There are basically two primary goals of content writing. The first goal is to make the content reader-friendly so that they get enough interest in reading the content till the end and take interest in the product, service, or other relevant contents on the website. The second goal is to make the content search engine-friendly so that search engine crawlers find the article relevant to the users based on certain keywords and rank it high on the search engine result pages. If you have a popular social media page, huge regular readers on your website, and great promotional strategies, your content’s priority should be the readers. But when you do not have them and you need to drive readers through your content, you need to write search engine optimized(SEO) content to rank higher and get unlimited organic traffic. In other words, any content writing with search engines as the first priority is SEO content writing.
What Makes SEO Content Writing Different From Others?
There is a huge demand for SEO content writers in the online world and people even hire freelance SEO expert to optimize their contents for search engines to rank them higher. For writing a general content, a little bit of research and good writing style are enough. But for SEO content writing, there needs to be a detailed keyword research so that the content gets ranked higher easily with the selected keywords. The writer needs to be aware of the current SEO practices for such content writing as the density of keywords, placement of keywords and likewise. Furthermore, the content must be written in such a way that there could be scope for external and internal linking so that link juice can flow smoothly for higher ranking automatically. There is a misconception that SEO content writing is only for search engines. It is true that search engines are the first priority but there is rather an equal weight must be given to writing the content properly for the users to take an interest, increase engagement, and make it viral in a short period of time.
Elements Of SEO Content Writing
For writing SEO content, one needs a proper SEO content strategy so that every content becomes SEO-friendly and in the long run, they get ranked higher for the keywords used.
Deciding The Goal – The first element of SEO content strategy is deciding the targeted audience and the goals to achieve your content. Depending on whether it is for selling a product or service or a simple blog so that readers check out other blogs too, the keywords will be decided. The reason is that the categories of readers are different and so will be their search queries on search engines. Based on the assumption of those queries, keyword research will be done.
Keyword Research – The second thing one needs to do is find out the keywords to be used in the content. The keywords need to have low competition and high search volume. There should be multiple keywords some of which should be primary and others should be secondary, long-tail, and semantic keywords. You can hire freelance SEO expert to do this part.
Deciding The Essentials – For any SEO content, the title and the sub-headings play the most important role. Therefore, enough time should be spent to decide a keyword-rich and catchy title that could come close to matching with the query that the targeted audiences might search on the search engines. The long-tail keywords must be used for the sub-headings. Similarly, the meta description should also be prepared with keywords and it must be very intriguing because the targeted audiences might check the meta description before click on your link on the search engine result pages.
Placing The Keywords – It is finally time to write the content. It should be written like a general content keeping the targeted audiences in the mind. But the most important thing should be placed on the keywords in the content so that all keywords are properly utilized and spread the content. Furthermore, the density of the keywords should be according to the latest SEO standards. There should not be any keyword stuffing. Furthermore, you cannot write large sentences and long paragraphs.
Using Quality Anchor Link – The external and internal linking plays a major role in SEO content writing. You should use high-quality external anchor links to relevant websites in your content. This will increase the credibility of the article and the search engine crawlers will consider your content more relevant. Similarly, you should never miss out on the scope of linking the web pages of your website in the article. This will help to pass the link juice evenly and the reader can also check them out to increase page views and engagement and reduce bounce rate.
Other Miscellaneous Aspects – You should use creative images after every couple of paragraphs because content with least images is not considered good by search engine crawlers. The images have to be SEO-friendly as well which means you have to specify titles and alt texts with primary keywords. After finishing the content, you have to revise properly and use of SEO plugins will help you to iron out the content.
The clients post freelance jobs of high budget all the time to hire SEO content writers. If you want to make a living from content writing, you have to elevate yourself from a general content writer to SEO content writer.
