How to Write Great SEO Content?

SEO has been one of the most talked about topics in the past few years.

According to a survey by SEMRush, 76% of the respondents stated organic traffic as the critical metric to measure success. 

Well, surely, SEO is important for your content marketing efforts.

Your content could be lost somewhere on page 50 of the search results without SEO, and traffic would not be good for you. The same is true for first page ranking in Google; it only gives a small part of the marketing power that being top of page 1 can afford.

Therefore, in this article, we will talk about how to write SEO content. But first, let's understand what SEO content is.

What is SEO Content Writing?

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SEO content is a type of online content that focuses on improving website rankings in search engines (such as Google) and preparing for organic traffic.

In other words, SEO writing is a technical process that you need to follow to rank your content on the search engines.

SEO writing content is one of the most important things that any blogger can do to rank their content higher on Google.

Many people think of SEO writing as a technical process that may include creating long keyword lists, coming up with killer headlines and meta descriptions, or even tinkering around on various social media sites.

In reality, writing for SEO involves rethinking your own content strategy, so you get results.

In short, amazing content + solid on-page seo = seo writing.

Why is SEO Writing Important?

For SEO, writing is important because it helps you rank sites based on various signals (pages viewed/hours spent on-site). It also gives readers a thoughtful and valuable experience.

It seems like common sense, but the content is still king no matter what industry you are in.

The majority of your marketing can thrive off of delivering a quality user experience. Content marketing takes advantage of the best asset a business has: its people. The average number of words each person on staff produces per day is 2,000!

That's incredible when you think about all the unused potential messages within your company.

Getting your customers to come back and share their experience with you is one of the most direct ways a business can grow its customer base, build brand loyalty and increase revenue.

According to Google, creating great content that helps users solve problems resulted in 66% higher click-through rates (CTR) than non-content pages on average! The more people who see your site or read what you have written about them, the better it will be for your business.

You might think that this is all well and good, but how do you get readers to see and read the content?

There are many tactics out there today, such as SEO writing. When done right, SEO writing can help attract visitors by convincing them to visit your blog or website. 

Types of SEO Content

The primary purpose of writing any type of content is to get the website on the top search engine results page (SERP). There are many types of content, but some are more useful than others in SEO.

Here are the various SEO content:

• Long-form blog posts: Long-form blog posts are one of the most important types of SEO content. The average length for a blog post on reputable websites is around 1500 words, but that varies depending on type of website you have and your focus as an individual blogger.

• Short-form content: Short-form content can connect with your audience much more engagingly. Short-form content is a combination of images, videos, and text that can be shared on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It has become the latest trend in marketing and is being used by brands to create engaging content for their customers.

• Infographics: Infographics provides content that is informative and helps educate customers about your products or services. If you want backlinks, create an infographic. You can collect data, display it in an organized way and represent it visually with infographics. This type of content is user-friendly and will get you excellent SEO results through backlinks.

• Video: Video marketing has become an important tool for many companies and brands today; this is why there are so many videos on YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and other platforms like these.

• Podcasts: Podcasts are audio-only content, allowing people to listen while they drive or do other tasks that require their full attention. They can also build a brand's reputation and increase its visibility online because the audience can become more loyal as time goes on by listening to podcasts regularly.

These are some of the SEO content that marketers consider important and can be displayed on Google search pages for certain queries.

But, we will focus on writing SEO-friendly content or a blog post.

How to Write an SEO Content?

It is important to write down a plan for your content to start with SEO writing. Here are the steps to create high-quality SEO content.

Strong SEO Writing Needs Good Keyword Research

This is the first step to writing high-quality content that can provide great SEO results. What are you going to write about?

Which keywords should be used in your article?

You need multiple ways of getting this information because there will always be new words being searched for, and old ones may not show up as often anymore.

And that comes with good research of topics and keywords.

A keyword research tool like Ahrefs will find your main keyword's broad topics, related terms, and long-tail keywords.

The keyword phrase is simply a phrase you want your content to rank for. 

The more popular those keywords become, the higher they'll be in search results rankings when people type these words into Google or another search engine.

Head to the Ahrefs keyword explorer and search for a broad topic in the box. Click on 'Phrase Match' and set the search volume and keyword difficulty as you want to. Read our guide on keyword difficulty to find how to use this metric.

The idea is to filter out the highly competitive keyword and include low competition keywords with a higher search volume.

However, most SEOs commit this mistake; they consider search volume as the only metric for keyword research. The truth is that search volume can be misleading.

A high search volume doesn't merely guarantee large traffic to the search query.

While some keyphrases may have traffic distributed on the first page or even the second page of Google, some may have 90% of the traffic only on the first two results.

Also, include the relevant keywords and NLP terms in your content to improve content relevancy. 

Determine Search Intent and Identify the Right Format

In recent years, Google's algorithm has changed how it ranks search results.

In the past, you could get those top three or four pages of your desired keywords easily and without much competition whatsoever.

Search intent is one of the most important ranking factors in SEO.

Knowing your target audience's needs is what makes the search query more accurate.

The content you use, the message you send, and the call to action you leave depend on what people are looking for. There are four types of search intent, and each one has its own style.

• Informational: Informational search queries are made by someone who wants to find information on a particular topic. When you search these types of queries, you'll get information from a website with a lot of information on the topic, or you'll get results from a search engine specializing in informational searches.
• Navigational: Navigational search queries are searches made by someone who wants to navigate a particular website.
• Transactional: A transactional search query is a search query that is meant to help users make a purchase online. In a transactional search query, the user will usually intend to find a product or service they want to buy.
• Commercial: Commercial search queries are made by someone who wants to make a commercial transaction, such as looking for an online store that sells its products.

To make it easier, SEMRush's keyword magic tool lets you define the search intent for your main keyword.

Considering your search query and the type of content, you can choose the intent for your keyword research.

Create a Well-optimized Meta Title 

The Meta Title is a short title that appears on the search engine results page (SERP) and in the browser's address bar. It is usually a keyword phrase that describes the content of the page.

Optimizing your meta title is one of the most important aspects of SEO. It is one of the first things a search engine will check before showing you any results.

By default, Google might even use your title tag as the meta title if the meta title is not well-written.

While the page title may contain some long-tail keywords, a meta title should be more enticing to get clicked.

Just head to the Blog Title creator and generate the best title ideas for your main keywords.

You can generate tons of blog title ideas by clicking on 'Generate More' here.

Create a Catchy H1

When people click on your page, they will likely read the first line of text, which makes a good H1 tag absolutely necessary for this purpose.

H1 tag is generally the page title or header tag.

The meta title is what people see on the search engines when looking for your content. It's important to write a good one!

The meta title is critical because it shows SEOs how structured the page should be, making it easier to rank well in Google and other search engines!

Here are some quick tips to make your H1 more worthy:

• Write a unique title for your webpage.
• Use words like 'how', 'why', 'what', and 'where'.
• Try to display what's written in your body using the unique H1.

Optimize the Meta Description

The meta description is a line of text that describes your page in a few words. When someone clicks on the link, it's displayed at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) and the browser's address bar.

Meta descriptions are important because they tell people what your website's content is about. Meta descriptions help search engines figure out how relevant your site is to a certain search query.

Your site's meta description takes a small bit of text and puts it on the page that shows up in search engine results pages, and social media feeds. This is like an ad for your site or pages because people will probably click on it.

To generate meta descriptions quickly, you can use the Scalenut AI meta description generator tool to generate meta descriptions quickly and pick the best one for your page.

For example, our blog topic is 'How to find the insurance company?'. Here, we can generate as many meta descriptions and copy the better one.

Here are some quick tips to writing meta description:

• The meta description should describe what is on each page of your website so people can get an idea about it before visiting the particular web pages that you want them.
• Make sure to use the target keyword in the meta description.
• Keep the meta description to be around 140-160 words long. But, make sure not to do keyword stuffing in the meta description.

Content Structure and Readability

As we have mentioned earlier, the content structure is important to SEO and readability of your website. A lot depends on how you structure your posts and pages to improve their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).

The use of headings and subheadings like h2, h3, and so on make your content scannable and easier to read. This doesn't contribute much to your SEO, but it is one of the best practices to include subheadings to improve the readability.

The content must be divided into small paragraphs instead of long ones to make it even more scannable.

The best way is to analyze the top competing pages for the main keyword and use their subheadings. Make sure not to copy the subheadings here.

Instead, you can tweak the subheads and write a better paragraph.

Using the Scalenut report, you can create a content brief with relevant subheadings.

To improve the readability, check out our guide on how to improve the readability of your content.

Use numbered lists and bullets to make your information clear. They make it easy for people to read lots of text at once. This will increase the chances of getting a Featured Snippet on Google searches.

Add Visual Content

Good SEO content may surely contain visual content like images, videos, and infographics.

The more valuable and engaging the content is, the higher Google will rank it.

It will definitely get you more backlinks.

Pictures and videos can attract more traffic to blogs or copy. They help you get into the Images and Video sections of Google, which is a great place for pictures because it shows what people searched for in the past that came from this site.

Make URL Readable

It's important to write a quality URL that clearly describes the page's content. This helps readers understand what they will find on your page.

Your URL structure should be simple and contain only the main keywords you want to promote.

Here is how you can make your URL readable:

• Keep the primary keyword in the URL.
• Use only lowercase in URL.
• While it doesn't affect SEO, Google spiders like short URLs compared to longer ones.

Make Sure to do Interlinking

Link building is one of the most crucial factors in SEO.

Internal linking is when you have pages connecting to other pages on your site. Having a good internal linking help users find relevant, valuable content on your site without having many external links pointing to irrelevant pages.

Google robots look through your site to find new URLs for the database. They search by following links that lead to new URLs.

FAQs

Q1.  Is SEO easy to learn?

Ans: It depends. However, most consider SEO as a challenging field to master since there is a lot to learn about search engines and how the optimization process works, which may be intimidating at first.

Q2. Does SEO need coding?

Ans: The simple answer is no, SEO doesn't usually need much (or any) code. You can perform an excellent job of SEO without touching any code. However, the broader answer is that knowing how programming works, or even being able to perform some coding yourself, is always beneficial.

Q3. How do you start writing SEO?

Ans: Here are the tips to keep in mind: 

• Pay attention to what the reader wants to know. 
• Use SEO keywords that seem natural. 
• Discover reliable information about unfamiliar issues and conduct thorough research. 
• Engage the reader and write in the appropriate tone.

Q4. Does SEO require HTML?

Ans: Your website's SEO will suffer if you don't use optimal HTML tags. As a result, you'll require them.

Q5. Is Learning SEO worth it?

Ans: Yes. SEO works very well, not just for getting traffic but also for getting leads and sales.

Conclusion

The best way to improve your writing for SEO is to start with an outline. An outline will help you decide what you want to write about. 

Our tool lets you create a content outline, and the AI tools will create content using those outlines.

If you need some inspiration, take a look at our blog post on how to write SEO content