You spend a good amount of time on SEO content writing. You know it’s a long term game. You’re willing to wait and let Google pick up your content. There are days that you’re a bit less patient and you can’t help but check Google Search Console for the 10th time. Nope, you’ve still only got the 50 views for the month, just like when you checked yesterday. Aaarggghhh…
Content writing is a chore sometimes, but it should be more of a joy. You should focus on helping people solve problems and discovering that you’re someone they can trust to help fix their problems. You put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into your content. Unfortunately, it isn’t a case of build it and they will come. With Google, you do have to give them some signals that your content is legit and worth picking up. Let’s look at some basic SEO that will attract Google’s attention sooner rather than later.
SEO Content Writing Tip #1: High Intent Keyword Research
I know, I know, another article on keyword research. I’m not here to give you the same advice. I don’t want to tell you to go after keywords of high volume. I don’t even want to tell you to target long-tail keywords. Those topics have been done to death.
The main thing I want you to take away from this tip is to focus on high intent keywords. Whatever blog or website you’re trying to build, you should have a clear idea as to what your ideal reader is trying to do. Are they going to buy something from your website? Are they going to download something? Are they looking for reviews? Build your keywords around that.
So for example, this blog I run about SEO content writing, I could (and should) target high intent keywords like, “-PDF”, “download” and “guide”. My site is currently informational, but I do want to build a relationship long-term with my customers, so I want them to download a widget of some sort.
The key here is that there might not be much volume for that, but for the little volume there is, there is high intent for those who are searching for it. What would you rather: 10 downloads from 100 searches a month? Or 1 download from 1000 searches a month?
SEO Content Writing Tip #2: Keywords In Headings
This is probably the easiest way to signal to Google that you know what you’re doing. With your keywords that you researched in the first step, you now will sprinkle them around your blog, but mainly putting them in titles and sub-titles, just like the one above.
This does a couple things:
- it highlights to real people what the main focus of your content is about. People know from reading my blog that they will read content about writing content that helps to rank in search engines.
- It also helps search engines to better crawl and identify where to place your content in their SERPs. You might have the best content in the world, but if the structure of the content doesn’t give them enough cues to figure out what it’s about, they won’t rank it.
So don’t be afraid to structure your content with the keywords in the title and subtitle. It’s not spammy. Far from it. It’s what helps people and search engines solve their problems, sooner.
SEO Content Writing Tip #3: Keep Writing!
This last tip is probably the most powerful of all. SEO doesn’t happen with one article. It happens with multiple. Not only that, it happens with multiple spread out over a long period of time. We’re talking months at least.
You should be writing a decently sized piece of content and publishing every week. What a lot of pro content writers do is put aside a day just for creating content. It might be Monday, as it’s the start of the week and they come back fresh and ready to smash out some knowledge. The schedule it to be released at the same time every week.
Think of these as “shots at goal”. Not every piece of content is going to rank in the top 10 in Google’s SERPs. Heck, not every piece of content is going to rank in Google AT ALL. The more shots at goal you make, the higher the chance that content will stick. And of course, the longer you’re taking shots at goal, the more you’ll stand out from the crowd, the more Google will notice you and trust you.
Then once you start building the trust of real people and they come back to your blog, the sooner Google will index and rank your content.
Super basic stuff, these tips. But you’d be surprised the difference they make to your content. I spent years messing around when I should have focused on these. You don’t have to be an SEO pro. Just someone who’s disciplined, focused and willing to play the long game. Join me, I’d love to have someone on the journey building a blog through strategic SEO optimized content writing.