Content Marketing Trends for 2023
Content Marketing 6 min read
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Home Blog Content Marketing14 SEO-Friendly Content Writing Tips to Beat Your Competitors
Content Marketing 6 min read
Content Marketing 4 min read
Content Marketing 6 min read
Content Marketing 4 min read
There’s a thin line between content writing and SEO content writing. That thin line just happens to be a handful of on-page SEO best practices and guidelines to create SEO-friendly content.
Though not immediately obvious, there is a world of difference between the effectiveness of content created without the help of a SEO company versus those that did get a boost with it.
SEO-friendly content is keyword-focused and search-optimized content that’s created specifically to rank on search engines like Google or Yahoo! In short, it’s more discoverable and is more likely to get more attention and traffic.
Although some marketers think this means it should be stuffed with keywords, SEO content writing is just made fro search engines to find, understand, and connect your content to the topic you’re trying to cover.
As a veteran content marketing agency, we’re letting everybody in on our best practices by listing down the most important factors you need to know to create SEO-friendly content below.
Quite the list? Keep on reading to know the specifics of each best practice!
Search engines crawl websites just like how users read your content with the help of your keyword research and technical SEO techniques you have in place.
They’ll recognize your headlines and use them to better understand and quality assess your content, like which parts are the most important, relevant, accurate, and so on.
To help you build a structure for your page or article, here are a few SEO content writing tips we personally follow at Propelrr:
Old SEO practices will tell you that the longer the content, the better – but not anymore.
Over the years, Google has shown that it gives higher priority to not just longer, but more so, higher-quality content. They aim to provide their users with the best possible answers and this often boils down to having posts that provide the most thorough answer to the user’s query.
Some content optimization tips we recommended in order to produce high-quality content is using the following methods to determine the optimal length for your content:
Use the data and information above to find the approach that’s going to work best for your niche. Just remember that quality trumps quantity. So, check out your top-ranking content to see what articles get the most views and analyze the impact of content length.
First impressions last, so we better make it count.
Your SERP copy, or page titles and meta description specifically, are the first things users see when they use Google. So having a clear, engaging, and concise description can help build trust and entice them to read your content.
In fact, recent SEO studies and stats state that having an SEO-friendly Page Title and Meta Descriptions helps in improving your website’s click-through rate, thus increasing traffic for your website.
To ensure these are optimized, here’s an excerpt of our on-page SEO checklist on how to write good page title and meta descriptions:
Quick Tip: You can check your copies using Pixel Width Checker to make sure they won’t be truncated on SERP.
While we’re on the subject of SERP copies, one surefire way on how to make your content SEO-friendly is by adding your focus keyword in your page title and meta description.
Here are a couple of SEO guidelines you can follow to optimize for these factors:
While we optimize for focus keywords, using them repeatedly can cause unnatural and even borderline spammy content. In fact, placing keywords in one sentence, or 3-5 times in a paragraph can be considered keyword stuffing.
To create more SEO-friendly content, make sure to strategically use and place different keywords in your article, and as naturally as possible.
Also, be wary of your keyword density and make use of different keywords to keep the main topic of your article intact while removing the robotic tone in your writing.
Quick Tip: You can check your article’s keyword density and make sure it doesn’t exceed the 1-2% keyword use one-word, two-word, and three-words.
One key factor in SEO-friendly content is the ease of understanding. That is why writing headers and subheaders help improve your content’s readability.
Here are guidelines on how to properly use headers:
Other than keyword use and placement, linking is also an important way to make your content SEO-friendly.
The use of internal linking is a good way to help search engines and users to navigate through your website – much like directional sign posts on a road. Help Google crawl and navigate your site by establishing an information hierarchy and insert these internal links into your content.
A few of our internal linking best practices include:
While internal linking helps in navigation, citing external links are equally important in SEO as it helps build the domain authority and credibility of your website.
Some argue that citing external articles redirects traffic to other websites, but linking out to useful resources can build trust and help readers explore a topic in more depth while staying focused on the main point.
We follow similar best practices in our internal and external linking, the key difference though are the following:
Quick tip: When uploading your content, program the external link to open on a new tab when clicked. That way, your readers can stay on your pages and continue reading, while having the additional resource open and in queue for reading.
Building on the point of interlinking, the anchor text plays a major role in how you can make your content SEO friendly.
Using a contextual and descriptive anchor text to the links can help readers know what the link is about. Take the example below:
Since the paragraph discusses keyword research in SEO, we cited a relevant article and used a descriptive anchor text to set user’s expectations on the linked article.
If you’re having trouble writing or choosing anchor texts, here are a few more SEO friendly content writing tips we can share:
An often underrated yet crucial way to create SEO-friendly content is by adding alt texts to your images.
Although these descriptions aren’t explicitly visible on a website, search engines use this attribution to understand the subject matter of an image better.
Other than the SEO benefit, alt text attribution also assists people with visual sensory or processing impairments and/or learning disabilities gain context on what the photo is. Plus, it also helps users when images don’t load on a page or website.
To add to your growing list of content writing tips, here a couple of alt text guidelines you can follow:
Well-crafted URLs are one of the most important elements to make your content SEO-friendly.
Along with your Page Title, Meta description, and your content itself, your URL helps build context on what your content is all about.
Although it’s a factor not easily seen or viewed by your readers, it’s best to optimize for this as Google even dedicates a whole section in their starter guide just for it.
To craft a good and optimized URL, you need to:
Schema markup is short but powerful microdata that you can add to your HTML to enhance the way your page gets displayed in organic search results.
Using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, you can easily add a markup to your blog posts for search engines to better analyze your content.
Quick Tip: These are the same mark-ups that Google to create rich snippets that you see with Reviews, Recipes, Videos, etc. So better start tagging!
Content writing on its own is a tedious task, even without the added requirement for SEO. But however tedious the process is, this makes it all the more rewarding. You’ll find that once you get into a consistent practice of developing SEO-friendly content, you’ll not only rank better but help people discover your helpful content.
When working on more SEO-friendly content for your business and audiences, remembers these important points:
Facing troubles with developing SEO-friendly content for your websites? We’d love to help and share our more in-depth tips! Send the Propelrr team a message on our Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts.
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