Once you start your website, you should good SEO content to be seen in the search engines and get more visitors. But what does that mean? How do you write good SEO Content? What does that even mean?
Personally, I believe you should start with content that helps and serves your target audience. You can’t go wrong with being of help to those you serve.
As with anything, always provide value first, even when your goal is to write good SEO content.
Here are my thoughts on writing good SEO content on your blog or website.
1. Write good SEO Content with your audience in mind
What this means, simply, it to create content your target audience is looking for or needs (preferably both), and you’ll start getting more traffic automatically.
When you are creating good SEO content that is written with a specific group of people in mind, you’ll use words and phrases that people in your audience probably used to find websites like yours, and you’ll answer questions they have in your content.
As a website designer, and a web consumer, nothing quite drives me nuts like websites that essentially have the same or less content as a yellow pages ad. Use the medium to serve your customers and potential customers.
Address questions and concerns people commonly have before they hire or buy from you. What kinds of questions do people often ask you along the sales process? Write some content that addresses these issues, preferably using the language they use when asking the questions.
Don’t use the lingo that you use in your industry all the time. Use the lingo your customers use. This is what they are typing into the search engines.
Educate existing customers on how to use your products and services to best effect. For example, as a website designer, I also educate people in my blog articles on how to write for the web, how to market their website, and how to overcome mindset blocks when starting a business.
Why? Because as a business owner myself, I know these are things my target audience needs.
2. Do some research
When I talk about research, I don’t just mean researching SEO keywords, although that is helpful. I wrote more about that over here.
What I mean is, research things like:
- Are people looking for this information?
- What specifically do they want to know?
- How much search engine traffic does this topic get?
- How much mileage can you get out of this topic? Can you write several posts about different aspects of this topic?
Where would you find the answers to these questions?
There are a few spots. First, there’s Google’s “People Also Ask” section on the SERP page. Next, there are websites like Quora, where people ask questions, and others provide answers.
Finally, there’s social media. No one likes that person who spams Facebook groups with their business pitch, but groups full of your potential audience are great for content research. Pay attention to the questions people are asking with an open mind.
When I first started doing this, the questions and content ideas I discovered amazed me. My target demographic asked completely different questions than the questions I assumed they were wondering about. We’re too close to our topic, so we don’t realize what’s obvious to us is not always obvious to everyone else.
3. Stay focused on the topic
I struggle with this, as you might notice. I want to write a long, definitive tome on whatever I write.
For good SEO content and user-friendliness, keep your focus tight. The focus of this post is writing good SEO content, so going off on other parts of this topic (like keyword research) is drifting away from the topic at hand.
Instead, I can link to my other post on SEO Keyword research, which helps me keep the focus tight on both posts, boosts SEO because of interlinking, and provides another opportunity for improving my SEO rank with a different but related keyword.
4. Write in clusters for good SEO content AND user-friendliness
I’m going to use myself as an example here. Is that okay?
Years ago I had a blog that existed about ten years, but I lost most of it after I went off to work a full-time designer job for a few more years. I had a backup, thankfully. But I’ve been slowly going through the content deciding what to keep.
BUT, since I’m starting over from scratch, pretty much, I am taking a different approach. I decided on a few tight, interrelated topics that align with my business focus, and I am linking all of my posts together thoroughly so my readers and always find more information on related topics.
AND, I created a resource page with a list of resources for entrepreneurs and small business people, as well as individual posts about those resources, which go along with my other posts to help entrepreneurs.
I connected my posts topically, and so I linked them together too.
I wrote a large foundation of posts to start off, and now each of my newer posts strategically center on a topic with a specific goal of helping my readers improve.
Having the big picture in mind keeps me from writing too-long blog posts that ramble all over the place. Instead, I keep it relatively short and sweet, while focusing on a singular topic.
This provides a user-friendly way for my readers to learn about a topic while also writing good SEO content.
For example, this post is about writing good SEO content. It links to posts about topics like SEO Keyword research, and SEO tools. Search engines will realize I write useful content on SEO.
Now SEO is a hard topic to rank for, and I’m on page 3 or 4 the last I checked. I’m more focused on ranking for the other topics I write about at the moment. The point is, by writing several articles on different aspects under a broader topic, you’ll rank higher as a whole.
5. Break up content with relevant headlines
People don’t “read” online. They scan.
Use headlines, bulleted lists, images, and media to help your readers scan over your content. Headlines (actually marking content as a headline, so that it shows up as a headline in the code) will help the search engines figure out what your content is about easier, especially if you use relevant keywords and try to be helpful with your headlines.
6. Craft an attention grabbing title that uses relevant keywords
When someone searching sees your post in the search engine results, they’ll see the post’s title and an excerpt. Make those count, not only with your relevant keyword, but also interesting enough to make your reader want to know more.
Getting on the front page of the search engines is only half the battle. You also need them to click to go to your website.
7. Proofread your content
Running your content through a spell checker is not enough. I recommend using a proofreading tool like ProWritingAid that can make usage suggestions to tighten up your writing or hiring an editor.
Your writing is your first impression to your potential customers. You don’t want to sound like you just fell off the turnip truck.
Unlike other programs, I prefer ProWritingAid because it helps me improve my writing in so many areas, rather than just common spelling and grammar issues.
8. Use an SEO Plugin like RankMath to optimize each piece of content
Finally, an SEO plugin like RankMath can help you when you’re writing good SEO content by helping you see where you can improve your content’s SEO.
RankMath does so many awesome things for you as a website owner. I’d get off topic discussing them here, so you’ll have to visit my page about RankMath to learn more.
RankMath lets you create a custom Search Engine headline (different from the post title) and custom excerpt, as well as customize the social media preview of your content. You’ll get a score (from 1 to 100 and from red to yellow to green) to show you how well did you optimized your content in every post.
