The role and value of content for search engine optimization are hard to undervalue. On the one hand, it helps search engines understand what your site is about and match it to user queries to show your site on relevant search engine result pages (SERPs). On the other hand, it is what captures users’ attention and makes them click on your website. It’s also what keeps them on your site for a longer time, builds authority, and encourages prospects to convert. So, one way or another, content optimization is empirical for your brand’s recognition and growth.
But how do you craft copy that matches the needs of both search engines and your prospects? This guide will tell you step-by-step how to optimize content for SEO!
Start With Keyword Research and Thorough Analysis
To create truly SEO-friendly content that resonates with your readers, you can’t start straight with writing. The process begins far before that. Namely, you need to get through three preparatory stages first:
- Study your audience: Analyze your current customer base, as well as the audiences of your direct and indirect competitors, to tap into the pain points, preferences, and interests of your target audience. Understanding who will be reading your copy can help you define how to convey your message more effectively.
- Analyze user intent: Every piece of copy you share should find your potential customers at different points of their customer journeys. When writing a how-to guide, you’ll find your prospects at the informational stage and have to give them the answers they are looking for. When writing product comparisons, you’ll capture leads at their commercial stage when you need to tell them more about your product or service and its benefits. Carefully analyze the specific user intent you will tap into with your article to ensure that you know what they are looking for.
- Conduct keyword research: Lastly, the final stage of preparing your SEO content strategy requires conducting thorough keyword research. Leverage a keyword research tool that you can rely on to explore search terms that align with your specific niche, audience, and type of copy. Target the most promising keywords to include in your article later. By the way, the keywords you target during this stage can also come in handy for your PPC efforts.
Create and Optimize Your Title and Meta Description
After the preparatory steps are completed, you can start crafting your copy by starting with a meta title and description. A title is a brief headline that describes the topic of your article, and a description is a summary that aims to tell the reader what they will read about. These elements both appear in SERPs for relevant searches and are crucial to encouraging users to click on your link rather than visiting your competitors’ sites. Hence, if you want to earn the most clicks (traffic), you need to make them perfect.
There are a few essential rules for crafting well-optimized titles and descriptions:
- Keep them short – under 60 characters for titles and up to 155 characters for descriptions – to ensure that desktop and mobile users see them fully.
- Insert your primary target keyword both in a title and description, ideally locating them close to the beginning.
- Include a call-to-action (CTA) and integrate action verbs to encourage users to click on your link. For example, some words you can use include:
- Click;
- Learn;
- Explore;
- Use;
- Get, etc.
Write a Killer Heading and Plan Additional Subheadings
Without any doubt, headings play an enormous role in SEO content marketing. First of all, that’s because a whopping 70-80% of modern users only read the headline of an article or news story, while only 20% read beyond. Either due to a huge overflow of information or a shortening attention span, this fact affects marketing a lot, and it means that your heading can either make users read the rest or make you lose them forever.
To write resonating headings, follow these rules of thumb:
- Keep them short and straight to the point.
- Feel free to get creative, but ensure your headings are descriptive and relevant.
- Make them clear and specific.
- Use power words like “free” and “easy” to capture attention.
- Include “you” pronouns to personalize.
- Keep it unique and engaging.
- Integrate your main keyword.
Subheadings, in turn, are no less important. They add structure and readability to your text, thus ensuring a better user experience. After you have your heading, plan the overall structure of your article, and be sure to use different levels of subheadings (h2, h3, h4, etc.) strategically to make your text easy to read and understand. And don’t hesitate to integrate keywords into your subheadings for better SEO.
Craft an Engaging Intro
Just like headings, introductions of your articles aim to engage the reader and make them want to read the whole thing. Needless to say, capturing the attention of your audience isn’t a piece of cake, especially given that they often decide whether they want to read a whole article or not within seconds. That is, your intro must be flawless.
So what exactly do you have to do? Make your intro clean and easy to understand. It should introduce the topic and provide some background details to explain what the user will find on the page. At the same time, keep it short and intriguing to encourage the audience to read further. You can also use a popular “hook” technique in your first introductory sentence to capture the readers’ attention. A hook can be a quote, a piece of statistics, or anything else that can get your audience interested.
Write the Skimmable Body of Your Article
Once you have your intro, you can start crafting the body of your article. And you have to make it skimmable to get the most out of it. Why? – Because modern users are busy. Typically, they have time to read a maximum of 28% of the words during their visit or, more likely, even 20%. The rest of the text is simply being skimmed.
Now, this is something you should just take for granted and prepare for. If you’re wondering how to write SEO content that’s skimmable, you need to split your ideas into digestible sections and divide them with the help of subheadings. And, of course, don’t forget to add target keywords to optimize your text better and rank for relevant queries.
Integrate Both Internal and External Links
No matter how good your SEO content strategy is, it’s never complete without a linking strategy. Links, depending on their type, play different but equally important roles in your SEO:
- Internal links – Enrich your site’s navigation by linking related pages and enabling users to move between them freely and easily. By doing this, internal links greatly improve user experience and can also enhance the time people spend on your site, which affects your rankings.
- External links – Links to other trusted sources placed in your articles help improve the quality of your copy, show that you’ve done in-depth research, and, thus, boost your authority and credibility in the eyes of readers and search engines.
Be sure to use both types of links in your articles, placing them strategically throughout the text for maximum impact.
Integrate Visuals and Make Them SEO-Friendly
These days, no SEO-optimized content can go without some visual elements. Images, infographics, and other types of media make your copy look more appealing and engaging. At the same time, visuals help improve readability and, hence, help you deliver better user experiences.
Now, how do you handle SEO optimization of your visuals? Here are the key tips:
- Ensure the optimal size of your visuals to look clear and high-quality, but don’t hinder the page’s loading speed.
- Make your images responsive to look good on mobile, desktop, and tablet.
- Optimize file names to make them more descriptive and clear and integrate relevant keywords. This can also help your images rank in search results.
- Provide clear alt text for all visuals for greater accessibility.
Integrate Powerful CTAs
Content is one of the most powerful digital marketing strategies used today. It can help boost brand awareness, generate interest, and help convert more readers into customers. However, to do this, you need to make sure that your copy tells people what action you want them to take. Simply put, you need to integrate strong calls-to-action (CTAs).
A good CTA for SEO-optimized content should meet a few requirements:
- Explicitly state the desired action, for example, to subscribe to a newsletter or buy a product.
- Create a sense of urgency. This can be done with the help of action verbs like “buy,” “order,” “shop,” etc.
- Emphasize the benefits a user will gain from completing the action.
Use these simple hacks to make your CTAs clear and powerful. Then, integrate them strategically into your pages.
Track the Results and Adjust
Last but not least, you need to remember that even a good SEO content strategy can become obsolete and stop working effectively over time. That is, you need to update it to continue receiving tangible results constantly.
Leverage trusted analytical software, such as Google Analytics, and continuously monitor the performance of your content. Namely, you want to watch the overall volume of organic traffic, click-through rate, engagement, and other KPIs that can tell you more about the effectiveness of your content.
Based on the findings from your performance analytics, feel free to update your overall strategy and individual content pieces regularly to secure better outcomes.
Conclusion
Content can be a powerful tool for spreading brand awareness and converting more leads, but only if you get noticed by your audience. Content optimization is just meant for that. By optimizing your articles for search engines, you can take higher positions in SERPs and respectively get right in front of your target audience.
After reading this guide, you have a step-by-step guide on planning, creating, and optimizing your copy. Start using these tips to achieve your short-term and long-term business objectives!
