Tag Archives: Content Writing

Are you over optimizing your content?

Over optimizing your content can cost you search engine rankings. While all the time you’re talking about optimizing your content for search engine, what exactly do we mean by over-optimization?

We already know that we have to create our content around our important keywords. Up till here it is well and good. The problem arises when we get too obsessed with our keywords and instead of focusing on quality we start focusing on quantity.

Even if you remain conscious of the quality factor, sometimes you can produce too much of similar content. To be frank I tend to do that. Sometimes I simply go on creating pages and blog posts on similar topics. Not being in SEO person I didn’t even realize that my content was having a negative impact on my rankings until it was a bit late. I realized that, and fortunately, I could recover by removing and reorienting my content. Being a professional content writer was certainly helpful.

Here is a nice blog post on how to recover from over optimization.

The writer rightly puts emphasis on quality and purposefulness rather than simply flooding your website with lots of keyword-centric content.

But then what about covering all your primary and secondary keyword combinations? Again, this is no longer acceptable to Google. Have all the primary pages, use the right language that sounds natural to your human visitors and then, on a regular basis, publish content that is relevant, timely and useful.

Is content writing important than SEO?

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This is a question Internet marketers are facing again and again. Should businesses invest more on content or SEO in order to improve their search engine rankings?

I think both are specialised fields and you cannot favour one and ignore the other. Yes, your business needs content, written content, but it also needs to appear among top results in order to make that content accessible to search engine users.

But what if you have limited budget? What if you have to decide between content writing and SEO? What do you choose?

I will choose, certainly, content writing. It’s not because I myself am a content writer, I actually see the logic in it. Why do your individual pages and blog posts get indexed and ranked? What do people share on their social networking websites? It is your content. Without good content there is no hope of getting good search engine rankings, but without investing in SEO and by merely focusing on high quality content, you can always get good rankings.

Content is a communication and information medium. You talk to your prospects through your content. You generate leads and consequently business through your content. No matter how great your search engine rankings are, unless your content is able to convert that traffic to solid business, they are of no use.

On the other hand, have content that has good conversion rate and even mediocre traffic from search engines can get you good business.

Conventional wisdom says that you get good search engine rankings by doing the following two things:

Creating valuable content
Getting high-quality back links

Take care of these aspects and most of your SEO problem is solved.

Writing content for your local market

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Content Writing for Local Market

Wondering how to write content for your local market? If you’re mostly serving customers and clients within your city and you face lots of tough competition you need to strategically create content so that you can be easily found on the web.

While writing content for your local market you need to take care of the following:

You need to focus on the name of your city or all the surrounding cities you provide your product or service in
Focus on local landmarks. Landmarks are normally exclusive to particular cities. For instance, the statue of liberty is unique to the city of New York, if I’m not mistaken.
Focus on the local topics people can really relate to

While creating content for your local market you don’t always have to worry about your marketing pitch. Yes, of course people recognise you and your content by the business you represent, but in order to optimize your content for your local market and generate targeted traffic you need to write content (or get it written by a content writer) that talks about local issues either exclusively or in the context of your business.

Take for instance a fundraising marathon taking place in your area and one of the participants representing your business. You can publish a series of blog posts chronicling all the activities happening around the event, including how the person who will be representing your business is preparing for the big day. You can have video interviews. You can have photographs. You can compile a list of similar events organized in your city over the past 10 years, and so on. This will make you a part of the hubbub going on around you.

But you will have to make sure somewhere or the other your brand or your business is an integral part of your localised content marketing. Recently I came across a website that offers content writing services and it primarily concentrates on those clients who are specifically looking for content writers from India. In order to get content for almost everything related to India they have created a huge repository of articles and blog posts covering hundreds of topics. Although this might be getting tons of traffic to their website I’m not sure how much of this traffic actually converts. I am not against this strategy because if nothing else, thousands of people coming to your website everyday at least raises awareness. It’s just that you need lots of time and money to generate so much content.

Since content marketing can cost you money, you should focus on material that pushes your business interests forward instead of simply creating traffic. You can cover local events, local landmarks and other local news but make sure somehow they are related to your business.

Why most of my clients are happy with my content writing work

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Blowing my own horn? It may seem like that but this is more of an active thinking and constantly keeping in mind what works when it comes to delivering services your customers and clients really appreciate, and not just appreciate, but also profit from them.

Professional content writing is not just writing; you’re helping a person do business. You’re helping the person make a living by making an impact. And you cannot make an impact out of thin air. You really need to know people you are addressing via your content. In order to write convincingly, primarily I try to gather the following bits of information:

What exactly is the product or service my client intends to promote
What are the benefits delivered by that product or service
Why his or her customers or clients should choose that service or product rather than something from his or her competitors
Who is the target audience – its educational and professional background, money spending abilities and age group
What are the catch words or phrases the client thinks his target customers and clients respond to
A targeted list of keywords, if possible, and if needed
What should be the style – formal, informal, hard sell or suggestive

This list can be as comprehensive as you want but more information may overwhelm your client and also distract you. Detailed content writing work such as case studies and white papers requires more in-depth knowledge of the demography of the market as well as why the product or service exists, but for normal business pages, this information is sufficient.

Once I have gathered all the information I start writing for my client as if I’m writing for my own business. If I’m writing for my own business, my primary concern would be to write in such a manner that more and more business comes to me. Not just traffic, but real business. Higher search engine rankings can definitely be a plus, but it is of no value if that traffic doesn’t convert. So conversion first, and then search engine friendly content.

So when I understand the needs of my clients and also the nuances and dynamics of their target customers and clients, and then write content for them as if I am writing it for my own business, I am able to deliver what the clients want.

My favorite content writing tool

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Early in the day I was reading somebody’s blog post in which she had listed 50 of her favorite blogging and content writing tools. Right now I cannot access the post because I’m writing this from my galaxy tab and not my computer.

But if you ask me what are my favorite blogging and content writing tools these days, I’ll simply say Google Docs, and nothing else. And even the too I keep my editor window maximized (F11) and toolbar disabled so that I have just the editing screen with my text.

In order to improve my focus and eliminate distractions I’m rapidly moving towards minimalism and this also means using less and less tools. After all what do I have to do? I have to write. Whether I’m writing for one of my clients or for myself, all I need is an ability to type without much fuss.

So when I’m away from my computer I use my 7-inch Android tablet and google drive and when I’m in front of my computer I use Google Docs. Other than these, at least for writing, I don’t use anything else.

Of course for publishing I use WordPress but that’s not a tool but a platform. In fact, even for my main content writing website I use WordPress as backend.

Oh, and I forgot to mention GetPocket that was previously known as “Read it Later” or something. I use it not only to read useful blog posts and articles on my tab but also to compile content writing ideas.