at when they are looking through something else. Consider the following example:
- A person may be looking for a restaurant nearby. They could type keywords into Google like “restaurants near me” or “good restaurants in [my city].”
- Another person might be searching for a restaurant, but not specifically one close by. They might use keywords like “best restaurants in [my state]” or “top notch eateries within 100 miles of [my home town].”
You need to know the landscape you’re operating in to write effective SEO content.
To write effective SEO copy, you need to know the landscape you’re operating in. You need to know your audience and where they are coming from, what keywords they use and how often, who your competition is and how they are doing it, and what search engines expect from a page before they rank it.
Once you have an understanding of this information, it will be much easier for you to create content that engages readers while also meeting SEO requirements.
Long-form content is key to keeping readers engaged, but it has to be good.
Long-form content is the perfect way to keep your customers engaged, but it has to be good.
- Customer retention: Long-form content will help you retain your customers by giving them something to look forward to and keep coming back for more. If you want them to make a purchase again in the future, give them an experience that they can’t get anywhere else in such detail and quality.
- SEO: Longer pieces of content are given higher rankings by search engines because they tend to be more authoritative; however, if yours is poorly written or lacks the right content structure, then its rankings will suffer instead of benefiting from its lengthiness (such as having duplicate or irrelevant information).
- Sales: If you want your visitors who click on ads related specifically about your product/service offerings then this means it’s important for sales too! So if someone clicks on an ad with nothing but short blurbs about what we do here at [your company], chances are very slim any conversion would occur outside merely being curious about what exactly our business offers – which usually isn’t enough incentive alone.”
Writing headlines takes time and should be treated as a separate project on its own.
You may be thinking, “Of course I know this! I’m not an idiot.” But sometimes we get so caught up in writing the article itself that we forget to give the headline its due diligence. And believe me: if you don’t take the time to write headlines well, your content will suffer for it.
Headlines should be short and punchy—they should draw readers in and answer the questions they want answered.
But which questions do they have? Well…you guessed it! That depends on what kind of article you’re writing (e.g., an informational article or a guide), so let’s talk about how to write headlines for different types of content:
Technical SEO is just as important as the writing itself.
Designing your content around SEO isn’t just about writing copy. It’s also about technical SEO, which is the process of ensuring that your website is set up in a way that will allow it to be found on search engines.
Technical SEO includes things like metadata and internal linking, both of which are important for improving your rankings. Metadata is how Google and other search engines identify what each page on a website is about so that it can index them properly. Internal linking (also known as backlinking) is the process by which one page links to another—this helps Google understand the relationship between different pieces of content on your website, meaning they’re likely to rank higher than similar offerings without this kind of structure in place.
As you might have guessed from its name, technical SEO can help improve both your click-through rate (CTR) and organic traffic over time by helping Google recognize what your site’s content is all about—and then make sure people see that content when they search online!
People want answers to their questions. Good writers will find them and give them to them in easy-to-read ways.
I believe that one of the most important things you can do as a content marketer is to be empathetic towards your audience. It’s not enough to write copy with good grammar and strong structure, because if people don’t understand what you are saying, it won’t matter.
A good writer will recognize the fact that people come to Google for answers. They want explanations for things, or advice on how to fix their problems. If you can solve these problems for them by providing easy-to-read information in a friendly voice, then they’re more likely to stay on your site and ultimately convert into customers (or whatever else it is that your product offers).
So here’s what I recommend: start by understanding where you fit within the landscape of information available online about your topic or industry.* You need to see which keywords people are searching for when they come across your competitors’ websites (or other businesses like yours), and understand why those keywords exist so deeply within their minds.* This will give you an idea of what questions they have – which can then lead us into writing great SEO Copywriting content!
Conclusion
SEO copywriting is a process of discovery, and the more you know about what your audience wants, the better prepared you’ll be to give it to them. For those of us who love words, there’s no better place to be than at the helm of an SEO copywriting team where your job is to make sure people find what they’re looking for online. With this in mind, here are some tips that will help take your writing skills up a notch: