SEO Content writing actually improves your search engine rankings

Does SEO content writing actually improve your search engine rankings?

You may like to read 5 Reasons Why Content Writing Is Important for SEO

Although, whenever my clients ask me this question, I tell them that SEO content writing alone doesn’t improve search engine rankings but it is the underpinning of every SEO strategy.

Unless you have good content, you’re not going to enjoy better search rankings. There is a reason.

Over the years, an increasing number of organizations and content creators have realized that merely using keywords here and there doesn’t help much in improving one’s search engine rankings.

You need to provide useful information. You must write content that is relevant to what your target audience is looking for. Only then you can improve your SEO.

What do millions of Internet users access everyday while surfing the Internet?

They access the content present on various websites.

What do people promote day in and day out on various social media and networking websites?

They promote content links.

So it’s clear that everything is about content, whether it exists in the form of text, video or images.

Since everybody is seeking content, how do you create content that’s actually being sought?

And if you create content that is highly sought after, how do you let people know of its existence?

This is where SEO content writing can help you.

What does content actually mean?

As I have explained elsewhere on this blog, whatever information exists, it is content. It can be text, it can be video, it can be images, it can be PDFs, it can be social media updates – anything that can be read, heard or viewed, is content.

This TopRank blog post has compiled responses from 40 content marketers and content writers to get a perspective on what is content. For example, according to Heidi Cohen,

Content is high quality, useful information that conveys a story presented in a contextually relevant manner with the goal of soliciting an emotion or engagement. Delivered live or asynchronously content can be expressed using a variety of formats including text, images, video, audio and/or presentations. When used for marketing purposes, content should incorporate the organization’s branding, be void of any form of promotion, and use a call-to-action to be trackable.

According to data analyst Avinash Kaushik

Content is anything that adds value to the reader’s life. It can add value by making them smarter, making them laugh, making them do their job better, rush to their child to share the video, make a contribution to a charity.

How important are the keywords for SEO content writing?

Whether people are using search engines, online directories or social networking websites to dig out relevant information, one thing is common that they use: the keywords, the search terms.

There are many Internet “gurus” that say SEO is fast becoming irrelevant. They say that the keywords are losing their meaning.

There are many reasons for such opinions. One of the reasons is that these days more stress is put on the relevance of your content.

The artificial intelligence used by the search engine algorithms can understand your content even when you don’t use your keywords. It can make sense of the words by combining multiple words and multiple sentences and then deriving the meaning on its own.

Consequently, you should just focus on the quality and the relevance of your content.

Although I completely agree with the quality and the relevance thing, I think the keywords still matter. They’re going to matter for a long time.

Another reason for discounting SEO is that people these days are using social media and social networking websites to search for information.

This can be true for website like LinkedIn but finding business-related information on Facebook and Twitter or Instagram can be really daunting.

People are still using search engines when they want to find business-related information or when they are looking for products and services.

On social media and social networking websites they may stumble upon a bit of useful information, but they don’t actively use their search functions.

Search still means search engines like Google and Bing.

Does only SEO content writing help you improve your search engine rankings?

While SEO writing is the most important ingredient (it’s like the pasta in your pasta dish) what sort of rankings your content enjoys depends on many factors. Some of these include

• The authority your website or blog currently wields.
• The age of your domain.
• The number of authority incoming links.
• Your existing content quality.
• Your existing content density.
• The optimization of your source code.
• Your engagement level on social media and social networking websites.
• The frequency with which you publish fresh content and update existing content.
• The way content is organized on your website or blog.
• The level and the quality of competition your content faces on search engines.

SEO content writing is not just about outsmarting the search engines.

It’s about talking in the right language and using the right words; words people actually use.

If I’m writing about SEO content writing, and if nowhere on my page this phrase appears (let’s say all the time I’m talking about getting more search engine traffic — a good thing to do actually, but here I’m just explaining the expressions and their relevance) how can the search engines find my page when people are looking for SEO content writing?

So it’s very important that you figure out:

• What’s your target market
• What search terms and expressions they actually use
• What they’re actually looking for
• How to incorporate the data into your entire SEO content writing process

There is a concept called search task accomplishment. What does it mean?

Google these days does not rank your content based on how you have used your keywords. Though, keywords are still important, Google ranks your content based on what purpose it is solving.

To accomplish this, it takes into account the way people react to your content.

The logic is very simple. When someone finds your link on Google and clicks the link and goes to your website, does he or she find the information he or she is looking for?

If he or she comes back to Google and carries on with the same search, it tells Google that he or she didn’t find the information he or she was looking for and hence, he or she needs to look more.

On the other hand, if he or she doesn’t carry on the same search, it tells Google that your content accomplished the task for which it was created and hence, this particular link gets a ranking boost.

How does SEO content writing improve your search engine rankings

A lot of your success on the Internet depends on getting found, if you don’t have millions of dollars to spend on advertising.

You may like to read search engine optimization guidelines by Google.

According to Google guidelines, your content should be

• Useful and informative.
• Valuable and useful compared to other websites.
• Credible and trustworthy.
• High quality.
• Engaging.

Search engine optimization is definitely a good start and when you include keyword targeting in your overall SEO content writing strategy it helps the search engine ranking algorithms compute the relevance according to the searches being conducted.

It has a circular effect:

As you can see in the diagram, with the right start, one thing leads to another and it goes on and on.

But is it this simple? Of course its not.

SEO content writing has to be matched with relevancy — it must provide solutions and answers.

Suppose someone wants to know what smart phone she should buy?

Simply optimizing your content for iPhone or Google Pixel or OnePlus isn’t going to be of much help and if it isn’t going to be of much help people are neither going to link to it nor going to promote it.

Unless your content really helps her decide, it’s of no relevance, and even if it appears on the first pages of various search engines (flukes do happen), it neither benefits you nor your visitors.

Create few SEO content pages, but create highly relevant pages.

This is where everything begins.

If you start focusing on every keyword under the sun and start generating tons of directionless traffic it’s not going to benefit you, and you’ll end up concluding that SEO content writing doesn’t work.

Instead, focus on a few search terms and create highly relevant content around them. Just in a couple of months you’ll notice a marked difference and you will find that SEO content writing definitely improves your search engine rankings.

Note: This blog post was updated on March 30, 2020.