SEO Content Writing: Everything You Need To Know

You’ve probably heard of SEO, Search Marketing, or whatever you call it. And you might know a little about it.

But you may not be so familiar with SEO content.

We’ve put together this guide to help you find out what SEO content is and tips for writing articles for SEO. This will all be useful information, whether you’re writing the content yourself or you’ll be hiring an SEO content writer to do it for you.

What is SEO?

If you’re not familiar with the term SEO, it stands for ‘search engine optimisation’ and describes the process of making your website content as loved by Google (and other search engines) as possible.

The goal of SEO is to try and get your website appearing in the top 3 results of the search results pages. By doing that for keywords and questions with good search volume you can massively boost the traffic to your website.

SEO can be a real game-changer when done correctly.

If you nail your SEO, you’ll find it massively helps you:

• Get your brand name out there
• Generate lots more traffic to your website
• Turn searches into sales (with high quality content on your website)

To rank websites in the most appropriate order, the likes of Google use an algorithm to rank websites for various search terms. This algorithm is based on 200 different ‘signals’ that help determine how relevant your website is and how good the quality of your content.

The fun part about SEO is that the Google algorithm is constantly evolving, which means what worked to get a website running in the #1 spot this time last, won’t necessarily work this year, or next year – so SEO involves constant attention.

Quick side note – SEO shouldn’t be confused with paid advertising on Google, which is based on paying per click. SEO deals with just the organic traffic. Organic traffic is basically people searching and then clicking on non-advertised content.

What is SEO content writing?

SEO content refers to all the content created with the intention of ranking in search engines, like Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo.

Without content, you can’t improve your SEO performance.

SEO content isn’t solely content that sits on your website

SEO content used to mean content that sits on your website. Today, it’s more than that. 

It’s still your website content, but it’s content on all digital channels; social media, online listings, business directories, forums, and more. 

SEO content sits within your content marketing strategy

With content marketing, content is more than the written word. It’s videos, it’s infographic, it’s memes.

All the content you create and publish online can be discovered on search engines.

What remains the same is that SEO content is the mechanism for getting your brand to show up for people’s (customer) searches. And turn your visitors into customers.

SEO content isn’t just any old content thrown together on a topic. It needs to be written around a set of priority keywords that have been identified as popular and relevant for the chosen subject(s) of your content.

These keywords are the phrases that your target audience is actually typing into their search bars.

Those keywords must be carefully weaved into the content and structured in a way that lets the search engines know what the content is about and what the most important elements are.

If you want to reap the benefits of soaring up the ranks thanks to your SEO performance, you’ll need to become very familiar with SEO content and how to create the good stuff.

How SEO website content benefits your business and boosts your digital marketing

Creates enjoyable user/customer experience

SEO has technical aspects that make it much easier for a search engine to find your website and rank you according to the quality of your content. 

Technical optimisation will also improve the user experience. If your website is easy to use, your audience is going to use it! 

Technical SEO tactics include: 

• Structuring your content
• Link building
• Decreasing page load speed
• Refining URL slugs
• Making your website mobile friendly

More people coming to your website and finding out about your brand

SEO content makes a website visible. Optimised content leads to search bots choosing to rank your website. 

If you rank well for searches that your customers are typing in, you’ll have customers coming to you rather than you chasing them.

Short, and most importantly, long term return on investment

What you pay now and for the next 6-12 months of SEO you will make back in no time – so long as the SEO works.

The SEO we have done for our own website and for our clients’ sites, even after they finish their SEO, are still getting people to their website from the content we created.

Here’s an example of SEO long term ROI for you: A blog that we wrote 3 years ago has single handedly brought in over 50 sales leads and secured us our biggest contracts we’ve ever had as a business.

So far, one of the clients we secured from that blog has generated us over £20,000. The cost to write that blog was £250.

Best of all, it will keep getting people onto our website and enquiring about our content services for years to come.

Creating SEO website content that helps answer a question or solves your customer’s predicament is the way to go. And best of all, it’ll help many customers now and well into the future. 

What is an SEO content strategy

An SEO content strategy is a plan that outlines how you will create and optimise content to improve your search engine rankings.

Effectively, how you plan to get more people landing on your website.

Having a solid SEO content strategy in place ensures that your focus is on what you know that people are searching for, rather than what you think they’re searching for.

Creating an effective SEO content marketing strategy can encourage new customers to seek out your brand, make your business stand out amongst fierce competition, and increase your conversion rates.

The core components of an SEO content strategy include:

1. Rankings
2. High-quality, relevant content
3. Metrics

Rankings

Creating SEO content does two great things:

1) It delivers value

2) It gives your website visitors a decent experience.

Both of these factors are key to letting Google know, very politely, that it should rank your website highly and send prospects straight to your website without delay.

To understand your website content, Google deploys bots to crawl your site (scary, hey?) to index, or score, your pages.

To be in with a chance of ranking up there with the best, here’s what you can do:

Update your sitemaps and submit them in Google Search Console – this tells Google how many pages you have, and briefly what’s on them.

Include authoritative internal and external links to boost your site’s credibility.

Create more high-quality content such as blog posts – the more valuable content you have, the higher your chances of ranking.

Ensure your site is – not just mobile friendly, but optimised for mobile. A huge section of your target audience are probably browsing your website on their mobile devices.

Think strategically – about where to place keywords for maximum effect.

Think about your website’s navigation – is it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for? This is the stuff Google’s critters are looking for.

Format your content with – descriptive meta tags, optimal titles and snippets, heading tags for organising page content on pages, and short but sweet descriptive URLs.

Creating high-quality, relevant, valuable content for your audience

Unique, valuable, and high-quality is where it’s at for your SEO content marketing strategy.

Think carefully about questions your customers commonly ask you. Chances are, other people will want to know the answer to them, too.

Adding a FAQ section to your website is a great shout – Google can index this type of content clearly and it’s already in the perfect format for search. Winner.

Metrics

Google is an ever-evolving beast. You don’t really stand a chance of keeping up with its algorithms, so don’t even try.

What you can do, however, is measure your own SEO content strategy to see what’s working, and what’s not.

Set relevant KPIs to analyse your content’s performance and iterate over time. Rinse and repeat.

Metrics that resonate with your SEO content strategy include traffic volume, bounce rate, social engagement, click-through rates, dwell time, and obviously – rankings.

Why is content important for SEO?

Content is the centre of the SEO universe. Search engines look at millions of websites daily (aka ‘crawling’) in order to find the best content for each search term.

When crawling the sites, they look at the content of each page to determine how relevant they are for terms mentioned within the content.

Some of the key factors that affect where your web page ranks are:

• Content structure
• How well it’s written
• Themes covered
• Any imagery or video content (including their file names and alt-texts (alt-text being a worded description of the image))
• Number of backlinks (links from other sites to the page)

And why is ranking high in the search results so important?

Well, a recent study found that the first five organic results listed in Google account for almost 68% of all clicks. And, according to Backlinko, fewer than 1% of people searching on Google will click on results that feature on the second page of results. That’s why SEO pros go gaga for Google results that appear on page #1.

Essentially, SEO is so important in modern business. For your SEO to really work and be worth the investment, you need a content strategy behind it. Without content there is no SEO.

How to write content for SEO and rank

So, you’re sold on the idea of SEO and you want to know how to write SEO content. Great stuff.

Whether you’re writing articles for SEO pages of your website, or you’re thinking of launching blogs for SEO purposes, keep reading to find out how to write content that ranks.

Here’s a quick rundown of what you’ll need to do if you want to dominate the search results and rank in one of the top spots:

1. Choose a topic to write about and do keyword research

It needs to be relevant to your business and also something people are searching for. Find the right keywords to focus on.

Keyword research is a big task, and can be pretty complex if you don’t know what you’re doing, so you might want to hire an SEO copywriter to help.

It’s not just about choosing the keyword with the biggest search volume and writing a blog about it, you need to be confident that the ‘search intent’ is suitable for your business.

Most importantly you need to make sure the keyword matches what your customers need.

Google in particular is fantastic at analysing the intent of someone’s search. You can search anything and Google has an answer for you.

Understanding search intent for SEO content writing

Thinking about the search intent is key for writing SEO content. If the copy doesn’t quite match up with the search intent, your chances of ranking are slim. And even if you do manage to rank, then when people land on your content and it’s not what they were intending to land on, they will bounce right off.

People bouncing off your content is a BIG issue when it comes to SEO.

The user who left your content after only having read 2 words has essentially told Google, ‘hey, this wasn’t right for my search’ and Google will move your result down the ranking for the search query (keyword) used to find that content.

Google is a people pleaser effectively. And so are you now!

How to figure out search intent

It’s simple really. Google the keywords you’ve got and check out the top results.

See what the content is talking about, the angle the writer has opted for in each result, the businesses ranking in those top spot (don’t get jealous of them though!), also the content format.

Is it a ‘how to’ guide, a listicle, opinion piece or is the result dominated by videos?

Search intent is a big deal in SEO. So don’t ignore this very important first step.

2. Now you have your keywords and search intent, you can begin planning your content

The keywords you’ve identified are known as ‘pillars’. Pillar keywords are the primary topics or themes that you want your content to rank for in search engine results pages, and act as the core support for a bigger cluster of long-tail keywords.

For example, if your business sells bluetooth headphones, your pillar keyword might be “bluetooth headphones”. No surprises there.

But from this pillar keyword, you can begin to generate a cluster of long-tail keywords that are related to bluetooth headphones, such as:

• “best bluetooth headphones for gamers”
• “bluetooth headphones for remote working”
• “cheap bluetooth headphones”

By focusing on pillar keywords and building out clusters of related long-tail keywords, you can create a more comprehensive and effective content strategy.

This approach helps to ensure that your content is optimised for search engines and provides value to your target audience.

When you’ve got to grips with your pillar keywords, that’s when your content strategy starts taking off.

By using your keywords and search data you can really plan out what you’re going to write about. This is when you will plan out your introduction, main body content and then the conclusion for a customer to take your desired action.

Planning your content is very similar to if you were writing a normal piece of content. But SEO content requires the same process, but the addition of working in the relevant keywords from your SEO research.

Why is it important to plan your content alongside your keywords?

Remember what we said about the search intent, it’s the same for your keywords.

Related keywords around your chosen topic will be essential for telling Google and your readers how suitable the content is for them. And by including all the relevant keywords and search phrases it will massively increase your chances of ranking.

DON’T however jam all the keywords into the content, you need to be careful and write the keywords naturally into your copy.

Your chosen keywords should act as a springboard of your content structure and what you will talk about in your content.

Make sure to not only review the typical keywords, but to also see what typical questions your customers are asking in the form of FAQs from the search data.

The below image from ahrefs speak volumes about the importance of SEO keywords for your content.

3. Time to get creative and write – make your content original and high quality

SEO content years ago could just be some form of content that has a load of keywords chucked in. Those days are long, long, long gone.

SEO copywriting is essential and the quality of your content will have a huge say on how it performs. I say perform rather than rank because ranking is just a small part of search marketing.

Getting to page 1 is great, but staying there and making people click on your result over others is what counts. Content will be the single most important factor for achieving both of these things.

Another thing is that people say you HAVE to be doing long form (2,000 words or more) content to rank. This isn’t wrong, but it’s not entirely accurate either.

Your business, industry, and the topic you’re writing about will hugely impact how much content is required to:

• Make you rank
• Catch your target audience’s attention
• Convert your reader

For example, if you’re in a highly competitive industry, such as finance or healthcare, you may need to produce a significant amount of high-quality content to stand out and rank well.

On the other hand, if you’re in a niche industry with fewer competitors, you may not need to work as hard creating high volumes of content to make it onto page one of search results.

The topic you’re writing about also plays a role in determining how much content is required. Some topics may require more in-depth coverage and analysis, while others may be more straightforward and require less content.

What content is best for SEO?

We hate to harp on, but high-quality, relevant, and valuable content is the best type for SEO.

We aren’t here to tell you that you must immediately write 50 blog posts or create 24 infographics.

You know your audience and customers the best, so create the content that they will love.

Just like no business is the same, no SEO content strategy is the same either.

The key to SEO content is writing quality copy that your readers will genuinely be interested in.

The content should actually help them, whether it’s to answer a question of theirs or to provide them with a solution.

Whatever you create, create it with user intent in mind. You should answer the questions and provide information that your users are looking for. This will greatly help to improve your website’s relevance and authority.

Think evergreen content

No, not the trees. And not Will Young’s song Evergreen

Evergreen content is the sort of content that is always relevant and doesn’t become outdated quickly. This type of content can continue to drive traffic to your website over time, and can also be repurposed into other formats (such as videos or fancy pants infographics).

You’re also going to want to use headers appropriately – H1, H2, and H3s space out your content nicely and make it easier to read (and index by Google).

But, “How to write SEO content for my website?” we hear you cry.

Look, if you can’t or won’t write, we’re here for it. We’ve got a team on standby ready to take your instructions.

For SEO article writing, SEO blog writing, SEO landing page writing, call it what you will – our SEO copywriters can handle it.

4. Optimise the content for real people

The key here is our use of ‘real people’.

You want and need readers to love your content if it’s ever going to succeed. What people love is what Google will love. All your SEO content should be well-structured and really easy to read and understand for your target audience.

Use subheadings, short sentences, nice bitesize paragraphs and give the reader some interesting visuals – such as images, videos, illustrations, and infographics.

Making your content appealing is what will really impact how your website’s presence grows over time.

5. Review your use of keywords

Once you’ve finished creating your piece of SEO content, go back and check you’ve used all the relevant keywords in the right places – making sure you include priority keywords as early as possible (and throughout the content).

When you read back through your work, do your keywords stand out like a sore thumb?

If they do, then its likely that you haven’t implemented them well enough.

You’ve got to avoid jamming every single keyword in your content. It will have the opposite effect and Google will just vomit at the sight of your overflowing keyword junk content.

We have a process to adding keywords into your content. You certainly need to know what you’re doing and ensure your content is still of the highest quality.

Content that speaks directly to your audience is essential in all of this!

6. Promote your content

It’s not enough to have great SEO content sitting on your website, you need people to start interacting with it right away.

This means you may have to promote it elsewhere. Social media is a great place to start, or send round an email to your marketing distribution list to get folks clicking.

If you’ve got a decent following on LinkedIn, go ahead and repurpose your content on this platform. For example, you can create a LinkedIn article based on the blog post you just wrote.

DISCLAIMER

Be careful though – nothing annoys search engines more than duplicate content (because they don’t know which page to rank, so they probably won’t rank any (yikes).

Take excerpts from your recent blog to generate LinkedIn articles, and reword it enough to keep Google from freaking out on you. Don’t forget to add a nice call to action reminding readers to check out the full blog post on your website.

You might think, “well then what’s the point of investing in SEO if I’m going to be marketing on social media anyway?”

The idea is once you have users interacting with your content it will start sending positive vibes to Google that your content is worth ranking because real users are enjoying it.

You’ll also, hopefully, get support in promoting your content with readers spreading the word about your business too.

7. Build backlinks

Links from other sites to your SEO content are one of the keys to SEO success. But they’re not easy to achieve. Link building can take weeks, months, or sometimes years to accumulate.

According to Ahrefs, the more backlinks a page has, the more search traffic it gets from Google – so it’s definitely worth the effort.

To do this you will likely need to work with a backlink partner. If this is of interest, get in touch we can help.

Hiring professional SEO content strategists and writers

You need to use your time wisely. You want to focus on running your business, not trying to plan your entire SEO content strategy and then write all the content too.

Plus, even after reading this super detailed blog, do you really know where to begin? We hope so, you have all the info you need. But it’s a lot to take in, right?

Our team of experienced SEO content leaders can help you put your strategy together and then create all the SEO content.

We can save you time and hassle by dealing with everything from the initial keyword research and putting together an SEO content strategy, right through to writing and optimising your SEO content.

Give us a shout using our contact form and let’s start with a chat.

FAQs

What’s the difference between an SEO strategy and an SEO content strategy?

They’re not different, they’re related. An SEO strategy is the action plan for your overall search marketing. The best SEO strategies will have a content strategy behind it, also known as the SEO content strategy. The SEO content strategy is key to achieving your overall goals within your SEO strategy.

Your SEO content strategy will cover what content you’re going to create, when and where you’ll publish it, and who’s responsible for making it happen. The search content strategy will outline the steps you plan to take to improve search rankings. Of course it’s significant in your SEO strategy, but it will also line up with your wider content strategy. ​

Can you have an SEO strategy without an SEO content strategy?

While it is possible to have an SEO strategy without an SEO content strategy, it is typically not as effective.

Content is a critical component of SEO, and without a well-executed content strategy, your business may struggle to achieve your desired search engine rankings and attract the right audience to your website.

How do I find SEO keywords?

Finding keywords, otherwise known as keyword research, is crucial for creating strong SEO content.

Here’s a quick summary of how you find the best SEO keywords for your content:

1. Make a list of the topics and themes that are most important and relevant for your business.
2. For each topic and/or theme, add related words and phrases that you think people will be searching for.
3. Try to include longer specific phrases in your list too (known as longtail keywords), not just short generic terms.
4. Use keyword research tools to help, such as SEMrush, AnswerThePublic, Ubersuggest, or Ahrefs. Using these tools will give you invaluable data around a topic – how many people search it a month being the key stat. It will also give you a range of related keywords, use these as other content opportunities or to work into the same piece of content.

How do you measure the success of an SEO content strategy?

Ultimately, once you’re ranking, SEO content success is sales, calls and messages coming from your website.

The success of your SEO content strategy can be measured in several ways, including website traffic, search engine rankings, engagement metrics, and conversions.

By tracking these key performance indicators (KPIs), you can assess the effectiveness of your content strategy and make adjustments as needed to improve the results.

Can I hire an SEO content writer to do it for me?

Absolutely. And you’re in the perfect place right now, because that’s what we do. Funny that. Our team of SEO content writers and experienced SEO copywriting specialists can help you put together your SEO content strategy, find the right keywords to focus on, and create content that ranks.

Interested? Get in touch.