Tips on How to Write SEO Content
A website without optimized content is like an empty shell. Content is what makes the website and drives traffic towards it.
SEO friendly content is what determines which queries and keywords your site will rank on the search engine. There is no option to have poor content on your website.
We have created this guide ‘How to Write SEO Content’ to help you know the crucial points to be included for writing web content that:
- Your target audience is looking for
- Search engines can find
- People can understand with ease
Content Writing Best Practices
Let’s delve into the best practices of how to write SEO content.
Topic Research
Topic research is something that helps Google to interpret search queries. The Hummingbird update has changed the SERPs to a great extent. This is what Danny Sullivan has explained.
‘Hummingbird is considering each word in the query as a whole. Every word is taken into account. Pages matching the meaning rank better than pages matching only a few words.
As you can see in the image below, the highlighted word ‘fix’ is not present in the query. This means that Google interprets the search intent, matching the query’s meaning.
Keyword analysis is a challenge you will face while writing SEO content for your website.
Apart from keyword analysis, taking a closer look at competitors’ practices is crucial. Consider their best practices that dominate the SERPs.
As you can see below, similarities in the query “best city bike” include:
List numbers, and adding a year to the post.
Also, Google considers identical words that may be useful to the target audience like “best urban bikes” and “best commuter bikes”.
Tools to use – On-page SEO checker
Never Stuff Keywords
Keywords make your content search-friendly, relevant, and readable. When you start stuffing keywords in the content, it does the opposite for your website.
A web page stuffed with keywords looks deceitful to the search engines, and it can drastically drop your rankings. Readers may consider it as a low-quality page and will bounce back. It will increase your website’s bounce rate, which will not look good to the search engines. Thus, the search engines also consider your domain as untrustworthy.
Search engines are smart. You do not have to use the grammatically incorrect keyword, your target audience uses. Search engines understand what your page is all about.
Snippets
If you were successful in getting your website on the first few searches of Google for a keyword, there is still a catch. Some other website might have taken over the first screen of the website, that appears right below the search query.
This is the featured snippet, which is also known as zero position and is the box right below the query, as you can see in the image below.
How to optimize your content for the featured snippet?
- Analyze your pages that rank in the top 10
- Target question keywords and provide an answer
- Use header tags properly
Mobile-Exclusive Keywords
Creating content as per mobile requirements is crucial because people are more accessing the web from mobile phones than desktops.
You are losing on a lot if you are not paying attention to the mobile user’s needs and solutions. Let’s consider a few examples of how you can consider a mobile-friendly approach:
Search Intent
The search ‘how to repair a tire’ does not have the same intent when searched from desktop and mobile. When searched from the latter device, it means that the person is looking for urgent help.
If you have content on your website covering this topic, then consider the device from where you are getting the traffic.
Mobile Search Volume
When you scrutinize the popularity of a keyword, you may only check the desktop volume. As you can see in the image below, the search volume for the keyword ‘how to tie a tie video’ is almost 50% more in mobile than on desktop.
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