SEO Content Writing

By covering topics related to your industry, products and services you can create awareness of your brand with the intent of getting the opportunity to pitch your product later down the line.

Secondly, once a particular audience is aware of your existence, your content marketing writing can engage your audience and build credibility for your brand.

Next, as you might expect an audience that is aware of your brand and has some credibility in it because they found your content useful will be in a significantly more comfortable place to part with their money in favour of your products or service as a result of your copywriting, designed to turn a prospect into a customer.

Also, when a purchase is made many companies end their communication with the customer, which is a shame because the next phase represents a perfect opportunity to grow this transactional relationship into a loyal one where your customer will purchase from you again. But in order to get to that point, you can also employ content marketing in the form of SEO content to further educate the customer on things like how to use the products or how to overcome common challenges, or in many cases even start a discussion on what new features or changes to add to future versions of your products.

Depending on how advanced you want to get with Keyword Research, there is on great first step that you can employ to fine-tune your efforts from the very start. I am talking about your Buyer Personas. These are just profiles of your regular or desired customers. Put in the context of Keyword Research, when you clearly describe your Buyer Personas you may come up with a more in-depth understanding of how your customers may be searching for you.

Some of the concepts that you absolutely must acquaint yourself with are Keyword Metrics, which show how attractive a keyword can be, how competitive it is to rank for it and what realistic traffic and monetary value can you obtain by pursuing it.

Next, you will have to learn the difference between Head Terms and Longtail Keywords which consists of the facts that the former can bring more traffic but are more competitive while the latter can be less attractive but also more realistic to rank for organically.

Next, not all landing pages on the web are born equal and that is because some of them hold product descriptions while others are mere informational articles, so understanding Search Intent can go a long way in figuring out that extra layer of context necessary to rank in SEPRs nowadays.

Once you get a grip over Keyword Metrics, Keyword Lengths and Search Intent, you will need to apply these in a Keyword Strategy which will likely begin with Keyword Clustering. This is a concepts that is formed around grouping together semantically similar keywords also ensuring they have the same Search Intent.

A natural next step to the efforts behind Keyword Clustering is the creation of Topic Clusters. What this means is that looking at keywords in isolation can sometimes throw you off track, as people tend to think more in terms of broader topics which they then translate into many different variations of keywords that they use in search engines. Turning your Keyword Clustering Efforts into your website’s Topic Clusters is reverse-engineering this process, where you create Broader Topics that can be accessed through a number of semantically similar keywords that share the same Search Intent.

Keyword Mapping is the second part of the Keyword Strategy and is when you align your efforts behind Keyword Clusters with those behind Topic Clusters to assign keywords to Landing Pages that you will later attempt to rank.

It is also important to make sure that covering these topics will bring value to your organisation, whether that’s by building an audience that is likely to advocate your products, someone who will become inclined to purchase from you and ultimately become a loyal customer.

So when choosing a topic to write about you will likely determine the attractiveness of the topic by looking at such keyword metrics as the keyword search volume and organic traffic potential. However, if you genuinely want to rank organically with your topics, you will also keep an eye on Keyword Difficulty. More specifically, you’re most likely to succeed in the scenario in which you will target keywords with a Keyword Difficulty that is comparable to those of keywords you already rank for, if any. If you’re doing the SEO for an established brand, set your benchmark for Keyword Difficulty based on those keywords that already bring you traffic.

Finally, Topic Selection wouldn’t be of too much use if you don’t pay close attention to Search Intent. Specifically, once you’ve determined a keywords cluster to target, you absolutely must go to the corresponding search engine results pages (SERPs) to identify their search intent and make sure you don’t match keywords with different Search Intent against the same Topic Clusters. As a cautionary note, if a SERP’s Search Intent is commercial, you will simply be unable to rank with an informational article or vice versa. So making sure to account for Search Intent before proceeding to writing a Content Outline is crucial with organic rankings part of the equation.

The first thing you will do when writing a Content Outline is likely to be the Page Title. As far as SERPs are concerned Page Titles have character limits that need to be accounted for if you want the Page Title to be fully shown in search engine results pages (SERP). Some of the most generic advice would be to include the keyword in the Page Title and keep it closer to the beginning of the Title. Another general recommendation, particularly if you’re covering a topic in detail or need to provide additional context about what you’re writing about is to use brackets to provide that context.

One of the things that is likely to influence your guideline the most is writing the main headers for the content. There are many ways to approach this, but Nurdic.com landing page outlines are largely based on existing content that did very well on the web. Namely, for the most part, the content creation outlines begin with a combination of all subtopics covered on such SEO giants as Backlinko, Ahrefs Blog, and SEJ.

Talking about headers, as a general rule these can be longer than Page Titles as they are not limited by the display in SERPs. Because of this, some sources may try to convince you to write Headers that are up to 18 words long, however, I would encourage you to keep as informative, but as concise as possible.

Next, craft a compelling Content Intro. Content Intros are the best spot to better explain what the entirety of your content is about and are also a good place to reveal more about the context and angles you’re about to explore. Depending on how much context you want to provide an intro can be as long as 3 paragraphs, but a good general recommendation would be to keep it as short as a paragraph.

Once you’re done with your Content Intro and Headlines, a recommendation would be to focus on the Content Angles you’d like to explore within each Header. You may of course use sub-headings to accommodate further structuring of content and HTML in particular support up to 6 levels of sub-headers. However, it is not recommended to use more than 3-4 levels of headers, because at one point it may be difficult for a user to understand how deep within what content section of content he or she is located while reading.

Leave space for Internal and External Links. Internal Link optimisation continues to be a big part of SEO, so a good idea might be to allow yourself to link to other landing pages on your website. Depending on the Search Intent you’re serving, it is also recommended to use your external references directly in your content and give credit to your sources.

End your article with a Conclusion. Just to be clear, a conclusion is not the best place to keep your main points of the content. A conclusion should be a short transition out of your content and potentially a good place for a call to action.

To put simply, in a SEO context, Content Readability can be limited to the alternative uses of language depending on the wider context of the user journey, be it within the page content, the website or the wider organic search neighbourhoods the page is shown under.

Depending first and foremost on the user journeys, some alternatives for the use of language are formal vs informal, conversational vs transactional and generic vs specialist.

Ultimately, readability stands for the ability to align the content to the language used by the customers, which starts with the search queries. Some of the questions you should ask are whether your customers are searching using formal terms or are they phrasing the search queries informally; do they adopt a more conversational tone or are they following a rigid transactional query structure? Depending on these questions you can decide on the language that is most appropriate in your writing.

Content Readability, on the other hand, is not the dumbing down of information for it to be accessible to everyone. Sometimes you ought to use complex language to explain commplex concepts, but it is a good idea either way to ensure your audience will be able to understand it.

Good content reveals its most important aspects at the very beginning, keeping the rest for the end. As a general rule, search engines are struggling to decide which pages to show for what keywords. Thus a website which has duplicated content on its landing pages or shared with other websites is likely to experience difficulties ranking on the Web.

Thus over the years search engines have learned to spot websites that use plagiarism. Such websites are often punished with lower search results than the original source of information. Duplicate content remains an issue widely encountered on the Web, however the point is not so much as to avoid the use of other sources in your writing, as it is to write original content that stands out, reffering back to the original source. The Web is still hungry for new original sources of information.

Some brands have a fairly established tone of voice, others – not so much, whatever the case – continuous research and optimisation of the use of language on a granular level can go a long way in increasing organic search traffic and improving the conversion rates in a manner that is sustainable and affords customers a view of the brand that reaches beyond the bluntness of a business transaction.

A good place to start the research on the topic of language use is to try to get a holistic understanding of all the search queries the website aims to target. This way, especially in the case of follower or niche brands, this process transforms the mindless practice of so-called content building into a mindful one of entering a conversation, one which can be continuously and constructively shaped and realigned according to new standards and developments in the market to achieve a desired form of resolution for the wider brand.

A concept introduced by Backlinko, 10x Content involves simply creating a significantly better piece of content for an already existing Evergreen Keyword. So because a particular piece of content in question is able to solve a search query for a user much better than other pieces of content that already rank, in the long run the better dwell time will push you to the top of the organic rankings.

The vast majority of new content on the web is starting to become an interpretation of someone else’s content, so if you want to stand out make it easy to take action on by organising it into a step-by-step process.

Drawing attention to my previous point on most new content on the web being some form of recycled existing content, sharing your experience first-hand as a subject matter expert can make your content stand out to users and build credibility in your ability to solve their queries or business problems.

Frankly, examples help users get their head around things as well as help users understand your content from a more personable perspective, one that not merely outlines a theoretical framework but can be applicable in real scenarios. Thus, supporting your key point with examples makes it more actionable.

This might be relevant for users as much as for search engines, but using stats to support your claims can go a long way in building credibility and trustworthiness. It’s advisable to link out to your stats directly from your content.

Although checking your spelling and using proper grammar can hardly be considered an optimisation, you might be surprised by how often this can be underutilised on the wider web. Don’t scare off your potential customers by making spelling and grammar mistakes.

There are few things worse than reading an entire piece of content only to realise that it is no longer relevant or applicable. Therefore, it is a great idea to go back and keep your content up to date in favour of writing a new piece. Besides, the first publication date is part of most search engines’ algorithms, along with the update date so the time you spend on spitting out new content might be better spent on optimising the existing one.

Share triggers are psychological triggers that encourage readers to share your content. In other words, when you include them in your content it triggers readers to link back to you as a source or share it on social media.

• Content Utility: This stands for practical content applicable in real-world scenarios. As a comparison, high-level content such as thought-leader pieces aren’t shared nearly as much as content that is practical. So, such content frameworks as guides and list posts both have high utility and are likely to gather a higher number of backlinks back to it as well as social shares.
• Content Length: Longer articles are significantly more likely to be shared over the web. One of the reasons this is the case is because longer articles leave a lasting impression on readers, which makes them more inclined to share.
• Content Stickiness: Highly memorable ideas and content are more likely to spread. One content framework highly praised by Backlinko’s Brian Dean is the Trademark Technique which encourages the creation of proprietary strategies and techniques that stick in readers’ memories.
• Positive Emotions: Positive Content tends to get shared more often than negative content. In other words, content that maintains a positive attitude throughout is more likely to be shared compared to content that elicits negative emotions like sadness, anxiety or ambiguity.
• Social Currency: Readers tend to share content that makes them be seen in a positive light. Furthermore, Linkcreators, a concept widely advocated by Backlinko’s Brian Dean as a group of users that are likely to link back to your content, are very much inclined to link back to content that supports their point of view.
• Storytelling: Be it a guide, a step-by-step process, a list post or an example, the easiest way to make readers remember your point is to use it in the context of storytelling or in other words, put your point together as a story. Stories are more powerful, emotional and memorable than pure information.

Onpage optimisation in particular concerns itself with the alignment of the Page Title, Meta Description and URL with the users’ search queries, through the keywords you can use in these elements. So, in simple terms when you’re targeting people looking for information on “Writing SEO Content”, you must ensure to title your article accordingly.

The same practice goes for meta description, which might contain a closer look at the term and which will be displayed in Google search results alongside the Page Tile. The URL, as it happens also carries some weight in helping search engines determine what the page is about. However, these should be written in a much more concise manner, compared to meta descriptions for instance.

In Onpage Optimisation, Image optimisation for SEO can be considered a topic of its own and that is because it can get quite technical at times, even in WordPress. At the bare minimum images must be titled based on their content and contain an ATL text describing it for visually-impaired users as well as search engines. However, the practice of image optimisation can also be extended to ensure your images have set dimensions, remain responsive and work properly on all devices as well as are featured in the most optimal formats.

Internal linking can go a long way in helping your audience reach more easily to other related pieces of information on your website as well as facilitates the passing of link juice across the entire website, which helps individual pages rank higher. However, so do the External References within your content. Studies have shown over and over again that including external links in your content provides an uplift in organic rankings.

Although hardly a content-related topic, Page Loading Speeds can influence how likely your content is to appear in front of an Organic Search Audience. Loading up your pages with visuals can certainly help users get a tighter grasp on your information, but overcrowding it with images can greatly increase your page loading speeds, leading to lower organic rankings.

If you’ve hit a wall in terms of the amount of time you can dedicate to your content or your content needs to be scaled beyond what you can write on your own, a good place to start would be to focus on the parts you are good at and get help with the rest. Simply select the steps in the content creation process that you’re good at, such as Keyword Research, Topic Selection, and Outline Creation and outsource the other parts, such as the writing of comprehensive content to someone who is in a position to do a better job.

Once you’ve assigned the different parts of the content creation process to different people, you may want to employ a Content Calendar. A Content Calendar is a mere schedule that outlines your Topics optionally including each stage in the content creation process along a timeline. Content calendars typically include your content pieces, updates to existing content, status updates from team members, and potential promotional activities. It goes without saying that you can employ a Content Calendar whether you’re working on content on your own or as part of the team, but its benefits are much clearer when you’re running your content as part of a team.

Another Benefit of a Content Calendar is that you can plan things much more in advance. Namely, instead of rushing your writing from one topic to another, you can dedicate more time in one go to Keyword Research taking your findings more in-depth than you otherwise would.

Work with people who have first-hand experience with what they write about, or as Backlinko’s Brian Dean calls them: Domain Experts. Finding Domain experts may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. Simply find people who have already written on the topics you’re trying to cover as a start. If you’re running into difficulties with this approach you can also employ external tools, such as BuzzSumo’s Find Influencers feature that can help identify published writers within your niche easier.

Next, hiring great writers is one thing, but as we’ve learned there is so much more that goes into creating great content that ranks than writing. So as you scale your Content Production, you may need to reach out for help to Specialists in various niches that can greatly enhance the quality of your content. Some of these specialised roles can include:

• Content Manager: A Project Manager who specialises in Content Production, ensuring that each piece of content goes through the entire process before it gets published.
• Keyword Research Specialist: A person responsible for carrying out the initial Keyword Research and Topic Selection.
• Content Editor: A person who is well-versed in grammar and can check your content is well-structured, factually correct and free of spelling errors.
• Web Designer: The person responsible for creating any sort of visuals or design assets that can enhance your content.
• Web Developer: A person who can make code changes to your blog, to introduce things like interactive features.
• Data Scientist: A person who can run the numbers for your industry studies and surveys, if you plan on using any of these in your content.
• Link-Builder: A person responsible for creating backlinks from other industry players back to your original content.
• Performance Marketer: If Content Marketing receives a significant budget in your organisation, your content efforts may be amplified by its promotion on social media.
• Web Analytics Specialist: A person responsible for setting up appropriate tracking in place to better understand the outcomes of your content, be that engagement or conversions.

It goes without saying that the number of specialists you can employ greatly depends on your budget and the more specialists you hire the more difficult it gets to ensure they can produce great outcomes together. So if you’re running a smaller organisation, you’ll likely find yourself with one person carrying out several responsibilities.

You might be surprised to find out that some websites publish content for the sole purpose of linking out to others. There is no easy way to find roundups other than searching for them online, but if you’re an industry player for a long time, you will already know where the opportunities are. In the case of Nurdic.com, a potential target for this strategy would be Aleyda Solis’ learningseo.io which features a curated list of backlinks to reputable sources for the most complete overview of SEO topics you can find on the web.

Resource page link building is when you get backlinks from web pages that curate and link out to other useful industry resources, relevant to their industries. The idea behind this link-building tactic is that a resource page’s value is determined by the quality and quantity of the third-party resources to which it links. So when you reach out suggesting something of value to the creators of such pages, what you’re doing is helping them to improve the page.

This strategy stands for finding a broken link, recreating the missing content, and then reaching out to anyone linking to the dead resource to instead link to your re-created content. The idea behind it is that nobody wants broken links on their website, as they contribute to a poor user experience. So when you reach out to people telling them about broken links on their site, they’ll normally happily replace them with working ones.

If you’re employing the previously mentioned 10x Content concept to come up with content pieces for your website, this might be just the right strategy for you. It involves finding highly popular content with loads of backlinks, improving it to the best of your ability, and then asking everyone who links to the content you improved to link to you instead. Some of the opportunities to improve your content over the existing resource are to correct inaccurate or misleading claims; go deeper and explain things in detail and explain it in a manner that uses graphics, videos, or whatever is needed to help the reader understand things easier.

If you have a fairly comprehensive article on a topic a good idea might be reaching out to those who only briefly expanded on a topic and suggest your piece of content as a source. This is a tactic that can be often employed in collaboration with a broken link-building tactic, just to provide website owners with an additional reason to refer to your page and is similar to the skyscraper technique where a more comprehensive resource is proposed to the site owners.

While many other link-building tactics aim to create content that appeals to as wide an audience as possible, ego bait takes a highly targeted and personal approach. The success of ego bait content revolves around attracting the interest of whichever influencer or website owner you want a link from. So what you must do is simply create content that catches the attention of industry players in your niche and entices them to engage with your content.

Unlike quotes, images are embeddable. When people embed them in their content, they tend to link back to the source. Some of the few common image types that tend to attract links are Infographics; Graphs; Photos; and Mind Maps.

Although using first-hand data is always preferable, it may be possible for you to find publicly available data to put it in a digestible format and attempt to build backlinks off the back of it.

Just like in the case of data studies, infographics deal with the digestible nature of showing data. Unlike in the case of full-scale data studies infographics tend to have data on very niched-down topics which makes this technique so valuable to niche websites.

Just like in the case of infographics and data studies, Maps relate to building backlinks off the back of visualizing data. One argument for infographic maps over regular infographics is that, according to a large number of SEO managers, the infographic market is quite saturated and this asks for increasingly more sophisticated data visualization initiatives, like maps.

Surveys are all about first-hand data. They can come in handy in outreach to journalists who are looking into very specific issues. Survey data is really hard to come by these days, so if you have a chance to get first-hand information through them, you might find yourself building meaningful relations with journalists as a result.

Many companies are in the business and putting entire awards ceremonies for certain industries and niches. A quite powerful link bait tactic as award nominees and winners are likely to link back to the award owners mentioning their nomination.

Running your own podcasts can help you build backlinks off the back of its guests, who would be in a very good position to link back to you since you’ve interviewed them directly and they might also be interested in mentioning their ties with the podcast.

Not an uncommon strategy for some blogs are running interviews in various forms with industry professionals. This, like the other tactics, can end up resulting in a link back to the website owners as this is a meaningful means of forming relationships with industry professionals.