No matter what you’re writing, whether it’s website content, blog posts, articles, product descriptions or any other form of written word that you’ll see online, SEO will always be at the forefront of your mind. However, it’s sometimes difficult to find a balance between highly optimised content and content that people would like to read and will enjoy. Today, we’ll explore several tips and techniques, ensuring you can find this perfect balance, every time you write.
Conducting Keyword Research
The first and foremost thing you need to do is to conduct keyword research. Not only is this essential for SEO, but it will also help you to write more fluently, meaning you won’t have to go back through your content afterwards to implement the words. Conducting the research will also help you to set the tone for the post and direction that it’s going to go in.
Define Your Readers
After you have listed out your keywords, it’s time to start writing. But, before you do so, you need to be sure that you know who you’re writing for. If you’re writing for females aged between 18-30, you should write in a very specific language that will be relevant and appropriate for them.
The best way to carry out this task is to set up a purpose for your content. For example, if you’re aiming your article at photographers. What skill level are you aiming towards? What sort of terminology are they using? What sort of photographs is your target audience interested in taking? You’ll also need to consider what platform you’re sharing your content on. For example, the language used on LinkedIn is quite different to the language used on Instagram.
Set a Structure
This will benefit both your SEO ranking and the readability levels of your content. Consider how you are going to lay your article out. Are you writing a list article with an image per point? Are you going to use an article similar to this, a step-by-step guide with subheadings or are you going to creste a huge block of text?
Plan the structure of your article so you can easily stick to it, ensuring it’s easy to read and you can later incorporate SEO practices later, such H1 headers, etc.
Make Your Content Easily Digestible
This consideration goes hand in hand with the consideration above. If your content is a huge block of text, readers will find this extremely difficult to consume and the chances are that they won’t finish it. Instead, try keep your content nicely spaced out and separated by a subheading.
SEO guidelines state that you should have a new subheading maximum of every 300 words. Otherwise, your post can get penalised and lose ranking points.
Be Accurate & Precise
If you were reading the Harry Potter books and it was full of typos, grammatical errors and incorrect facts, you wouldn’t like to read it. In fact, you probably wouldn’t get through the first chapter. The same aspect goes for your posts. Proofread your work definitely before posting. If you need to, triple check it. Not only will the credibility of your blog be harmed by poor quality work, but Google will also rank you down.
Practice Proper Practices
There are over 200 hundred SEO guidelines when it comes to creating optimized content. Although you’re not expected to know all of them, there are several main ones you should always be aware of. The point above about subheadings is one.
Another is implementing the right keyword density throughout your content, currently set at 2.5%. It means that for every hundred words you write you’ll need your main keyword used twice. Any more than that and it will badly influence your rating.
Pace Yourself
This is one consideration that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Working on optimised and readable content is hard work. It can be both physically and mentally draining. Ensure that you take a break. If you’ve been writing for half an hour, take a break, even if it’s some minutes and you’ll be surprised how great your concentration is.
Perfect Your Content
With all these considerations above in mind, once you finally reach the end of your content post, check it over to ensure everything is perfect, both for Google and your Readers. Read it aloud to yourself. Does everything sound alright? Are you communicating the message you wanted to communicate? Is the keyword density spot on? Are you using the right images? Are the paragraphs and sentences the right length?
These are all the questions you should be asking yourself. Take your editing stage one step at a time, but aim for absolute perfection in everything you write.
