What do you understand by an effective SEO content writing service? What should be the fundamental qualities of such a company promising to improve people’s search engine rankings?
Recently I was interacting with a client (who is into Internet marketing business) and he was complaining that neither SEO content writing service companies nor their clients truly understand the real meaning of search engine optimization. They are trapped in a vicious loop.
What’s that loop?
Somehow, they get hold of a list of keywords that catches their fancy and then start optimizing the website based on those keywords, paying little attention to whether these keywords will get more business or not. They are happy just to see their links appearing on the first page of search results for the chosen keywords.
But this happiness is short lived, as soon it dawns upon them that their improved search engine rankings are not bringing new business. Having spent all that money and effort, they end up thinking that the concept of effective SEO does not exist.
Read 10 SEO content writing rules you cannot ignore.
We need to redefine qualities of effective SEO content writing services
Most of the mainstream web page optimization companies these days acknowledge the importance of effective content. Read 5 reasons why content writing is important for SEO.
After Panda and Penguin updates, Google shifted its focus from keyword-oriented ranking to quality-oriented ranking.
It was very easy to rank your content based on keywords. All you had to do was, publish lots of content around your chosen keywords and you were good to go. But to create lots of keyword-centric content, people ended up creating trash content, Google often terms as thin content.
Useless links would rank higher and the content that wasn’t focusing much on keywords but was of good quality, was pushed lower in the rankings. They didn’t know how to optimize your website; they just knew how to optimize your website for selected keywords. A big difference.
Even top SEO consultants of that time didn’t have a clue about conversion rate, and even if they did, they couldn’t care less.
A search engine like Google can only survive if it can find useful information for its users. This is something it competes on. It needs to ensure that there is no dearth of quality content in the search results.
This is why, these days, though, your keywords are important, more important is the quality of your content. The fundamental qualities of your content these days are an integral part of ranking algorithms in all major search engines.
Read Give the right answers and improve your search engine rankings.
So, what are the basic 5 qualities of an effective SEO content writing service?
- Content optimization with right keywords and search terms.
- Providing answers to people’s questions and queries.
- Using great headlines to attract people to your website.
- Writing content according to well-defined personas.
- Updating and repurposing existing content.
When we talk of SEO content writing it is understandable that you want to improve your search engine rankings and get better results. There is no problem in that.
But your search engine rankings should translate into more business through the traffic. Your content should be able to draw the right people to your website and this means knowing the right words to target. Let’s go through these 5 qualities of an effective SEO content writing service, one-by-one.
Content optimization with right keywords and search terms
It is the job of your SEO content writing service to know the right keywords for your business. The service should be able to find out what search terms people are using to find a business like yours, a product like yours, or a service like yours.
When you are effectively optimizing your content, it is not about getting ranked higher for your favourite keywords, it is about getting ranked higher for the keywords and search terms people are actually using.
An effective SEO content writing service ensures that proper research is carried out to find out the expressions people are using on search engines and then create content around those expressions.
Providing answers to people’s questions and queries
People these days search for questions and queries on search engines. Especially after voice search became mainstream, people started carrying out searches using conversational expressions and when we are conversing, we normally ask questions, something like “where can I find this service”, or “how much does this content writing service cost”.
Using great headlines to attract people to your website
Every copywriting expert says that if you want to learn about headlines, carefully observe how newspapers use headlines to make people buy the day’s copy of the newspaper. This is why the phrase “screaming headlines”.
The content writer from your chosen content writing service should be able to create effective headlines that successfully draw people to your website from search engines and social networking websites.
Your keywords should be used when creating headlines.
In terms of webpages and blog posts, the headline is the title. This title appears in search engine results as hyperlink. If people can see the keyword or the query they have just used in the text of the hyperlink, they are more prone to clicking it. So, make sure that while you are using the keywords for creating headlines, the headlines are compelling enough to draw people to your website.
While we are at the topic of headlines, never use headlines to mislead people. This is counter-productive. You will begin to lose your search engine rankings and worse, people will stop trusting you.
Writing content according to well-defined personas
Whom are you writing your content for? Why am I writing this blog post? Whom am I talking to?
I’m talking to people who understand content writing and content marketing and additionally, would also like to use content writing for SEO. They want to know how to do it.
They may also like to hire an SEO content writing service so this blog post educates them about what all the chosen company should be able to achieve in order to holistically improve their search engine rankings.
Similarly, when content is being written for your website or blog, it should be written for a well-defined persona.
Persona means the profile of the person accessing your content. What does that person want? Where does he or she come from? How much does he or she make? How old he or she is? Is he or she married or not?
You can create a long list of questions to define the ideal persona for your content.
Updating and repurposing your existing content
Among the major qualities of an effective SEO content writing service, this is also important. Improving your search engine rankings also means continuously updating your existing content.
Read How to repurpose old content.
Search engines continuously want to crawl fresh content. They don’t want to crawl outdated content. So, if you published a blog post or an article or a web page a year ago, perhaps it’s time to revisit it and revise it according to the current information you have.
Similarly, your SEO content writing service should also encourage you to repurpose your content.
Repurposing content means reusing it indifferent forms. Perhaps you can create a slide out of an existing blog post? What about infographic from the data that you used in one of your previous blog posts? You can also create a YouTube video using one of your articles as background. This gives you an opportunity to create fresh content out of existing content and your SEO content writing service can play a crucial part in this.
To be frank, deciding to hire an SEO content writing service is one of the most important business decisions you are going to take because the future belongs to content marketing. What content you have on your website will decide what sort of presence you will wield on the Internet in the coming months and years. Consequently, any SEO content writing service you decide to work with, must have these qualities to enable it to deliver you effective content.