Tag Archives: seo content writing

How to write content for humans but optimize for Google and other search engines

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The greatest objective of your content should be that it appeals to your human readers and provides them the information they need in order to decide in your favour (that is, when they seek something that you provide). But for many businesses, search engine optimization takes precedence over the relevance of the content they are writing. How do you create a balance? How do you make sure that you write content for humans but you optimize it for Google and other search engines? How can you make both the parties happy?

SEO chart that explains the entire process of SEO content writing

Can you ignore your search engine rankings?

There are many online marketers and in fact, even content writers, who will tell you that don’t worry much about search engine rankings because if you have great content, your rankings should automatically improve. Ideally, yes, they should automatically improve. But do they? No. We don’t live in an ideal world. In the world we live, there are people who can manipulate their search engine rankings and search engine algorithms can be manipulated. Not just that, you are constantly facing competition. Someone or the other is going to get better of you no matter how hard you try.

Sure, it is the quality of your content and the regularity with which you publish your content that has the biggest impact on your search engine rankings but optimization also plays a very important role, so you cannot ignore your search engine rankings if qualified and targeted traffic matters to you.

In his recent blog post the renowned online marketer Neil Patel has explained how you can create content that is both human friendly as well as search engine optimized.

SEO content writing to improve your search engine rankings

Neil says that in order to search engine optimize your content you first of all need to understand what all helps you improve your SEO, and the first stress he makes is SEO copywriting. Many content writers and content marketers are of the opinion that every piece of content that you produce and publish must have the ability to “sell” something. I have used quotes because selling doesn’t always mean selling products and services. You can sell an idea. You can sell an opinion. You can sell an action. For example, if you want people to subscribe to your newsletter, for you THAT is selling. If you want people to download your e-book, then that is selling for you. If you want people to click your ads than that is selling for you. When you are making people do something, you are selling to those people. So even convincing content writing is like copywriting. How do you convince people? By writing logically and convincingly, of course. So this automatically makes your writing human-friendly.

How do you make your content writing SEO-friendly? By writing in the language used by people who are looking for solutions rather than products. By actually using the words and expressions people use in order to find what you have to offer.

A peculiar thing about search engines like Google is that their crawlers and ranking algorithms study bits of text at particular locations. For example, your page or blog title must contain your keywords. It helps if even your description contains some combination of your keywords. Then, the algorithm also studies your first paragraph and checks for the appearance of the main words. It also looks for your relevant words in the headings and subheadings that you use while writing your content. The bulleted list also gets some sort of importance and also does the text inside the hyperlinks.

These are small things that are often ignored by content writers but they can make a big difference. The above-linked blog post also contains some tools that can help you significantly improve your search engine rankings. Do check it out.

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Writing content based on customer-centric SEO strategy

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Customer-centric approach for writing SEO content

Is your content writing customer-centric SEO-based or you randomly go on writing and adding content to your website or blog just to cover the keywords you think people must be using to look for your business? There is nothing wrong in preparing your own list of keywords – both small combinations and longtail keywords – and for all you know, since you are an expert in your field, you may very well know what your prospective customers and clients might be looking for, but in many cases I have found, people have no idea.

Most content writing is done to improve search engine rankings

No matter how holistically I look at my content writing and content marketing services, 70% of the clients hire me to improve their SEO. I don’t mean to say that it is less of a service, but rather than worrying about their conversion rate, they worry about their search engine rankings, which, in itself is not bad, but it is definitely bad if you’re trying to achieve this at the cost of the quality of your content.

If I want to make a priority list of things to keep in mind while writing your business content, here is my sequence goes, with number one being the most important thing:

  1. Highly useful and topic-centric content that is well-written.
  2. The content highlights all the benefits of the product or service people should buy that product or service for.
  3. User engagement and two-way communication should be facilitated by your content.
  4. Content writing with high conversion rate. I put it at number four not because conversion is less important than the three points listed above, it is because if you take care of the above-listed three points, conversion automatically begins to manifest.
  5. Improved and higher search engine rankings. It is the same as improving conversion rate – if you take care of the above-listed three points – 1, 2 and 3 – your search engine rankings automatically improve. SEO content writing basically means high-quality content written to inform and engage your audience, using the language your audience is comfortable in.

Aligning content writing with your customer-centric SEO strategy

Why do you want to improve your search engine rankings? Don’t laugh, I really mean to ask this question, why are you bothering with SEO? The obvious answer is to get traffic for the right keywords. What are those right keywords? The keywords that you think people are using in order to find your product or service. Are you using any tools to find what keywords people are using? Are you asking those people what words, expressions and phrases, and even questions people are using in order to find what you are offering? Yes, people do type in complete questions like “where can I get an expert content writer for my industrial legal services website?” or, “when I am in Casablanca, which is the best taxi service I can hire?”

This is why I always advise my clients, don’t focus on particular keywords, focus on the answers you need to provide in order to help people become your customers and clients. When you provide answers to the right questions, on your own you begin to improve your search engine rankings.

How to follow customer-centring SEO strategy while writing content?

One thing you can do is, ask people straight away. While making people fill up your contact form, ask them how they found you and if they used the search engines, exactly what keywords they used? Not everybody will respond, so make it an optional field, but some will. You can also ask people once they have become your customers and clients because then they are more prone to replying to detailed queries.

You can ask people face-to-face. Ask them what problems they are facing? Even if they seem to be using bizarre words, note them down – you will be surprised to know how many people actually use those bizarre words.

Obviously this is not going to be a one-day or a one-week, or even a one-month project. It may take time to cover all the important keywords that people are using in order to streamline your SEO process through strategic content writing.

Content writing for Google Pigeon Update and local SEO

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content writing for Google pigeon update

Content writing can have a big impact on your local SEO no matter what updates are going on at Google and other search engines. According to this Search Engine Land report, The Google Pigeon Update was intended towards improving local SEO giving more relevant and accurate local search results that are “tired more closely to traditional web search ranking signals” (frankly, I was unable to understand this, can anyone help?) The updates were mostly for US English searches targeting US local SEO and SEM sectors. Later on it was also expanded to the other regions of the world. My focus would be the content writing aspect of local SEO vis-a-vis this ongoing debate on the Google update.

Since the Google Pigeon Update is more focused towards improving local search algorithms, it was difficult to ignore the business directories that mostly cater to local businesses, for example in India we have IndiaMart and many more. Last year, the local review site Yelp had complained that the Google search results were ignoring its results and SEO advantages it had enjoyed so far, and were pushing Google’s search results ahead of local business and review directories. This seems to have been corrected in the Pigeon Update and Yelp again has attained its SEO advantage. In a blog post last month, Shelly Kramer posted a review of the impact that Google’s Pigeon Update has had so far on different businesses and their SEO positions.

Content writing for Google Pigeon Update in particular and local search results in general

Give and take everything revolving around search, eventually it is content writing that impacts your rankings. It’s mostly your content that decides (of course there are scores of other factors but mostly it is your content) what sort of search rankings your website or blog is going to enjoy. Anyway, how do you write your content for the Google Pigeon Update in particular and local search results in general? Here are a few things you can do:

  1. Talk about your locality as much as possible. If you provide computer repair services in and around, say Pigeonburg (no such locality as far as I know, so don’t try to look in Google maps), create lots of content talking about your computer repair services in and around Pigeonburg. Write about the various events taking place in Pigeonburg and connect these events to your computer repair services. Routinely write about Pigeonburg and computer repair services.
  2. On your social media profiles try to create a community of Pigeonburg residents who would be interested in your computer repair services by posting highly relevant content that would interest people in Pigeonburg.
  3. This is not related to content writing, but you should also get your business website listed in as many Pigeonburg online business directories as possible because as mentioned above, the business directories are given more preference over natural results.

Content writing for local SEO is not much different from writing content for any other topic in order to optimize it. You just need to talk a lot about your locality – in the right context – and then also incorporate the keywords relevant to your business.

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Writing reader-friendly content automatically improves SEO

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Reader friendly content writing is good for SEO

Want to improve your SEO? The first thing that you need to do is write reader-friendly content because this is the sort of content that is ranked higher by search engines whether it is Google or any other. Through your content if you solely concentrate on SEO, you neither improve your search engine rankings (in some cases you do, but it hardly pays) nor your conversion rate. Coming to the point, here is how you make your content reader-friendly:

  1. Create a meaningful title for the webpage or the blog post: Many content marketing experts and established copywriters believe that the title of your webpage or the blog post is as important as the body text because on the Internet grabbing someone’s attention is very important. If people don’t come to your page, if your title does not draw them in, there is no chance of them ever reading your webpage or blog post. This can be achieved by writing a compelling and to-the-point title. Writing a great title tells people what your blog post or webpage represents and has to offer. The search engines make out what your webpage or blog post intends to communicate by analysing your title. Spend ample amount of time writing your title.
  2. Make sure the body text has high-quality and relevant content: Unless people really like your content it is never going to enjoy better SEO, so make sure that your written content solves the purpose for which it was written. If your title says that your webpage or blog post solves a particular problem then actually solve that problem rather than simply beating around the bush and leaving the reader hanging. Provide the solution. Help people. Deliver what you have promised.
  3. Be mindful of the language that you use: Preferably you should write in the language people use but sometimes some writers go overboard and end up using really crude language that doesn’t look good on a business webpage or blog post. When I say use the language that people use what I mean is, use the sort of language people use to find your product or service on the search engine. For example, I need to decide whether I should write more content about “content writer”, “content writing services”, “web content writing” or “need business writer” and such. They don’t necessarily have to be the same words because these days even related and contextual words can get you higher rankings even when you have not used the main keywords. The gist is, neither dumbify your writing nor make it too hard to read.
  4. Use shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs: Remember that when you are writing commercial content you’re not showcasing your literary skills and all the prestidigitation that you can do with words and phrases. The sole purpose of your writing is improving sales and leads. So use concise sentences that are stick to the meaning. This will also help those who are reading your content from their mobile devices.
  5. Make your content scannable by using headlines and bulleted points: Organize your main thoughts using headlines and bullets. Take for example these bullets that I have just now used. Even if you don’t read the paragraphs you can just read the highlighted bullet points and you can make out what I’m trying to say. Your headlines and bullet points are the regions where the search engines quickly go through to find relevant information and then evaluate your content accordingly. It also makes it easier for people who don’t want to read the whole thing and just want to scan your material.
  6. Link to existing content without compromising the wholesomeness of your current page or blog post: Since many people might be reading your content using their phones and tablets avoid using lots of links to other pieces of content at the cost of the meaning of your current webpage or blog post. Use the hyperlinks only when the topic is totally different and it would help your readers learn more but if they don’t want to click or tap the hyperlink they shouldn’t miss anything.

Why reader-friendly content improves your SEO?

Why do you want to use a search engine like Google? It is because in most of the cases you are able to find what you’re looking for and you also like the quality of the content that comes up on the results page. You wouldn’t be happy with the search engine if you rarely find high-quality content. So Google has to constantly think more about its users and less about people trying to promote their services using the search engine because you cannot force people to use your search engine but if many people use your search engine you can always force businesses to adhere to your guidelines. Most of the major search engines make it a point – through their algorithms and ranking patterns – that you make your content as reader-friendly as possible and if you keep on creating high-quality reader-friendly content they rank your content well, automatically improving your SEO.

Many clients hire me to create SEO content. They give me SEO titles and a list of keywords and they want me to write content around those titles and keywords. For a while I have also promoted my SEO content writing services but in reality, when I’m writing SEO content I’m simply writing high-quality reader-friendly content. The rankings of my clients improve and so does their conversion rate.

Does SEO content writing improve your search engine rankings?

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SEO and content writing

How is SEO content writing different from regular content writing? Does it matter that you pay attention to how you are arranging content on your web pages and blog posts in order to improve your search engine rankings? Right now it does, in the future, things may improve and perhaps the search engines will be able to rank URLs according to their actual value rather than the words being used.

The fundamental challenge of content writing, especially on the Internet, is, striking a balance between meaningfulness of the content and SEO. Frankly, there is no escape from paying attention to the way search engines interpret your content if search engine traffic matters to you. Whatever you are writing, eventually, it’s the algorithms that decide for which keywords and key phrases – whether you’re trying to target shorter phrases or longtail keywords – your content is ranked, or not ranked.

These days I am using ScribeSEO to revamp all the content on my website as well as blog. Although I am an experienced content writer, and I know a thing or two about writing content for SEO, sometimes it becomes difficult to keep track of the language you are using while writing content. It doesn’t happen all the time, but once you start analyzing your content using specialized tools, interesting things get revealed.

For instance, one of my pages, despite different tries, was optimized for “your content” despite the fact that I was targeting for “content writer”. Who would, and how many, would search for something like “your content”? The language that I had used, seems to have misled the ScribeSEO analysis software.

No, I’m not saying that you should get too much bogged down by what a particular SEO tool advises (or for that matter, an SEO expert) you to do in order to improve your search engine rankings. Nothing can surpass your own judgment and analysis. Of course when you need to do lots of content writing one or another tool comes handy, but eventually it is your own way of writing that can help you in terms of SEO.

Are SEO and content writing interrelated

SEO or conversion rate

It depends. Pure SEO doesn’t mean good conversion rate and effective content writing doesn’t always mean higher search engine rankings. That is why I said in the beginning, an experienced content writer tries to strike the perfect balance. When I’m working for my clients, I know that search engine traffic for them is as important as, if not more, their conversion rate. If there is no traffic, or very little traffic, there aren’t many people to do business with. Conversely, if the content doesn’t convert, no matter how much traffic you get from search engines, it hardly matters.

How do you make sure your content writing caters both to the search engines and the human visitors?

It’s very easy to do once you decide to write what really matters rather than being manipulative. SEO content writing actually depends on writing content that is totally user-friendly. There are primarily 5 things you need to take care of

  • What language does the target audience use vis-à-vis the product or service you are writing about
  • How focused you are going to remain on the topic of that particular page or blog post
  • What are the key words or phrases people use on search engines while trying to find what you are going to write about
  • Use those keywords and key phrases judicially while creating content
  • Use those keywords and key phrases at prominent locations such as the first paragraph, the title tag, the description, headings and subheadings and bulleted points

The language is important because this is the same language people use while talking about your product or service, whether they’re trying to search for it on Google or talking about it over there social networking profiles. The problem with SEO content writing is that it has a sort of, bad reputation. People relate it to keyword stuffing. It actually means writing content that search engines think the users will appreciate and like.

It doesn’t always have to involve your core topics. There may be some interesting news, or even political news that directly or indirectly affects your business or the way your prospective customers and clients do business with you. SEO content writing can involve sharing your thoughts with your readers and somehow relating them to your own business.

Remember that these days search engines, especially Google, are very touchy about the overuse of keywords. So don’t use them if there is no need to use them. That is why you need to vertically focus on the topic of the page you are writing the content for, so that you can naturally use those keywords and key phrases.

So should SEO be in your mind while writing content? It should be, even if getting good rankings isn’t one of your priorities. Good SEO practices while writing content automatically make your content more focused, subject-specific and easier to read. Search engines want to index and rank content that they think is useful to their users. By following good SEO practices while writing content, you make it more user-friendly.