The 5 Steps to Writing User-Friendly Content Search Engines Love
The best way to build authority and trust is by creating well-researched, highly helpful content for your website that answers user’s questions.
Unfortunately, mastering the art of SEO copywriting is a problem most SEO professionals face. SEO copywriting is not rocket science if you just remember one thing: Create appealing, user driven content that solves a problem or leaves the reader satisfied and happy he or she clicked through to your page.
SEO content creation for better ranking centers around creating content that pleases the reader, meets Google mission statement, (thus pleasing the bots at Google), and builds authority? Well, here is a systematic guide:
Step 1: Perform Content Driven Keyword Research
Even though you probably have more keywords than you would care to use, we should mention that since 66% of all SERP clicks go to the top three results, you MUST nail your content keyword research.
In your writing, concentrate on long tail keywords simply because they are less generic, less competitive, but still targeted.
Step 2: Understand Important SEO Copywriting Elements
Here are the important SEO copywriting elements you should pay attention to:
Headlines: If content headlines and headings do not compel readers to click through, your CTR will take a hit. Compelling headlines are an important aspect of content creation. Ideally, your headlines should grab attention, and compel readers to want to learn more aka, click through. By creating compelling headlines that demand click through, it does not matter if you land at position one or position four: your compelling content headlines will do all the work for you and you will get a ton of organic traffic. While you may have your specific way of doing it, it is best to create your content headline before creating your content body because the former will guide your copy and the content therein.
The Content Itself: The SEO copywriting elements would be incomplete if the content itself was not part of the essential elements. As we have repeatedly stated, Google gives better ranking to user centered content. As a content creation rule, update your website with a minimum of 2-5 new posts each week because Google and users love fresh content. To write smart content that users and Google likes, create content around keywords and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords. Nevertheless, remember that Google hates keyword stuffing; further, keyword stuffing will increase your bounce rate since users will not find the content helpful.
Before starting the post writing process, you want to understand your target audience, their real problem, and the solution your post offers. Once you figure this out, write your post. When creating posts, create a compelling keyword rich introduction (use keywords wisely).
Step 3: Optimize
Optimizing your content means formatting your content using the H1 H2 H3 and H4 tags, highlighting important parts of your content in bold and italic. As a note, the title tags range from h1>h6 and each of these tags will enlarge your font and make text bolder and stand out at varying degrees. These tags make it easier to structure content for easier reader navigation.
Step 4: Optimize for People
Writing for people is the most important part of writing SEO copy. When you create copies, you should have an aim, and intention. Do you want to drive engagement? Do you want to convert? Words are powerful. How you use them on your copy will determine how well your copy achieves its goal.
To optimize for people, when performing keyword research, pay special attention to user intent keywords. Optimizing keywords can only take you so far. To optimize your content for users, you want to do one more thing: tell stories. Tip: Online readers love engaging content. The best way to create content is by using stories to tell a story. Using story-telling elements such as humor, dialog, and other story telling elements your target audience may respond well to, which is why understanding your target audience, will help readability and engagement.
Step 5: Optimize For Search
To optimize your content for search engine bots and web-crawlers, the rule of thumb, which is derived from the fact that Google spiders pay attention to these areas, before publishing your content, optimize your Meta data. Specifically, pay special attention to your content title tag and Meta description and ensure these two areas contain the keywords you are targeting and their derivatives.
That is it for on-page SEO. On-page SEO covers about 90% of what you must do to rank.
Conclusion
Writing for SEO reader engagement and Search Engine Ranking is a bit of a balancing act, but it can be done. If it’s done right, it can pay off in significant ROI.