Is it possible to craft website content that pleases both search engines and your audience?
It certainly is, but if you’re only writing your content with search engines in mind, you’re making a costly mistake. If you can write content that’s engaging and captivates your readers, you’re already incorporating an important aspect of your SEO Strategy.
Content is the top factor that Google takes into consideration when ranking your website for SEO. Links come in second.
SEO can be complex and easily misunderstood if you don’t know what you’re doing. You either spend the time getting over the learning curve, or you let an SEO expert work their magic.
Keep reading to learn the top ten ways you can write website content that aligns with your SEO strategy.
1.Write Eye-Catching Headlines
Your headlines will make or break your content, and have a major impact on your website traffic.
Typically, 8 out of 10 people will read your headlines, but only 2 out of 10 people will actually click through to your content after reading your content.
You don’t need to be a proficient copywriter to write actionable headlines either.
There are plenty of ”fill-in-the-blank” types of resources on the web to make your job easy-peasy. As well as lots of tips such as using power words to beef up your headline.
But what does this have to do with SEO? Your headlines are an essential aspect when you write website content. So make it a priority to write an outstanding and eye-catching headline, every time you write website content.
2. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
Gone are the days of stuffing keywords to trick the search engines into thinking your website is chock full of valuable content.
When you write website content, you should be starting off with extensive keyword research.
Long-tail keywords perform well, and you should always perform research to ensure you’re getting the most relevant and specific keywords to your industry or niche.
3. Your Site Speed
You land on a website and it takes forever to load, so you exit and never look back again.
Not only should site speed be a major player in your SEO strategy, but it’s also imperative for your audience to have a quick website to access.
If your website speed is longer than 2-seconds, then you have problems. Your audience may drool over your content, but if you have a slow website, you can bet they won’t be hanging around long.
You can visit your Google Analytics to see what your site speed is, or use other tools to determine the speed and what you can do to improve it.
4. Don’t Neglect Formatting When You Write Website Content
If you’re still writing like you would in College or University English class, you’re in serious trouble in the content marketing world.
When it comes to writing blog posts, a whole slew of new rules apply. Specifically, formatting. Proper blog post formatting will benefit your audience and your SEO ranking.
You want to write shorter sentence, 2-3 sentences at most, with the odd 1-sentence line thrown in there for emphasis. Bullet points are your best friends, too, as are visuals like screenshots and images.
But the most critical piece to formatting is headings. Using headings breaks up the text, so it’s easier to digest for your readers, but it also assists significantly with your SEO strategy.
Heading 2 and 3 are major players so you should aim to have your keyword in at least one heading for when Google bots come crawling.
5. Internal Link
If you’re new to SEO this may be a new concept to internal link when you write website content, but internal linking has several benefits. It not only helps your audience, it helps your website traffic and your SEO.
When you’re writing a blog post and you mention a word or a few words that relate to a previous blog post you have written, you link to it. This is internal linking.
This keeps your readers on your website longer, because they may see other articles they’re interested in and end up scooting over to your next drool-worthy piece of content, instead of bouncing from your site.
6. Write Long-Form Content
Not only do most audiences tend to enjoy comprehensive guides, tutorials, and listicle posts the most — Google favors long-form content, too. 2000+ words to be exact.
In fact, the top ten positions in Google for many keywords is content that is at least 2000+ words. Long-form content is even said to get more social shares.
Of course, you need to break up a long post using the proper blog formatting we talked about. But it’s clear that long-form content is a bandwagon you need to jump onto, and pronto.
7. External Linking
External linking is just as essential to your SEO strategy as internal linking to your own content is. Linking is the second thing Google looks for when ranking, after all.
When you come across content that would genuinely help your audience, it’s always a smart idea to link to it. Make sure you’re only linking to authoritative sites that will benefit your readers.
Google and other search engines also look at who you external link too when scoring or ranking you.
8. Don’t Forget About The Small Stuff
We’ve discussed keywords, but not all the places they should go other than directly in your blog posts when you write website content.
When learning SEO and coming up with a strategy, some of the basics you’ll learn is tags, putting keywords in your meta description, alt text, URL/slug, and title.
But sometimes in the hustle and bustle of getting content out on time, we can neglect the “small” stuff. But it turns out the ”small stuff” isn’t so small.
Forgetting to use your keyword in your title, URL, meta description, and alt text in images can be detrimental to your SEO strategy. And without a decent SEO strategy, you won’t see organic traffic pouring in your website.
9. Don’t Be Afraid Of Visuals
Part of an excellent blog post is one you can scan easily and find the information that’s important to you. A great way to break up a blog post, especially a long one, is to be generous with visual.
Now, I’m not talking about just images. Screenshots are a wonderful addition if you’re writing a guide or tutorial, or just a data-driven post. Videos, diagrams, and graphs are also a great addition.
This makes all the difference for your audience, especially if they’re short on time and are referencing back to one part of the article.
It’s also excellent for your SEO strategy as it beefs up your content, which gets more social shares, more backlinks, and ranks better because it’s popular.
10. Social Media Presence
As a website creator of any kind, you need a strong social media presence to help humanize your brand and engage with your audience, customers, or clients.
Social media is an excellent way to engage and connect with your audience on more of a personal level, which helps drive traffic to your content on your website.
But did you know social media also helps with your SEO strategy?
Because it helps to humanize your brand, connect you with your audience, bring more blog traffic and increase your online visibility — it also massively assists your SEO efforts.
Final Thoughts
SEO on its own is no easy feat — but to try to combine SEO and write website content that’s also appealing and valuable to your audience, can be tricky.
The most critical thing to remember when working on your SEO strategy is to not forget who you’re writing for. Yes, SEO is important, but your audience is more vital to your business than a keyword or a link. So always write with them in the forefront of your mind.
Sometimes we just don’t have the time to learn and ins and outs of SEO; completely understandable, especially if you have a business to run.
We can help. We have countless free SEO tutorials to help you get a strong grasp on SEO, as well as various SEO tools to get you started.