66% of marketers consider improving their search engine optimization (SEO) their top inbound marketing priority. Without SEO-optimized content on your website, you’re likely failing to miss out on a major number of customers.
It’s not enough to simply write a blog post and stuff it with keywords, though.
Instead, you need to use SEO-specific writing techniques to ensure your content stands out. Then, Google’s bots will crawl your content and determine if it’s worth hitting the top of a search page. When you reach the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), consumers will see your site before a competitor’s.
Ready to give your content and SEO ranking a boost? Discover how to write SEO-optimized content with these 10 tips!
Table of Contents
1. Know Your Audience
Before you can start using the bulk of these writing techniques, you need to know more about your audience. After all, they’re the ones you’re trying to optimize your website for!
First, identify the people who make up your audience. Talk to your customers. Determine their shopping habits, demographics, and personal preferences.
Write content that appeals to their interests or answers their questions.
Are you trying to attract local customers into your store? If so, you’ll need to adapt your strategy for local SEO services. After all, searches with the qualifier “near me” along with “can I buy” or “to buy” grew by over 500% over two years.
Once you know your audience, you can use these writing techniques to create content that matches their search intent.
2. Keep it Together
Before you start posting content, consider where you’re posting it. Since you’re taking the time to create original content, you’ll want to get credit for your work.
Make sure to post your original content under your own domain name. For example, you can post on your website, WordPress, or Blogger in a subfolder on your own domain.
Keeping your content under one roof while helping people learn more about your business.
It also benefits your writing’s SEO. By posting internal links within your content, you can improve your ranking. You’re also encouraging people to explore your site, which can help improve sales.
3. Attention-Grabbing Titles
When results appear in SERPs, we usually skim through the titles.
In order to grab the reader’s attention, you need to make an impactful first impression. Make sure the title clearly captures the purpose of the post and uses your keywords.
Once you have an eye-catching title, update the meta description as well. This is the small block of text that appears beneath the title on SERPs. The meta description provides a brief summary of the article.
Place your keyword here, too. Make sure the title and meta description both grab people in. Then, they’ll want to read more!
4. Key in on Keywords
Once you have a list of keywords, create content for each one.
You should make sure these keywords appear in the title, URL, meta description, a headline, and within the page content. Careful, though. Overstuffing your content with keywords can result in penalties.
Instead, make sure your keywords appear naturally within the text.
5. Stand Out with Structure
Organize your content by breaking it up into smaller paragraphs. Then, use headlines to organize these paragraphs into brief subjects.
Use H1 for titles and H2s for subtitles. Structuring your article this way will make it easier to read and encourage people to continue down the page.
Find out how to optimize your header tags before you start writing.
6. Focus on Readability
If your content is difficult to read, people won’t stay around. As you use these writing techniques, consider your style. Text that’s complicated and difficult to read won’t keep people on the page.
This will impact your dwell time, or how much time people spend on a page, which can impact your ranking.
In order to improve readability, keep your content logical and simple. Clarify pieces of information when you can so people better understand the topic.
7. Go Deep
Instead of brief posts that provide an overview of a topic, dig deeper. You can create deep, quality content by:
- Writing longer posts (2,000 words or more)
- Creating ultimate guides that explore sub-topics
- Exploring topics with many different angles
Feel free to dig deeper with your research as well! This writing technique will help your content appear unique and helpful to Google and your readers.
8. Get Factual
Don’t make random, outlandish claims. Instead, make sure to complete your research. Add supporting facts and data to your articles.
Make sure to source these articles as well.
Try to make sure the research is up-to-date. After all, you don’t want to show data from 50 years ago when there are newer studies and stats. If there aren’t new studies, try conducting your own surveys for fresh data!
Adding external links from reputable sources will show Google and readers you’re a credible resource, too.
9. Format for Featured Snippets
Google is adding more featured snippets, which show searchers brief answers to their questions on the top of a SERP. In order to gain this prominent space on a SERP, you need to format your content for these snippets.
You often see these snippets in the form of recipes, answers, or summaries.
To do so:
- Include statistics and data within the article
- Break content apart using numbered and/or bulleted lists
- Improve your content’s quality
- Answer questions within your content
- Add a summary at the end of your article
Formatting your content for snippets will help you stand out on search pages.
10. Show Off Expertise
Google values content that demonstrates authority. After all, you want to appear as an expert in your field. In order to build your reputation as an expert resource don’t neglect to improve your About page.
You can also add author bio pages for each person who contributes to your blog. That includes guest bloggers as well.
Showing off your expertise will help you stand out from other writers in your industry.
SEO Content That Stands Out: 10 Writing Techniques for Killer SEO
It’s time to get writing! With these 10 writing techniques, you can produce killer SEO results.
Check the Marketing section of the blog today for more genius tips!
