Content writing and SEO are interrelated
What impact does your content writing have on SEO?
I know, this is an age-old question.
Most of my clients contact me for my content writing services because they want to improve their search engine rankings, which is perfectly fine.
If you are serious about getting traffic from search engines, you need to put in lots of effort getting to the top positions.
Depending on who is telling you, between 60-70% of all clicks are taken by the top 5 search results.
The only problem is that they think once they have published the “optimized” blog post or web page they are all set. They are going to rank higher and get traffic from Google and the motor of their business will start whirring.
They are right and wrong at the same time.
Yes, SEO and content writing are interlinked but content writing in itself doesn’t lead to better search engine rankings.
To get better rankings, you need to understand what search engines like Google are looking for, and what role your content plays in that.
Google doesn’t rank your content because you have “optimized” it.
The search engine could least care.
Google ranks your content based on how much valuable information it provides for the query that has been used.
Of course, it helps if you make your writing crawler-friendly and through the right use of words you give the ranking algorithm enough material to analyse your text, but other than that, it is the value, I repeat, the value that you provide that ultimately decides how your content ranks.
How are content writing and SEO interrelated?
The fundamental block of your search engine optimization is content writing.
Without written content, you can’t think of improving your search engine rankings.
So, this is settled.
How can you improve your search engine rankings with content writing?
Here are a few things you can do:
Provide answers to questions
This is a sure shot way of improving your SEO. Someone asks something from Google and Google provides the answer.
Total win-win.
This is exactly what Google wants to do.
The search engine wants people to ask questions and then it wants to give them the best answers.
If you have got the best answer, your answer will be shown at the top.
Hence, if you haven’t yet started writing content for your website (or you haven’t yet hired a content writer), the best first step would be to create a long list of questions people may have regarding your business.
These are the first most pages you want to write. This in itself can boost your SEO tremendously.
Write shorter sentences and paragraphs
The ranking algorithm after all is a machine. It gets confused if you write complicated sentences.
I’m not saying that you avoid complex sentences altogether.
Sometimes you don’t want to avoid writing longer, complex sentences, and this is fine.
You should definitely write the way you want to write and if you deliver value, people will read it anyway.
But when it comes to talking about the core issue and using the targeted search terms and keywords, use smaller sentences.
Preferably, don’t have more than one sentence for a paragraph.
It may seem odd in the beginning, but when you consider people going through your website on their mobile phones, you will realize that even a small sentence may appear like a big paragraph on the mobile phone.
Mobile-friendly content is also search engine-friendly content.
Publish new content consistently
This is something many clients don’t understand. They think that once they have covered all the keywords, they can relax.
Remember that this is Internet. Everyone can publish without spending much money.
Even if people don’t publish high-quality content, they can create enough noise to drown your voice.
By the time you say “content writing and SEO” there are scores of blog posts, webpages, press releases, news reports, case studies, podcasts and social media updates on your industry, pushing your content down.
The search engines also need new content to crawl all the time. You can call them content-hungry.
Pay for quality writing not for quantity writing
Writing and publishing 5 high-quality blog posts or web pages is far more effective than publishing 50 blog posts or web pages that are mediocre.
Improving your SEO through quality content writing works like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Well-written, good content gets good feedback from readers and users and this feedback helps search engines like Google evaluate your content.
Due to positive reaction and feedback your search engine rankings improve and then more people who can give you positive feedback and reaction get to find your content.
Even if initially you can get good rankings if people don’t stay on your website, if they don’t spend much time on the link that they have found in the search results, you begin to lose your rankings.
Hence, quality content writing is of utmost importance for sustained SEO.