How To Write Good SEO Content

Getting top rankings on search engines with SEO isn’t like flicking on a switch. No matter how much money you spend on SEO software, you cannot get top rankings without the right site content. After all, It’s the content that gets the ranking. Content is also part of SEO. Many best practices for content writing are also best practices for SEO. To get top rankings with SEO you need to know how to write good SEO content. If you are trying to work out how to do this, you’ve come to the right place. 

Finding The Right Keywords for SEO Content

When writing content for SEO, keywords need to be factored into the content creation process from the very beginning. Well-chosen keywords must form the foundation of good SEO content. The first step of doing this is finding good value keywords to target. You need keywords with a high search volume but not too much competition.

These keywords also need to be a good match for the types of search intentions your content is catering to. If you are writing content for product pages this can be as simple as finding the best combination of words to describe your product, for example, an online kitchenware store may need to choose between Pizza Slicer, Pizza Cutter, and Pizza Knife and then chose an additional phrase to signify internet purchase, buy, online, free delivery, etc.

But SEO content isn’t just for driving immediate sales, it can also be used to establish a relationship that will eventually lead to online sales or a visit to your store. This is a key reason why so many business websites have a blog. Every day searchers are typing all kinds of queries into search engines that are related to themes, topics, and problems connected with your business. Marketers refer to this strategy as Content Marketing. To create good SEO content for these purposes you need to find the queries people are asking search engines that are linked to your products, and then provide a good answer to them. 

For example, a website selling guitar strings in the US can see on Google trends that a popular related question is ‘how to tie guitar strings. This is a classic problem that people who buy guitar strings have. This phrase can form the basis of a well-written article on how to tie guitar strings, accompanied by helpful images, and perhaps an embedded Youtube video from the website’s Youtube channel. Some people searching for the answer will already have enough guitar strings for the moment, but when they break, they’ll know where to find a new set. The keyword finder feature in rankingCoach makes this process easy by showing you the average search volume of phrases and your site’s chances of ranking for them. 

H1 and URL’s for SEO Content

H1 means headline size 1, this refers to the largest title font on the page, which is often reserved for the title/headline of a piece of writing. Titles are always important for content, but even more so when it comes to SEO. It is a crucial location for keywords. Your main keywords should be featured in the H1. If your article is responding to a question users are typing into search engines, this could also be the place where you put that question, so for our previous example the H1 could be

Choice A: How to tie guitar strings

Choice B: Guitar Guide: How to Tie Guitar Strings

Choice C: A Guide to Tying Guitar Strings

You need to make sure that the title containing keywords is also appealing to the reader. H1s play an important role in drawing clicks to the article. It is often the first thing the user reads from the article when it is linked to other pages and shared on social media. It also draws the reader into reading the article itself. 

IMPORTANT: If the H1 you type into your CMS is also set to generate the URL, make sure that you only use characters that Google accepts for URLs. You can learn more about this in the article on SEO friendly URLs. On top of being an important place for keywords, the URL will appear in the page’s listings search engine results page, which is another reason why your title needs to be engaging and clickable. 

For SEO Content & Planning

If you were one of those people who managed to make it all the way through school without ever writing a plan for their essays, I’m sorry to say your run of avoidance has come to an end. Planning your writing won’t just make it better and easier, it can also improve its SEO.  We have established that when writing content to solve searchers’ questions the main headline/title H1) should embed that question. The H2 forms the subheadings in the article. We can either use them to divide the article into the different stages of answering the H1

H1: How to tie guitar strings

H2: Removing The Old Strings

H2: Attaching The New Strings

H2: Tuning The Guitar

Or we can add mini questions linked to the topic covered in the H1 

H1: How to Tie Guitar Strings

H2: How to Tie Electric Guitar Strings 

H2: How to Tie Acoustic Guitar Strings 

H2: How to remove Guitar Strings

H2:How to dispose of Guitar strings

These questions are linked to the first question so provide users with even more content value. They contain the keywords we need and they may also rank for the subheading questions too. As you can see by spending a little more time researching, thinking about your H1 and H2s, we make coming up with ideas, structuring, and writing for our content much easier. Which in turn creates Good SEO Content.