Since existence of search engine, SEO writing has existed. But for some reason it isn’t talked much about. Most SEO gurus focus too much on link building and other grey hat stuff that they forget about the intention of WHY the search engines were created in the first place – to analyze and index the data available on the internet so that people can get the information they are searching for.
That is why when it comes to writing content for your own website or whether it is a collaboration with another website, SEO cannot be an afterthought. You need to make sure that you are doing the research, creating an outline and optimizing the content for SEO right from the start.
So you can provide value while also making sure that all the optimizations are done properly for it to rank highly for the keywords you are targeting.
In this article, I’ll cover the basics of how you can become a better SEO writer.
Find an Industry Relevant Keyword That Receives Traffic
You are doing this to get more traffic to your website. So make sure you are targeting keywords that receive a decent amount of traffic that you can rank your content for.You also want to make sure that the keyword you are targeting is relevant to what your website is about. For example, if your website is about pets, then it doesn’t make sense to write an article about kitchen remodeling.
You have to make sure that the keywords you choose are about pets and receive some organic traffic every month.
Best way to get keyword ideas is to go to question and answer websites like Quora.
Search for the keyword “pets” and see what questions people are asking. Things will start clicking for you.
Once they do, start searching for those questions on Google and see if there are a lot of websites on the first page that specifically answer that question. Also look for the “People Also Ask” snippets. That’s a good sign. It shows that Google has recognized that particular question as something a lot of people are asking, and this snippet will have different variations of that question and also some closely related questions.
Last step is to get a tool like Ahrefs or Keywordseverywhere to dig deeper into these keywords and see what other variations or closely related keywords you can target.
The more the better because then you’d be able to get more traffic to your website.
Find What You Competitors Are Ranking For
This is where a tool like Ahrefs comes in very handy. Here at our office in Memphis, we spend several hours a day reverse engineering competitors in Ahrefs. It is an invaluable tool when it comes to seeing what your competitors are doing and see if you can do it better than them.All you have to do, is throw your competitors website in ahrefs and click on Organic Keywords in the left bar. That will give you a list of all the keywords your competitor is ranking for and which pages of their website are ranking for those keywords.
Once you have that info, then it depends on you whether you want to do more research or if you want to rewrite the content that your competitor has on their page but in your own words.
If you rewrite the content, make sure you check it in Copyscape once you are done so that it is 100% unique. There’s no point going through all this trouble to write a plagiarized article. You might as well stop doing SEO if you are going to do that.
Creating An Outline
After research, this is the most important step. Not only will creating an outline make it easier for you to write the article (you’ll just have to fill in the blanks once you create an outline), it will also help you decide which keywords you should use in which subheadings.This is important because you can only have so many keywords in your title. You want to make sure that your article ranks for multiple keywords. Having optimized subheadings or sub-titles is the way you rank for multiple keywords and bring in more organic traffic.
The outline should also make logical sense. It shouldn’t just be created so that you can stuff in as many keywords as you can.
Remember, at the end of the day, you are doing SEO so your website can be seen by real people. It should look like you have done the research and put in the effort to provide them with valuable information.
That’s when your prospects will start taking your website as an authority in the niche and will end up buying from you.
Write the First Draft
Of course there is a first draft. No article ends up being the perfect article right out the gate. You have to write the first draft, proofread it and see if everything makes sense and reads perfectly.Remove unnecessary sections or sentences. See if you can say the same thing in less words. Keep it concise and to the point so that the reader can move on to the next section quickly and digest the information in an efficient manner.
You also have to think about the tone of your audience.
This is where doing proper niche research comes in handy. Read the forum posts that other people in your niche make. And see how they talk.Replicate the same tonality in your articles to convey your message. It will be much better received than if you don’t adapt your tonality to your niche. They will think that you are an outsider and so you don’t have as much experience as them.
Summing Up
SEO writing is nothing revolutionary, nor will you have to do something out of the ordinary. You just have to tweak your research process just a little bit to see what your competitors are doing. If you can see what they are doing and if it is working for them, then you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.You can just do what they do, but do it better than them so you can get better results than them. I hope this helped you.
