What is SEO Writing (Plus Our Top Dos and Don’ts)

If you’re interested in digital marketing, you’ve probably heard of SEO (search engine optimization) writing. You might have even seen job postings for SEO writers, and were wondering what this is all about. Content Refined uses SEO writing in all of our Content Creation packages, and it goes hand in hand with our SEO optimization service. Feeling a little lost? Let’s get into what SEO writing is, and some of our top dos and don’ts.

SEO writing is the act of creating written content for a website or blog that includes specific keywords. This is done in order to grab the attention of a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. These keywords are specific, targeted words or phrases that are directly related to the topic you are writing about, and will help readers to find your website via search engines.

There are a multitude of reasons why SEO writing is important for online success, but above all, you want your targeted customers to be able to find you. Not only is it important that your website is able to be found on search engines, but it is important for the keywords to be accurate, and to match exactly what your potential customer is searching for. This is important for obvious seasons, but also for your search engine rankings. Google is able to detect if the link to your website is clicked on, and then whether or not the “clicker” returned to Google within less than ten seconds. If they did, this can most definitely affect your rankings, as your SEO keywords may be misleading. For this and many more reasons, SEO writing is incredibly important to your digital marketing strategy.

Create and post relevant, high quality content as often as you can. Not only will posting relevant content on a regular basis increase the chances of you being found, it can also help you move up in Google’s rankings. By high quality content, we mean content that is more than a few sentences long (1000-1200 words are ideal), and be sure to cover a variety of topics that are relevant and related to your company or website. SEO keyword research will help to best determine the subject of the content you should be creating when it comes to your business.

Tip: Make sure that your content is shareable on social media, as back-links will increase your search engine rankings.

While including a keyword or key phrase in your content often is a good idea, it becomes a problem when you start keyword stuffing within your own content – meaning that you’ve included a keyword so often, that your content does not flow or make sense. While yes, including relevant keywords may promote more traffic to your website, it will not be enjoyable or easy to read. If your content is not enjoyable to read, your website will be quickly clicked off of, which again, will hurt your search engine rankings. In addition, you do not gain long lasting, repeat customers, which is ideally your end goal in your digital marketing journey.

A great way to avoid the temptation of the previously mentioned keyword stuffing, is to use synonyms. This not only helps make your content flow more efficiently, but it can be incredibly helpful when it comes to different search terms. If using too many of the same keywords, your page may also be seen as low quality by search engines, which will lower your search engine rankings.

Keep a close eye on your competitors – and by that, we mean check out the content that they’re posting. We don’t mean for this to sound sneaky, or for you to rip off their ideas – this comes down to checking out the style and format of their articles. Check out the length of their articles, how often they’re posting, are they linking to internal and external links, whether they’re inserting original images or any images at all, etc. Digital marketing means always, always keeping one step ahead of your competitors, and you’re going to want to make sure your SEO writing follows suit.

In other words, make sure your content’s not boring! Create content that you yourself would want to read, and make sure that you’re not just choosing a topic for the sake of it. The worst mistake you can make is creating boring content just to have something to post. Thoroughly do your research on what your readers are interested in, and make sure that as a writer, you can find an angle to make it interesting for yourself. There’s nothing worse than when you can tell that a writer is truly not interested in what they’re writing about, and how can you expect to sell someone on an article that you didn’t even enjoy writing?

Yes, while doing keyword research you may want to take each relevant keyword that you find, and write an article around it. However, you really need to weigh up how relevant this is to your website, and if you can write an entire article about it. You do not want an article to feel forced or out of place. You want it to flow smoothly, and for it to seem like it was something you chose specifically – not just because it might increase traffic to your website. Again, readers can always tell whether or not the writer knows what they’re talking about, or if they are writing just for the sake of writing. Choose your topics wisely!

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of what SEO writing is, as well as some of our top dos and don’ts for your content creation. If you’re just developing an understanding of SEO writing, it is easy to get confused about what you should and shouldn’t do. Consulting with a team like Content Refined is a great way to go. Even if you are looking to create your own content, we can upgrade your existing content, or conduct that crucial keyword research for you. Book a free consultation today to get going!