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5 Reasons Why Content Writing Is Important for SEO

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Do you know that your SEO begins and ends with quality content writing?

It is so important that every major search engine optimization agency these days doesn’t implement your optimization strategy without a solid content strategy.

SEO benefits of content writing have been copiously documented by now.

What is SEO content writing?

It means writing content in such a manner that it begins to rank higher for the related keyword searches. You use the keywords in the title of the web page or the blog post and then strategically use them at various places. Ideally, your content should be optimized for search engines as well as humans.

Read How to evaluate your SEO content writing.

Before you comprehend and decide to use content writing to improve your search engine rankings you need to learn

  1. What is SEO content writing?
  2. What type of content you can publish on your blog or website?
  3. What is going to be your long-term content strategy?

For this section, I’m going to explore the various aspects of writing content specifically for higher rankings.

Although, merely pushing content doesn’t have a great impact on your SEO, it is the most important aspect of your ranking strategy. If there is no content, there is nothing to rank.

As explained above, in order to write content for SEO, you need to follow certain steps including

  1. Make sure that the main keyword phrase appears in the title of your web page or blog post.
  2. The main keyword phrase and its various parts should be scattered all over the content of your web page or blog post.
  3. You should also use the alternative phrases, what they call LSI keywords. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and these are the related keywords to your main keywords. If you feel that you are over-using your main keywords you should replace them with LSI keywords.
  4. Use your keywords (including LSI keywords) within the <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags to put more emphasis on them.
  5. Use your keywords (including LSI keywords) as anchor text when linking to other web pages and blog posts on your website.

These are all a part of on-site SEO. These are the technical side of SEO. These alone don’t decide how Google is going to rank your content, but they are a part of the building blocks that you need in order to write SEO content.

Of course, the fundamental aspect of your content writing must always be its quality, its relevance, and the value it delivers to your visitors. Without quality content writing, there is no hope of getting good search engine rankings. Quality content writing is the most important part of your SEO.

Read 20 Evergreen Characteristics of Quality Content

With quality, SEO-friendly formatting is very important because the Google algorithm looks for important words at particular places on your web page or blog post.

Now coming to the “content” part of writing search engine friendly content. Here are a few things you need to follow:

  1. Do keyword research: Before you start writing content make sure you have a comprehensive list of the right keywords and key phrases you are going to use. These must be the search terms your target customers and clients are most likely to use when trying to find you or your service or your business or your product.
  2. Start writing high-quality content: I can never understate the importance of high-quality content. If your content quality is inferior, no matter how much time you spend optimizing your content, all the SEO benefits will be lost. Remember that the only reason your content exists is to serve your prospective customers and clients. So, whatever you write, keep in mind that you have to provide some sort of solution.
  3. Incorporate your keywords: Once you have written content that you feel is going to convert well, incorporate your keywords. Insert your keywords at strategic locations. Don’t overuse them. Whenever you feel that you cannot help using them, use alternatives – as mentioned above, use LSI keywords.
  4. Promote your content: Marketing your content, making sure that your target audience is able to find your content through various social media and social networking channels, is an important aspect of SEO. Google wants social validation. Try to get social validation from as many resources as possible. Promoting content will also get you precious back links.

5 Reasons Why Content Writing Is Important for SEO

Now that we know what is SEO content and how to write it, let’s come to the main topic of the blog post: reasons why content writing is important for SEO.

SEO is actually all about content marketing. And since content writing is indispensable to any genuine content marketing effort, we can safely say that SEO is actually all about content writing. How come? I’m describing that below.

1. SEO needs strategic usage of keywords and search terms

Although big advances have been made in terms of ranking web pages and blog posts according to their true value, keywords still matter. You can judge the importance of keywords by the fact that your ranking depends on whether you have used your keywords or one of its alternatives in the title of your web page or blog post, or not.

It is only through strategic content writing that you can use the right keywords to satiate Google. If there is no content, it is very difficult for you to rank for the right keywords.

2. Social validation can only be obtained due to quality content

I have personally seen that many web pages and blog posts rank well due to the social validation they have been able to attract despite having inferior quality content. But this can only be achieved by brute force and lots of money. For a small or medium-sized business, the only way you can get social validation is by quality content writing.

When your content is great, when it delivers value, when people find what they are looking for through your content, they tend to engage with your content through social media and social networking websites. When they share your links on their timelines, Google sees these actions as social validation and then uses this validation to rank your links.

3. Quality back links can only be obtained due to quality content

Back links are also a form of social validation but you don’t necessarily have to focus on social media and social networking websites to garner back links.

Why would people link to your website or blog? Apart from the fact that sometimes you can pay websites and blogs to link back to you, in most of the cases, people link to you because they appreciate what you are publishing.

This, Google sees as validation and its algorithms use this validation to rank your webpages and blog posts.

4. In order to rank your website and individual links, Google needs content

This is a straightforward logic. If you don’t have content, what is Google going to rank? In Google Images Google ranks images, in Google Video, Google ranks videos and in the same manner, in the normal Google section, Google ranks text, your written content.

This is why content writing is important for your SEO: it is giving Google something to rank. It also tells Google for what keywords and search terms your content should be ranked.

5. Content writing contributes to the “Search Task Accomplishment” factor

This is a new trend emerging: does your content solve any purpose? Search Task Accomplishment is becoming a new buzzword on the Internet, especially in the content marketing and SEO circles.

Soon, Google is going to rank your content according to the true purpose it solves. A user should be able to find exactly what he or she is looking for when he or she uses the Google search engine. Google is working on an algorithm that will be able to find if people are able to find exactly the information they need on your link. If yes, your rankings will start improving and if no, your rankings will start deteriorating.

Additional SEO benefits of content writing

  1. People voluntarily link to your content.
  2. People have more reasons to link to your content because you give them a wide choice of topics and interest areas.
  3. There are greater opportunities for your content being shared on social media.
  4. With high quality content people spend more time on your website indicating to Google that you have quality and relevant content.
  5. Content writing boosts your content marketing efforts and this in turn improves your search engine rankings.
  6. Organic rankings achieved through quality content writing last longer and attract more traffic because people prefer to visit links that appear organically rather than promoted by advertising.

There was a time when SEO existed in isolation. No longer is the case. SEO these days is the sum total of your entire content marketing dispensation. Without great content, you can never hope to enjoy good search engine rankings. With every preceding month, content writing is becoming more and more important for SEO.

Does SEO content writing really matter or is it just a fad?

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You must have noticed that I provide SEO content writing as a separate service, as in, I provide business content writing services and I also provide SEO content writing services beside other such services. But on many websites and blogs you must have come across people saying that there is no such thing as “SEO content writing” and the term is used to sound more esoteric, confuse the clients, and ultimately, charge more for basically nothing.

More or less I do agree with this notion. I believe there is just good content and bad content and good content always improves your search engine rankings. So why provide SEO content writing as a separate service?

After everything is said and done it takes extra effort to write keeping both search engines and humans in mind. Whether you agree or not search engines are constantly looking for content for the appropriate keywords and such terms. It doesn’t matter much if you’re selling something uncommon. But if you are promoting a service or a commodity that faces lots of competition, and if it matters to your business how much search engine traffic your website gets you have to organize your text in such a manner that all major search engine crawlers can crawl you are website, index your content and rank your links according to the keywords and search phrases you have used.

Since the competition is fierce you have to be very particular about the way you write and arrange your content and to an untrained person this might be quite difficult. Writing is an interactive activity and you cannot quickly train yourself to write in a certain manner. You can easily write a story or product or service descriptions but it takes training and experience to create text that is received well by the search engines as well as your prospective customers and clients. the skill has to be ingrained into your subconscious.

This is why it is better to hire someone who is comfortable at SEO content writing rather than you throwing darts in the darkness just to find out where they hit. Of course you can do that if you want to learn how to do it but if this is not your business it is simply a waste of time. In order to save a few hundred dollars you might end up spending time worth thousands of dollars.

Again, many people confuse SEO content writing with simply inserting keywords and key phrases into the text being written. Sometimes they overdo it (inviting penalty, unknowingly, from search engines) and sometimes the under do it, getting no relevance at all. Even while using your keywords and search expressions you need to sound as natural as possible. You need to have a compelling voice. Your writing should be able to convince your visitors because simply getting traffic doesn’t really do you much good if people leave your website within a few seconds because you’re writing cannot engage them.

There is another aspect of SEO content writing: it forces you to focus on a specific topic. For instance if you’re writing a page on “small-business web designing services” you need to mention this particular phrase in order to make sure the visitors understand what you’re trying to convey. It needn’t appear in every paragraph but it should appear wherever it is necessary. This will keep you focused on this particular topic. You may be providing web designing services for different types of businesses but you will write this specific page only for those people who are looking for small business web designing services. The same goes for any other field, let us say for instance, SEO content writing. If you are talking about your SEO content writing services you will be explaining what sort of SEO content writing services you provide and what are the advantages of hiring you for such services. Ultimately, this focus increases your keyword relevance.

So yes, SEO content writing does matter if you are really concerned about getting targeted search engine traffic without affecting your conversion rate.