If you’re a regular reader of this blog then you know that we strongly believe that good quality content must be your top website priority for SEO. You can have the best strategy, the smartest marketing whiz kids, the flashiest videos, the coolest widgets and the hippest mobile app – but if your content is terrible, the rest simply doesn’t matter. (Oh and if you’re not a regular reader, you’re missing out plain and simple.)
You want people to visit your website, to link to your website, to refer to your website, to syndicate your content, and to respect your website as a voice of authority. This comes when you have excellent content. When you have the content, the rest really does come easily.
SEO. Search Engine Optimization. See what we did there – we just jumped from talking about good quality content to tossing out the biggest and most debated aspect of digital marketing. SEO does not come without controversy and hype. But we’re here to say that SEO is critical to your website success.
The two work together: with good content you can have good SEO and with good SEO it’s easier to write good content.
The Scoop On Good SEO
When we talk and write about SEO we’re referring to website copy that enables your website to rank highly in search engine results. This content has to be interesting, useful, practical, informative, highly readable, and a voice of authority. Not everyone can write this kind of content (we’re pretty good at it – we have a whiz kid writer who knows how to get it done – contact us and we’ll hook you up) – it takes a strong understanding of your niche, the ability to research, a critical mind, and essentially a talent for excellent writing.
To help you stay one click ahead of your competitors, we thought we’d share our top SEO writing tips with you. Of course, there is lots more to this than ticking off the list below, so don’t hesitate to contact us for advice and assistance.
- Know Who You’re Connecting With: do your research so you can understand who is actually visiting your website. Find out if these are experts in your niche market or people who are new to the space. This for example, determines the kind of language, voice, and content you provide. You need to deliver what your website visitors want – if they can’t find it on your website, they will move on.
- Headlines Rule: just like the title of a book or a movie, headlines really do count. If the headline doesn’t grab website visitors or stand out in the search engine results, you won’t get clicked. It doesn’t matter how excellent your content is, the first impression (i.e. the headline) is all that matters.
- Don’t Skimp On Content: gone are the days of 250 word blog posts or website pages with three lines of text. People want more. People are spending more and more time online and turn to websites to research, learn, connect, and find what they want. In order to give your website visitors this, you need to deliver well-written content between 650 – 1,000 words. In fact, in some cases you might want to push your content copy to 1,500 words. It really depends on what you’re talking about and why. For example, this blog post will likely run around 800 – 1,000 words. This word count gives us the room to remind you that we are the authority on SEO content and digital marketing.
- Think Whitespace: along with this long content comes white space. No one is ever going to read your content if it’s written in eight point Times New Roman font in big long paragraphs. Kind of reminds people of textbooks and high school…. use whitespace to your advantage to make the reading easier for your users. Oh and don’t forget to include sub-headings – these help you rank well in search engine results and give your readers the opportunity to quickly scan the page looking for exactly what they want.
- Don’t Keyword Jam: this is one of the worst things you can do. You have some keywords that you know rank high and you’ve read that your SEO will improve the more you use them – wrong – completely wrong. Yes, know your keywords, know which ones rank well, and then that’s it. Use these keywords when they work and fit, but don’t write sentences around these keywords. Search engine algorithms are way too smart for this. Your content will immediately be discarded and ignored. Instead keep your content focussed and on-point, this will naturally help you with your SEO content creation. Oh, and if you find it’s super challenging to write an article or post about a specific topic, this likely highlights that this is not a topic you should be writing about. The language needs to flow naturally.
Alright, so we’re at around 828 words now… This means we need to start wrapping things up. We don’t want to be too wordy but we want to make sure we’ve piqued your interest and got you thinking about your website content and how you can improve your SEO.
Find Out More
This is why we are here. To help you. We know SEO. You know we have a whiz of a writer who can get you the content you’re missing out on. There is so much more to website content and SEO than we’ve got here – contact us and we’ll meet. We hate bad content and we really don’t want you to suffer through it.
(944 words – pretty much exactly what we wanted)
