Secrets of professional SEO article writers.

Get your keyword research on

Keywords aren’t just things you stick in your writing; they inform your strategy and help you to understand how people are finding your website. It can also show you whether you’re creating the right content for your audience and whether Google is taking notice of it!

Put the keywords to work

SEO and content writing can rely on the impact of how you use key words – it does actually matter where they are placed in your copy. Keywords are still good and useful, but it shouldn’t be a struggle to fit keywords into your copy. Your keywords should feel natural in your writing when you feel like you’re writing gibberish that’s when you’ve gone too far.

The people using search engines are searching for a particular word or phrase because they want to know more – it makes sense to give them what they’re looking for.

Knowing the basics of SEO

Keyword optimization will help, but it’s the technical side that you also have to know of for it to be effective. Knowing a little about technical SEO can help you to become a better writer.

Firstly, having an understanding of how Google crawls pages to hand out link authority – content writing isn’t just about a singular blog post. It’s about a whole host of blog posts and how they link together.

Make your article long enough to count

You’re probably asking yourself – surely, 100 words of fresh content is better than no new content at all? However, search engines tend to give preference to longer blogs and articles for no good reason.

Try and write over 600 words as a good benchmark, but if you can write more, then try to go for 1,000 words. There has been a lot of research into search engines that tend to favor ‘in-depth’ content of at least 2,000 words. But that being said, the longer your content is, the more volume you’re going to give your readers.

Tools to enhance your SEO writing

Finding the right tools to track where you rank the keywords you target. The analytics of your site are important to monitor how often your site is being viewed – try to monitor this regularly.

If people aren’t staying on your site for long, then your ‘bounce rate’ will be high – it means people aren’t staying to read your content. Writing good SEO based content isn’t just about the words on the screen – it’s about how your visitor sees them too. Optimize the optimization of your web content, when writing on WordPress as your main blogging platform then there are lots of free online PR tools, here at Blue Whale Media we use Yoast along with several others.

Things to think about when content writing and SEO

Which keywords and phrases are people searching for? Try and make yourself a keyword spreadsheet for a certain topic; this will help to understand what people search for when reading about something in particular.

Who is reading your content? Well, people are, it’s not facetious, but all sorts of people write about all sorts of things. Remember that actual people are reading your content, so try and reach out to them.

Can you offer anything of value to your reader? What do you know that they are yet to be informed of?

Is what you’ve got to say unique? Nobody knows your business like you do, use that knowledge to write about unique topics.

Don’t be afraid to do something different, interview an expert, for example, quote them on their expertise.