How Can SEO Services Make Your Business More Profitable?
Businesses have grown to appreciate the power of SEO content writing in recent years. All businesses are now rushing to create content for their websites. Content marketing requires a good strategy to be successful though. Joining the mad content-creation rush will not do your business much good, if the end result is not valuable and well-optimized content.
SEO content writing is an essential skill for any modern digital marketers. Content writing is no longer just putting down words about a certain topic. It is about knowing how to target an audience, appealing to their passions and pain points, and leading them to solutions.
SEO content writing, when properly executed can transform your business. It can move your business from ground zero to sustainability.
Someone who’s just getting introduced to content marketing is likely to wonder, what is SEO content writing?
What is SEO Content Writing?
SEO content writing involves the creation of search-engine-friendly content. That being said, content writing should be human-centered. As you try to optimize your content for search engines, do not forget that you are writing for human beings. A lot of SEO content writers forget that bit only to end up with robotic content.
Anyone with a website must be in a position to create SEO content. You could also seek SEO content writing services if you don’t have the capacity to create the content yourself.
Digital Marksmen has a team of expert SEO content writers. We can produce amazing content for your website and help you achieve your business objectives.
So, how do you write content that your audience will love?
SEO Content Writing Tips
The goal of content writing is to appeal to your readers enough to keep them coming back for more. Before you start writing, you need to come up with a robust plan. Your SEO content writing plan should outline your objectives and a content strategy.
The following SEO content writing tips will help you come up with Impactful content
1. Map Out Your Website’s Goals and Objectives
Don’t rush into writing if you haven’t mapped out your website’s goals and objectives. You might end up with content that cannot help you. Even well-written content can be useless if it is not aligned with your objectives.
You can have goals and objectives such as;
- Increasing traffic
- Increasing conversions and sales
- Brand activation and awareness
- Increasing engagement, etc.
Your goals and objectives are defined by the kind of business you are running. Someone running an eCommerce business has different objectives from someone running a blog and hoping to earn from Ad revenue.
Understanding your goals and objectives will help you come up with an SEO content writing strategy.
For instance, if you are seeking to increase conversions and sales, you should focus on creating content for your product pages. You should write content such as product descriptions and CTAs (Call to Action). Your content should also be optimized for high commercial intent keywords.
If your sole goal is to increase traffic to your site, then your focus should be on blog content. You should seek to find out what topics are resonating with your target audience. You should then create content around such topics.
2. Know Your Audience
This is where most content writers get it wrong. You cannot write about everything and for everyone on the same website. There is a specific demographic that would be interested in your website or business and you need to find out who they are.
For instance, if you are selling ladies clothing, it would not make sense to create content about men’s clothing. If your business is offering different services or products, you need to know what kind of audience you should target for each product or service.
If your business caters to a diverse audience. You should segment your audience based on common interests to make it easy to provide meaningful content to everyone. You can segment your audience based on;
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Hobbies
- Buying habits, etc.
Segmenting your audience will help you avoid creating blanket content that cannot make any meaningful impact. Studies have shown that visitors to your website are likely to have more confidence in your business if they find value in your content.
3. Conducting Proper Keyword Research
Keywords are phrases that you use to make your content visible to search engines. That’s how people who are interested in your niche can find your content. Keyword research comes after you’ve understood who your target audience is, and segmented them depending on what kind of business you are engaged in.
Finding the right keywords is not difficult, but you have to be strategic about it. If you get the keywords wrong, you’ll end up doing a lot of difficult work in vain. You need keyword research tools to be able to conduct comprehensive keyword research. You can use tools such as SEMrush, Google Keyword Explorer, or Ahrefs.
Enter your seed keyword in any of these tools and they’ll provide a list of related keywords. They will also provide essential metrics on each keyword. You get metrics such as;
- Search volume
- Keyword difficulty
- CPC (Cost per click)
- Competition index
How to Conduct Proper Keyword Research
The two most important metrics while choosing keywords is search volume and keyword difficulty. CPC and competition index are important if you want to run some paid search advertising campaigns.
Keyword difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to rank for the selected keyword. Search volume shows you the number of people querying on search engines using that keyword.
You obviously want a lot of traffic, so it would make sense to go for keywords with high search volume. However, you need to consider the keyword difficulty as well. High keyword difficulty means there is high competition for that keyword, and the sites ranking for that keyword have high domain authority.
If your website is new and has low domain authority, it is nearly impossible to rank for keywords with high keyword difficulty. Try to strike a balance between search volume and keyword difficulty when selecting keywords.
New websites should go for keywords whose keyword difficulty is below 70%.
Keywords selection is also based on your business goals and objectives. If you are targeting a broad audience, you can use short-tail and phrase match keywords. If you are targeting a very specific audience, long-tail and exact match keywords work better.
Long-tail keywords are keywords that are made up of more than three words. Long-tail keywords offer more information about what the searcher might be looking for. For instance, if someone searches for “Top 10 Android Phones in 2021”, they’ve made what they are looking for quite clear. It is easier for you to create content that would answer their questions.
On the other hand, if someone searches “Android Phones”, it’s difficult to tell what they are looking for. You don’t know whether they are looking for a specific phone, or they just want to know what an android phone is.
Long-tail keywords help you ensure you are targeting an audience that would want to read your content.
You can also choose keywords based on intent. Intent is particularly important if you are trying to sell a product. If you are selling a product, you want to target people who need and can afford that product. To do that you need to find the keywords that indicate high buying intent.
For instance, if someone searches “where to buy Samsung Galaxy S20”, you are almost certain that that person wants to buy a Samsung Galaxy S20. If you are selling the product, and you find a way to lead them to your product page, there is a high likelihood that they will buy from you.
Keyword research is the backbone of any successful SEO content writing strategy. In the next section, we are going to explore how you should use your selected keywords in your content.
How to Write SEO Content That Your Audience Will Love
So, you’ve now selected your topics and your keywords and you want to write some amazing content. How do you go about it? You first need to establish what kind of content you need to write. You can write;
- Blog posts
- Sales copy
- Product descriptions, etc.
Again, the type of content you write depends on what you are trying to achieve. Blog posts are the most common type of content. They are used to attract traffic to a site. Sales copy and product descriptions are used on product pages.
Let’s explore how you can write an amazing blog post.
A great blog post has three main parts. It has an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. In the introduction, you rope in your audience into why the topic is important and how you are going to handle it.
In the body, you make your arguments and pass all the information you needed to pass. The conclusion is a brief recap of what the blog post was about. This is where you share your final thoughts and parting shots.
Apart from the general structure of your blog post, you should be keen on the following aspects;
- Headings, Sub-Headings, and Heading Tags
- Paragraph length
- Readability
- Keyword density
1. Headings, Sub-Headings, and Heading Tags
Your post must have heading and subheadings. Your heading is the first thing that should capture the attention of your readers. Make sure it is very catchy.
Headings and subheadings serve two main purposes. They make it easier for your readers to consume your content. One can scroll through your post and easily find some snippet of information that they need without having to go through the entire post.
Headings and sub-headings also tell search engines what your post is about. You have to use heading tags for search engines to recognize these headings. Sub-headings allow search engines to crawl your entire post and recognize what each section is about.
HTML heading tags run from H1 to H6. Most CMSs (Content management systems) allow you to add headings and sub-headings to your posts without having to write the HTML tags.
2. Paragraph Length
Long blocks of text are boring. It is important to break down your arguments into small chunks of biteable paragraphs. Try to make sure each paragraph covers a specific idea and can stand independently.
Most of the time, readers will skim through posts looking for a specific piece of information. Small paragraphs allow them to do so easily.
3. Readability
Readability is about ensuring your readers can easily comprehend your writing. If you are writing for a general audience, it is important to keep your writing simple and precise. You don’t have to use jargon and metaphors.
If you are writing for a niche audience, you have to learn how to communicate with them in their language and tone. For instance, if you are writing for a highly technical audience, you should be able to use the technical terms that they resonate with. Readability is heavily reliant on your understanding of the audience you are writing for.
4. Keyword Density
Keyword density refers to how many times you include your target keyword in your post. The main keyword should appear about 3 to 6 times within 1000 words. Try to include the keyword in the title and sub-titles of the post if you can.
Ensure you do not stuff keywords in your posts. Google’s algorithm can call out keyword stuffing. Your website will be penalized if you are caught stuffing keywords. Ensure the keywords flow naturally with the content around them.
Headings, paragraphs, and readability are meant to improve user experience. They are supposed to make it easy for visitors to your site to consume your content. If your content is difficult to consume, users will most likely bounce off the site too quickly.
High bounce off rates will affect your SERPs (Search engine results page) ranking. Google interprets high bounce off rates as poor user experience. Google always gives priority to pages that it thinks have the best user experience.
Keyword density is about making your post visible to search engines, and reachable by people who might be interested in such topics. As long as you pick the right keywords for the topic you want to address, you should not struggle to naturally include them in your post.
These writing guidelines apply to sales copy and product descriptions as well. The only difference is that sales copy and product descriptions are for product pages and are focused on promotion.
How to Improve the SEO Quality of Your Blog Post
It is very important to find ways to keep your readers glued to your posts as long as possible. The longer the duration people spend on your posts, the more authority they get for the targeted keyword. Apart from the writing itself, theirs is a lot you can do to enhance the SEO quality of your content.
Make sure you add the following to your blog posts;
- Images and Infographics
- Internal and External links
Images and Infographics
We had mentioned earlier that no one enjoys reading blocks upon blocks of texts. One way of avoiding the monotony of endless blocks of texts is using images and infographics. Images and infographics are visually appealing and the information on them is easy to understand.
Add an image or infographic after every couple of paragraphs, and it will make a huge difference in how your visitors consume your content. Images and infographics will make your visitors hang around your content longer. That will enhance the SEO score of your post and bring you more visitors.
Make sure you add alt descriptions on all your images and infographics. If possible, include your keyword in the alt descriptions. Since Google is not yet intelligent enough to study images, it uses alt text to know what an image is about.
Google will give your post priority over others if it contains relevant images and infographics. It gauges relevance using alt text. Adding alt descriptions to your images can make a world of difference in your search rankings.
Internal and External Links
Link building not only promotes your content but also improves the domain authority of your website. Internal links are links that lead to other posts and pages within your website. External links lead to content on different websites.
If you link internally, link to sites that have high domain authority. Your site is going to inherit a bit of that authority when connected to such sites. Internal links ensure there are links back to your website in case your post is used by another website.
Linkbacks are very important because they give the impression that your content is valuable. The post’s and domain authority are going to rise steadily if you keep getting linkbacks from other sites.
Ensure you make your content shareable. You can add social media buttons under your posts to make them easy to share. When your posts are shared on different platforms, google will interpret those shares as backlinks to your website and boost your domain authority.
User Experience Affects the SEO Score of Your Content
You can write amazing posts with awesome images and infographics, but they might not make any impact if people are not enjoying their experience on your website. User experience is tied to aspects such as;
- Loading speeds
- Ease of navigation
- Color schemes, etc.
User experience is about anything and everything that makes visitors comfortable on your website. Take for instance loading speeds. A visitor might be attracted by the heading of your post of search results, but if your page takes too long to load they’ll probably not wait to see the post.
If you’ve used color schemes that strain eyes on your website, it will be difficult to keep visitors on your posts regardless of how interesting they are.
You have to support your amazing content with friendly web designs. Make sure your visitors are comfortable on your site so that they can enjoy your amazing content. Your content will make a bigger impact on your visitors if they are comfortable on your website.
If you do not have the capacity to improve your user experience, you could hire expert web designers. Digital Marksmen can help you test and optimize the user experience on your websites.
Monitoring Post Performance
When you put in a lot of effort to write an amazing post, you want it to have a big impact and achieve the set objectives. That means you have to keep an eye on how the post is performing on search results. Use SEO tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs to monitor post-performance.
While monitoring post-performance, you should be looking at metrics such as;
- Impressions
- Ranking position for the target keyword
- Number of clicks
- Average visit duration
- Bounce off rates
Impressions will tell you whether Google thinks your content is valuable. If you are getting low impressions, it means Google doesn’t think your content can offer meaningful value to searchers. Ranking position can help you compare your post with the posts that are ranking above you.
The number of clicks will tell you whether your content resonates with the audience you’ve targeted using your chosen keywords. It will also tell you whether your titles are catchy enough. Average visit duration and bounce off rates will tell you whether users are enjoying their experience on your web pages.
Build Your Business Through SEO Content Writing
SEO content writing is not just about putting down some words. It is about reaching out to and touching your audience’s passions, pain points, and interests. Your main focus should be on creating valuable content. If you implement all the necessary SEO techniques on your valuable content, you’ll soon start seeing the business benefits of content marketing.
If you don’t have the capacity to create SEO content for your website, Digital Marksmen’s SEO content creation services might come in handy. Our content writing experts will create awesome content for your website and help you achieve your business objectives.