First of all, you have to know that, writing content that will be appealing to your audience and optimized for search engines isn’t an easy feat. As a matter of fact, those types of content are one of the biggest challenges content marketers and bloggers face. Hence, if you aren’t satisfied with your current audience and you want to build your blog audience then you’ll need SEO content writers and if you can’t afford that then you’ll have to get smarter with your content and the best way to achieve that is through SEO writing.

When it comes to SEO writing, one thing you should note is that writing for people rather than search engines is the best practice if you want to achieve results. In order for your online business to thrive, the content on your website should be able to achieve two goals:

• Solve a particular problem. 
• Must be appealing to your clients, readers, customers, etc.

Now you know the goals the content on your website should be able to accomplish, the question now is “how can I create content that can meet those goals?”, “How can I create content that ranks in search engines like Google and also persuades people?” If you have such questions or similar questions then what you need to learn is SEO writing. Don’t know how to do SEO writing? Don’t worry about it because, in this blog post, I’ll be teaching you how to write content that actually ranks.

SEO writing: what does it mean?

SEO writing is simply writing content that makes it easy for search engines to see what the entire writing is all about and also help it determine whether it’s of high quality or not.

Search engines like Google make use of spider (also known as a web crawler) to crawl content on your page or website to determine what the page or website is all about based on the language used. 

SEO writing does the work of optimizing the content on your page so that the spiders will be able to easily crawl the content on the page and judge it favourably which will equate to having a better placement in the SERP. So when the content on your web page is created without using SEO writing, it makes it difficult for crawlers to be able to determine what your page is about.

Why is SEO writing important?

The goal of every website is to make the first page of Google for certain keywords and SEO writing helps you achieve that. Without SEO writing, your content will not be optimized and when that becomes the case your content will come up several pages back in a search which is bad for businesses that need traffic to survive. 

What’s the fuss about Google first page all about? A study showed that the number of clicks your page gets does not only depend on getting ranked on Google’s first page but also being able to get as high on the page as possible and that’s because the result on the first page gets clicked by over 28% of people performing that search. After the first result, the percentage reduces as the spot or placement shown goes down the page. Websites struggle to make the cut for the first page because people rarely go past the first when making searching for something online except of course you are a writer and you are looking for more information.

How to write content for SEO that actually ranks

Learn and understand Google’s algorithm

Google updates or changes its algorithm from time to time which means that you’ll have to be updated with the latest algorithms of Google if you want to drive more traffic to your blog.

The reason Google changes its algorithm regularly is to ensure only the best-quality pages get ranked and that’s because Google is concerned about generating traffic for you rather they are concerned about making their search engine to be as effective as possible.

Know how to find the keywords for your niche 

Before you’ll be able to write carry put SEO writing, you should know how to perform keyword research and also learn how to select the best keywords when writing your content. That includes being able to determine the popularity of the main keyword and how to select long-tail keywords. This is important because sometimes the main keywords for a particular topic may have far too many competitors, competing for the first page. In that case, it becomes necessary to go for keywords that have a lower search volume.

Write longer content 

In case you didn’t know, Google’s Panda 4.1 algorithm update supports and rewards longer and more informative content—the update was put in place to penalize thin content. When writing, a good rule of thumb is to have each page carry at least 1000 words that are of high-quality content. 

Write unique content 

Google frowns at content that is highly plagiarized and because of that, you may get penalized and your content may never make it to the first page simply because the content of your web page will be considered as spam.

Before posting your content on your website, use websites like Grammarly to verify if your content is plagiarism-free. If some parts of your content appear as plagiarized you can remove them and if they are important to the body then you can consider rewording that part while ensuring that the copy remains or sounds natural. 

Use related words

Google’s latest algorithm takes into account common words that follow the keywords you use. Google does that to ensure that the content is really about the topic and not something else. Don’t panic, you wouldn’t have to research the related keywords as well since they are usually basic words you’d use for the topic you are writing or you have written on.

Not sure how to use these companion words? Study up latent semantic indexing to help you top those words to good use.

Include links to high-quality sites

You know how you write books and include references? Using links as information citation is a way to tell where the information on your content came from. However, just because you should use links doesn’t mean that you should select links from every and any website rather choose links from authoritative websites (high-level websites). The reason for this is that if you end up selecting a link from a spammy website then your website will be seen as a spammy website as well.

Search engines aim to make quality information available to everyone and when you have links to good websites on your content, it tells or shows search engines that your content are connected to other sites and that the information you show are from useful sites as well.