When it comes to writing good content for SEO, it’s all about the audience! SEO copywriting refers to the art of writing content that is carefully targeted to rank higher in search. Knowing how to write relevant content is a valuable tool in order to drive web traffic and improve your website’s rankings.
Here, at Ricemedia, we understand however that writing search optimised content isn’t just about rankings and traffic, it’s also all about the reader experience! In order to build engagement and see real ROI, it’s important to gain an understanding of who your reader is and their intentions. As a result, we’ve compiled together our top 10 tips for creating the best SEO content. Enjoy!
1. Know your Audience and Use Target Keywords Accordingly
The key to creating good content starts with having a basic understanding of your target audience. Knowing your demographic will allow you to write targeted content that will appeal to them and, therefore, will rank higher Think about the kind of information they need and what keywords they are using to find it. Creating personas to figure out their personal habits and hobbies can come in handy when finding relevant, profitable and targeted keywords that you can include in your content.
2. Cover Trending Topics
Covering recent and relevant topics in your onsite content is a good way to get to the top of the SERPs fast. In order to achieve this, try looking into what keywords are ranking highest in your topic area of expertise and target your content accordingly. Although these have a higher competition rate, key implementation can be worthwhile to your organisation or business.
3. Tailor Content For Featured Snippets
A featured snippet is a short and quick answer to the user’s query and is displayed right at the top of a search engines result page. In terms of SEO, getting a featured snippet is a great way to improve and increase traffic to your page. In order to get a featured snippet, you must make sure your content is of the highest quality and answers the users queries directly. Other ways to enhance your chances of a featured snippet include using numbered and bullet lists and structuring your content logically.
Why Are featured Snippets Important?
Featured snippets are a great way to steal traffic away from the highest ranking spots. In the past, they have got a lot of attention from SERPs and will continue to drive attention in upcoming years. In addition to this, they often tend to take up double the space on the first page which is an area often considered greater than the organic results.
4. Understand the Importance of Meta Title and Meta Description
When it comes to writing targeted meta titles and descriptions, a lot of people make the mistake of ignoring these entirely. Nevertheless, they are a key factor when it comes to producing good SEO copy. Together, they directly affect how much traffic is driven to your web page from a search result. Remember to consider your primary keywords as these will allow you to appear on the most relevant search queries for your targeted audience.
5. Don’t Abandon Image Alt-Tags
Another useful tip to remember is the importance of image alt-tags.
The purpose of alt attributes is primarily to provide a description of the contents of an image file. By adding relevant alt tags to your image, it will not only enhance your SEO but also aid those who can’t see images on their browsers. Using targeted keywords in your tags will further enhance your chances of SEO.
6. Incorporate Interlinking
Adding internal linking can be a highly useful and beneficial technique when enhancing your content for SEO. Not only does this add value to your side, but it also improves the user experience. Depending on the quality of your internal link structure, it can also affect the ‘crawlability’ of your site. However, it’s important to remember not to add too much interlinking as sometimes this can cause more damage than good so make sure everything you do link to is relevant!
7. Shorten your Sentences and Paragraphs
In SEO, longer blogs and articles tend to outperform shorter ones because they often provide more detail and information. However, long paragraphs and sentences do not. When a page has chunky or long blocks of text it can often impact the bounce rate of a site as immediate readers see this and know this isn’t what they want. For better results, try and keep your paragraphs and sentences short in order to keep your readers engaged.
8. Get Voice Active
With the advancement of voice-activated hubs, such as Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa, it comes as no surprise that the increase in voice-activated searching has skyrocketed over recent years. Because of this, content creators have had to tailor their content to match. By producing more chatty informal copy, search engines are able to rank your page higher based on relevance and tone. Using long-tail keywords will aid this and produce more relevant and engaging content that will rank higher.
9. Consider the Readability
Producing good content all comes down to the readability. When the reader clicks on the page, you want them to stay and read as this makes you look good, providing to search engines you’re relevant to their proposed query. The ‘Dwell time’ refers to the amount of time between the point of clicking on the link from the search engine to the time they return or leave the site.
Good readability can enhance your dwell time and SEO, providing that your page offers clarity, organisation, logic and simplicity. The more understandable, the longer people will stay. Therefore, the higher the dwell time, the higher the ranking!
10. Monitor Your Activity
Finally, it is crucial that you monitor the activity of your page. Not only will this tell you what has worked and what hasn’t but it will allow you to continue to produce excellent content that is loved by search engines!
Google Analytics is an easy and free way to track and monitor your page and audience behaviour. It can also give you an insight into the type of things to improve on and what content is well-received.
If you have any questions about SEO, content or how they can be used together to enhance your own marketing strategy, feel free to contact us today!
