The Ultimate Guide to SEO Content Writing

Why You Need An SEO Content Writing Strategy

The internet is full of sites with interesting content that almost no one will ever see. A great deal of time and effort may have gone into writing these pages. Unfortunately, the authors of this consent didn’t know how to write SEO-friendly content or how to build SEO keywords into this content to make it found on search engines like Google. 

So before you spend hours working on content, make sure you know how to write SEO content articles that rank well on Google and other search engines. This SEO content writing guide will show you a whole host of tools and tips on how to write good SEO content. This will help you to make sure that your site’s content gets the best possible ranking for the best value SEO keywords.  

Writing Good SEO Content by Serving The User 

Many SEO tips explore the hundreds of rankings factors that experts argue are the key to getting top rankings — and many of these tips are useful, but when it comes to tips and finding the most important for writing SEO content that ranks, before you get bogged down by the details of the many ranking factors, you should focus on just one thing: ‘Providing content that serves a purpose for the user’. These are the words of Google’s webmaster Martin Splitt. This may sound simple, but many SEO content writers fail to fully understand the importance of this tip and use it to inform their writing process by always seeking to serve the user with everything they write that they want to rank.

Writing SEO Content That Serves The User

So what do we actually mean by writing SEO content that serves the user? Well if you are writing content targeting a specific keyword this means you are trying to appear in the search results when a searcher types it in. 

So what does the searcher want and does your content do the best job of giving it to them? Both the searcher and Google decide this not you. If a searcher is looking for ‘the best homemade Pizza recipe’ does your blog article for your bakeware website on baking a pizza actually do this - all the pages at the top of the Google results are doing just that. 

In this case, serving the user means offering an appealing, easy-to-follow recipe with everything the user needs to make the pizza themselves. On the other hand, the content needed for a pizza delivery service on a page optimized for ‘order pizza now’ will be very different. This page will have easy-to-follow instructions on how to order a pizza along with a few appealing descriptions and pictures of the pizza.

A user served on this page won’t need to spend a lot of time on it, but they should want to, and be easily able to, click through to another page where they can order that pizza. In short, to create SEO content that serves the user and ranks well you must make sure your content tries its best to give the user what they want, and what they want will depend on the term. 

SEO Content That  Doesn't Serve The User

A classic example of how SEO content writers ignore this advice when trying to write good SEO content is in the way they prioritize the length of content and keyword density over writing something that is actually enjoyable or useful to the reader. Often this means repeating similar ideas over and over again or pasting together and rewriting other people's content without any regard for whether the ideas fit together or make sense.

SEO content written this way tends to be disconnected and hard to read. It also fails to give the user the answer or explanation they are searching for. If you write content that you, as the writer, can hardly be bothered to read it. This content isn’t serving the user and won’t rank well. It’s also important not to think of SEO content writing as a disconnected list of boxes to tick.

Don’t forget it's your SEO content that appears on the search engine results page, and it's this content that will convince users to stick around on your site. This means that improving your content can often be the key to boosting your sales and rankings. For instance, you may be told that your website is not ranking well because your bounce rate is too high: meaning too many people are leaving your website quickly after just seeing one page, and the reason they are doing this is because they don’t like what they are seeing or reading. SEO tools can help you find what potential site visitors and customers want, but you still need to give it to them in the form of well-written useful SEO content. 

Writing SEO Content for Purpose

There is an unimaginable depth of topics and types of content on Google. This means that not all SEO content will serve the user in the same way. That said, there are some classic broad categories that all websites for small businesses need to cover, and with these categories come some specific SEO content writing strategies. 

How to Write SEO Content: Product Pages 

E-commerce websites for small businesses may not all be selling the same thing but significant searchers will be interested in these standard topics for SEO content

• The products and services you offer 
• How and where to get these products and services 
• The spec and key details of your products and services

This kind of concept is relatively straightforward for any SMB owner to write. Your SEO keywords are the details you give customers who walk into your store online. The main difference is the focus on the right questions and keywords to ensure you write SEO content ranks well on search engines. So make sure you pay close attention to most valauble keywords that customers use to describe your products in search engines and use those, rather than the ones you like the sound of best.

How to Write SEO Content: Concepts and Features

After you have covered the essential SEO content topics that let search engines and customers know what you offer and where to get it from, you need to explore the issues, questions, and debates relating to your products and services. 

Your goal is to write SEO content that ranks for the kinds of questions customers might have about your products and any commonly discussed themes relating to your industry. This will help to attract customers who are doing research connected to the types of products and services your site offers.

For instance, someone looking to buy a snowboard online for a snowboarding trip to Whistler in British Columbia, a location world-famous for powder snow, might be searching for articles on ‘the best kinds of snowboard for powder snow’.

Many of the results on this results page are e-commerce websites that sell snowboarding gear that has written SEO content that takes the form of an interesting article answering this question, also including links to the recommendations they sell.

Any visitors interested in the answer are highly likely to be interested in buying a snowboard. An article talking based on the keyword phrase ‘best snowboards to take to Whistle’ might also bring in some good traffic.

Taking the time to write interesting SEO content that answers questions users are actually searching and interested in you have a much better chance of ranking and bringing more customers to site to discover your products and services. 

How to Write SEO Content: Linked Interests 

The third potential group of subjects for writing SEO content that ranks well on is much broader than the first two. It consists of any interest searchers and potential customers may have that could indirectly lead to your products. 

For instance, someone searching for ‘alternative to the Atkins diet' isn’t asking about sport but someone researching diets is likely to want to lose weight, so they might be interested in buying the products from an E-commerce site selling sporting equipment with blog articles exploring alternative diets and strategies for losing weight. 

Writing good SEO content with this strategy takes a little more detective work than the first two ideas. The related queries and related topics section of Google Trends can be a great tool for helping you to find and make those connections.

It’s possible to come up with many other ways of categorizing content types, from thematic to approach based, do what works for you. The important thing is that you spend some time thinking about the best way to ensure your content will engage and serve the user. If your aim is to do this for a search term with a good amount of traffic, you’re on the right track.

SMB: Another great way to find good content ideas is by monitoring the SEO content strategy of your competitors. rankingCoach offers free competitor tracking and keyword monitoring with rankingCoach FREE

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You may have already done some keyword research using the Google trends, the keywords feature on rankingCoach to help you find your topic, you will definitely need it from this point onwards to help you structure and target your content for SEO as effectively as possible. 

Finding Good SEO Keywords for Product Page Content

One of the most important and useful things about content for SEO is that providing you have picked the right topic, you can fine-tune your keyword choices as you write — even after the content has been posted. In fact, updating your content to refine keywords can really help to improve and create new rankings. Getting this right normally comes down to working on your SEO keywords in one of two ways:

First, fine-tuning the keywords used for your products and services to target the highest search volume. For instance, a coffee shop owner may be using the search term ‘Coffee shops Boston’, as a target keyword for their SEO content but find that more people in their area are searching for ‘Coffee to go Boston’. The Coffee shop owner could switch out his references for Coffee shops in Boston to ‘Coffee to go Boston’. Alternatively, they could create another page targeting ‘Coffee to go Boston’ and then optimize their site for both. 

Second, instead of just targeting the highest volume search terms, you can also take competition into consideration. So if many more people are trying to optimize their SEO content for one phrase, e.g ‘Burger restaurants London’ but another Term ‘Burger place London’ gets fewer searchers but has much less competition.This second phrase may bring many more customers to your business because the less competition makes it easier to get front-page rankings on search engines, and up to 92% of customers pick the business they find on the first page of Google. 

SMB TIP: Finding the right balance between search volume and competition, to get the best keywords for your SEO content, may sound complicated, but free SEO keyword tools, like those in rankingCoach FREE, make it incredibly easy and straightforward. These tools allow you to see how many people are using each term in your country or city, and also tell you how easy it is for your specific website to rank for these specific keywords. You can also track the rankings of your keywords to find the keywords that work best and track the progress of your SEO content.

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Finding Good Keywords for SEO Content 

Finding the best keywords for the SEO content on your product pages is all about finding the words customers use to find your products, and your store if you are a bricks-and-mortar business. Keyword tools also make this much easier. However, you find your keywords don’t just opt for the simplest or shortest terms with the highest volume. 

Think about the kinds of customers your products appeal to, and build this into your keyword process. If your products appeal to the budget market, make sure you experiment by adding extra words to your keyword terms like cheap or low cost, I.e, Jetblue or Ryanair might optimize 'cheap flights' or 'low-cost air travel'. Doing this will cut down on competitors selling to markets your products are not aimed at, so 'luxury flights' in this example, even if fewer visitors come to your site for the longer, more focused terms, they will be more likely to buy your products.

TIP: For help picking the best keywords for your business and tracking your rankings on Google check out rankingCoach FREE 

Finding Good SEO keywords for Non-Product Pages

For keyword research for informative terms, you need to focus on the intentions of searchers to work out which questions and phrases need to be in your SEO content strategy. To do this you should take 4 SEO keyword content steps.

Step one: Is the search volume high enough? This number could be aslarge as millions or as small as double-digit searches, it all depends on the size of the audience you are chasing.

Step two: Do the intentions of people using this term match what I offer? It’s important to make sure that people are using your keywords for the right reasons. So if you find a useful keyword check the search engines results page (SERP), to make sure the kind of content you are writing will match the expectations of searchers. 

Step three Can I use this term to create original and interesting content?

Step four: Can it be linked to the services and products I am offering?

SMB TIP: If you need help doing keyword research to find the best keywords, or help tracking the competition in the search results to make sure you are targeting the right keywords you should try rankingCoach FREE

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SEO Content Writing Tips: Content Length 

If you ask any copywriter to write SEO Content for you, the first thing they will ask you is how long do you want this SEO content to be? The answer you give to them should depend on two things: The purpose of this content and the length of your competition's content.

On product pages, there is space for keywords in the product title and descriptions, also in the product description but once you’ve created an engaging product page that covers everything you will find the best performing product pages in your industry, plus anything additional that may add value to the user,  you should stop, even if this is only few hundred words because you don’t want to detract from these pages' ability to sell by adding long-winded content or anything that could distract customers from buying.

SEO content for explaining key industry terms or concepts, especially in the form of blog posts or highly competitive industries like Digital Marketing, tends to be longer than product pages. You will often find blog content with a word count of 2000+ words. Competitor monitoring tools can really help you see the length of content that is ranking well. That said it isn’t impossible for a much shorter article to knock a longer article at the top but it needs to be more interesting to those users than the current top article; if all the top 10 articles are 4000+ words this means that longer articles have currently gotten the best response from searchers. 

TIP: Competitor monitoring tools make it easier to see the SEO content strategy of your competitors. Use them to monitor the search engine results page (SERP) 

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Content Tracker 

SEO Content Writing Tips: How Many SEO Keywords Should You Use? 

If you have done your keyword research and planned your articles to touch on all the logical questions related to the keywords you are targeting, you should find that your content already uses your target keywords quite a few times. Especially if you mention these keywords in the form of questions in your main and subheadings (H1 and H2). For instance, title and first few subheadings for this article could be: 

• Article Title (H1) SEO Content Writing: Getting Top Rankings on Google

• Subheading (H2) How to use SEO content to serve the user?

• Subheading (H2) What are the best content writing tips?

• Subheading (H2) How to write SEO site content 

Try to give yourself a little time to proof and redraft your SEO content after first writing it. This will help to find additional space for using SEO keywords. You should definitely include your main target keywords in the title of your article, you should also include it in your subheadings wherever possible.

You should also try and find an appropriate place to include it in the paragraph that follows each heading. However, be careful not to overdo it. A good general rule for working out how many SEO keywords you should use: if you know you have too many keywords in your SEO content if it begins to impact the text's readability. Make sure you are always serving the user. Also, avoid blackhat tactics like stuffing. When posting your article, don't forget to put keywords in your meta title and meta description along with your image description.

Tip: To read more about BlackHat SEO tactics to avoid keyword stuffing check out this article from the rankingCoach blog. To make sure you have the best value keywords try rankingCoach FREE. 

The Final Word on Writing SEO Content

Now we know that in order to write the best possible SEO content we need to take our time with SEO keyword research. SEO keyword tools can really help with this. We also need to track and monitor our competitors' SEO content to ensure we are targeting the best value phrases and ensure that our SEO content has the best possible chance of ranking. When writing explanatory content, take a little extra time to make sure you have answered all the interesting questions, users, searching this term will have. Doing all these things will give your SEO content the best possible chance of getting top rankings on Google. 

Need Help Finding The Best Keywords for Your SEO Content?

rankingCoach will show you exactly how to find the best keywords for your SEO content. It will also help you to track your keyword progress and competitors so you always have the best keywords and content strategy

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