There are over 30 billion websites competing for the first page on Google. Without SEO, your content cannot rank on search engines.

If you have a blog and are familiar with content marketing, you may have come across the word “SEO” in your meetings. SEO may sound complex, but it’s simpler than you think.

If you are on this page, I bet you are longing to learn more about SEO content and, of course, how to write SEO-friendly content for your blog and marketing. Anyone can write, but not everyone has the skills to create an SEO-optimised article. 

This article teaches you what SEO content is and how to develop a unique SEO content strategy. 

What is SEO Content?

Before defining SEO content, it is important to learn the meaning of SEO. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to optimising a website to rank at the top of search engines like Google and Yahoo so that users can easily find it.

SEO content is any type of content you create to rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs). The content is optimised for search engines and offers unique, engaging, and user-intent specific content to the readers.

Any content that ranks well on SERPs is optimised for SEO and may also have the quality that most readers and users need. 

SEO-friendly content is:

• Original, valuable, and engaging.
• Keeps the reader on the page for longer and has a lower bounce rate. 
• Optimised for the keywords the page targets.
• Improves user experience.
• Offers valuable answers to search queries.

What Content Matters for SEO?

Content and SEO should go hand in hand if ranking on search engines is your primary objective. 

When writing for SEO, you prepare, create, and optimise content to rank on Google and other leading search engines. 

When you intend to rank on search engines like Google, you must focus on the following:

• Find out what your audience needs.
• Prepare a list of keywords or search queries people are using when looking for your business or brand online.
• Create content that offers solutions and answers to what your target audience is seeking.
• Present your content or answers in ways your target audience can understand. For instance, if you’re writing an article for children, you should avoid using college vocabulary.

As a copywriter or digital marketer, learning to create SEO-friendly content is vital in ensuring your brand gains online visibility and beats the competition to stay at the top of SERPs. 

Types of SEO Content 

These are some of the examples of SEO-friendly content you can create for your website:

• Article: This may feature news, interviews, product reviews, and other evergreen content.
• Lists: This features listicle content like the top 10 lists or the best of all lists of products or services you are trying to optimise.
• Guides: Detailed content covering a topic is a part of the guide. These are more than 3000 words long. The longer content you write for guides, the better it is for acquiring a higher ranking.
• Videos: These could be long-from videos explaining how to use a product or some bite-size clips for advertising services.
• Blog Posts: These can be medium or long-form content that you create to answer specific questions your customers may have. Blog posts can also have detailed guides and interviews. You are free to post whatever content you wish to on your blog.
• Infographics: These will mainly contain data and focus on an audience looking for quick answers to their search queries in a visually attractive manner.
• How-to Articles: This type of content provides a step-by-step solution to questions your target audiences are seeking an answer to.

18 Ways To Write Perfect SEO Content 

Writing SEO-friendly content might be a challenging task for a beginner. 

To make things easier, here are the steps you should follow to create the perfect SEO content for your website:

1- State Your Goals 

In your content strategy, you should have some smart goals that you want to achieve. 

Here are some questions that you should answer:

• Who is your target audience for whom you are writing the SEO content? 
• Do you have an audience persona ready?
• What are the keywords that you want to rank for? 
• What are the actions that you want your target audiences to take when they read your content? 
• How will you measure success? What are your most important SEO KPIs?
• How many impressions or clicks are you looking to achieve in the next quarter?

Knowing what you hope to achieve is the foundation for any successful SEO strategy. 

You should set measurable goals so that everyone in your team can work towards achieving them. 

Some of the common metrics you should measure before setting your goals are:

• Impressions: This equals the number of times your content is seen by the searchers on the search engine result page.
• Clicks: This equals the number of times your content is clicked by the searchers on the search engine result page.
• Bounce Rate: This refers to the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
• Organic Traffic: The number of unpaid visits on your website. You should track your organic traffic before and after making changes to your content to notice the improvement.
• SERP Position: This is your website’s position on organic search results. You can track your rankings before and after making changes to your content to notice the difference.
• Dwell Time: The amount of time a person will spend looking at your webpage.
• Domain Authority: Domain Authority is the search engine ranking score. Higher domain authority correlates to higher organic rankings.
• Backlinks: These are the hyperlinks that link back to your website. A higher number of backlinks correlates to higher site authority and organic rankings.

Have a report on these metrics before you begin writing SEO content. 

This way, you create content that seeks to increase website dwell time and other metrics. 

2- Do Keyword Research 

You should focus on target keywords and phrases your audience uses to search your content. 

Your customers can’t find your business online if you don’t include target keywords in your content. 

When doing keyword research, you can use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Wordstream, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. These tools will give you details of what users are searching for and the popularity of those queries.

For example, if I wish to create content on the topic ‘how to reduce weight’, I will enter this search term on SEMrush.

The tool will display a list of keywords grouped under three different sections, which are – keyword variations, questions, and related keywords. 

I can filter the keywords related to my main topic to create user-intent specific content since ‘how to reduce weight’ is a broad topic, and ranking on this topic might be challenging.

Instead, if I write content on the topic ‘how to reduce weight in thyroid’ or ‘how to reduce weight naturally’, it would be much easier for me to rank my content.

You should pick keywords that are relevant to your audience, have a decent search volume, and have low competition. 

SEO content creation becomes easier when you select the best keywords for your content.

Once you have shortlisted your main keyword, you can use the keywords listed under the related keywords section naturally within your main content.

Remember that keywords will keep evolving with a shift in trends and as your brand grows.

3- Create A Content Calendar

Create a content calendar to plan and track the progress of your SEO content writing work. 

A content calendar is a schedule that shows and dictates when you will publish new content. It also shows the type of content you intend to post.

You can easily create a content calendar in Google Docs:

With a content calendar, you can ensure consistency in writing and publishing content for your audience. When you stick to your content calendar schedule, you can escape the last-minute rush to write and post your content.  

In most cases, the calendars will get derailed after a month because of changes in budget, staff, and marketing goals. 

Therefore avoid having content plans for next year if you don’t want to risk wasting time.

4- Start Your Writing with Research 

Research, research, and research. 

You should research widely to make your content stand out from your competitors. 

Researching helps you learn more about the target keyword you want to focus on when writing.

When researching, you can determine the following:

• Primary or target keyword 
• Article size or length 
• Type of article; blog, how-to, product review, etc
• An outline for the article
• People also ask questions relating to the topic 

When researching, you should ensure you fully understand the topic, search intent, and keyword you are writing.

5- Create an Outline for the Article 

The next thing you should do once you have your goals is to create an outline. 

An outline is a simple draft showing what you want to write in every article section. It makes writing fast and easy and helps you maintain quality.

When writing an outline for your content, you should fill out some vital SEO details. 

For instance, you should find out some questions people ask about the topic you want to write about. An article outline should have three main sections:

• Introduction: This is usually the first part of an article. It could be a paragraph or two inviting the reader to the main topic. 
• Main Body: When outlining the body, you list all the main points you want to explain.
• Conclusion: Plan your take away and final words. This section should include a call to action (CTA).

Determine all the H1 heading and subheadings you will have on your website. Research something unique to include under every subheading. This should make your article stand out from the rest in search results.  

6- Write a Rough Draft  

Writing SEO content begins with a rough draft. 

A rough draft of the article helps you refine your ideas and complete the research phase. 

Once you have a rough draft, you can also get the flow and tone of the article. 

A rough draft is essential when writing SEO content because it helps you to write freely. 

7- Write With Your Audience in Mind 

Here is the secret; when writing SEO content, you should have your audience in mind. 

Write content for humans and not search engines. Use words your target audience can understand and relate to.

Users search for content on Google and always look for answers to their questions. 

Therefore, the best way to rank at the top is to answer these questions with high-quality content. 

What does quality content look like? It should have:

• Flow of ideas
• Answers 
• Organised subheaders
• Visual aids

When you write for an audience, you should have their challenges, interests, and motivations in mind. 

The quickest way to achieve this is to research the buyer persona. You want to learn more about the target audience before writing for them.

Choose topics that resonate more with your target audience and address their pain points. 

When users find your content valuable, they will stay on the web page for long, and you get the time to convert them.

8- Edit Your Rough Draft

It takes more than a rough draft to write a compelling piece. Once you finish writing the first draft, it’s time to edit your content.

Editing helps you to check all the mistakes you make when writing. Some of these mistakes include the following:

• Typing errors
• Punctuation issues
• Wordy sentences
• Lengthy paragraphs
• Grammar mistakes
• Passive voice

Edit your article line to remove all such readability issues. You want to ensure your word choice and tone remain perfect throughout the article.

Some tips to help with editing:

• Proofread to correct all the mistakes.
• Remove all clichés that readers may not understand.
• Ensure your writing mimics the writing standards of your target audience.
• Use tools like Grammarly to check for grammar mistakes in your article. 
• Use tools like The Hemingway Editor to achieve an optimal readability score.

9- Optimise Your Content With Keywords  

You should optimise different sections of your content with keywords.

The title tag and the description tag are two important sections of your content. 

The title tag is displayed in the search engine results and is weighed heavily by the search engines to understand your content. 

Similarly, a meta description is what “announces” your article to the world. 

A meta description is a short and straightforward explanation of what your article is about. This section appears just after the title of your article, as shown below:

You should begin the page title with your primary keyword. A page title should be between 55-60 characters long.

When you write a meta description for your article, you should remember to:

• Keep it within 160 characters.
• Include a call to action to entice your readers to click through.
• Use primary and secondary keywords at the beginning and the middle of the description. 
• Keep the description compelling for the readers. 
• Ensure the meta description is unique on all the pages of your site. Google is most likely to flag all the duplicate meta descriptions. 

Besides, you should use semantic variations of your seed keywords in headings, subheadings, and the first paragraph of your content.

Search engines determine the relevance of the content by determining the words and phrases used in these sections.

10- Include Relevant Subheadings 

Headers and subheaders are vital elements that signal what your article is about. 

One of the basic tips for SEO content writing is to use relevant subheadings distributed evenly within your content. 

With more subheadings, you can place keywords where they should fall and improve relevancy.

With subheaders on your article, you make your content scannable. 

Your readers can quickly visit the section they are most interested in without needing to read the entire article. 

11- Avoid Keyword Stuffing 

When you do keyword research, you are likely to find hundreds of keywords relevant to your writing topic. However, that doesn’t mean you should have all of them in a 300-word article. 

Remember, your objective is to optimise your content for SEO without compromising quality. 

When you have plenty of keywords to choose from, it is essential that you only use those that fit your content naturally. Don’t force any keywords in your content to ensure your work remains legible.

Oversaturation of your content with a lot of keywords makes it dull. Focus your writing on one or two keywords and make the descriptions appear natural. 

If your content has a lot of keywords, it affects users’ experience. Most visitors will bounce off your web pages if it’s irrelevant. 

You can use semantic variations of your seed keywords but avoid using any of the main keywords more than the recommended limit.

You can use tools like Istio to measure the keyword density in your content. The tool will show you the percentage of keywords used in the content. It should not go over 2% for any word.

12- Link to Authority Sites From Your Content

When writing SEO content, you should link to high-authority sites. 

Adding external links to relevant sites from your content makes it more authoritative. 

Additional reading materials will expand your reader’s knowledge and also show Google that you have done your research when writing.

Add some statistics to your blog post to strengthen it. You can use statistics from relevant and authoritative websites to convince the reader when explaining difficult points. 

Having statistics on your blog post will strengthen your arguments and ideas to build your audience’s trust. 

Back up the information you are offering on your website with relevant data from an authority site. 

13- Write Long-Form Content 

When it comes to writing SEO content, longer posts tend to perform better. 

Longer blog posts might be quite overwhelming to your readers. Therefore, when you write longer blog posts, you should break down the content into scannable chunks. 

You can achieve this by writing short paragraphs and short sentences. Ensure your paragraphs have less than three sentences having not more than four lines.

Add some bullet points to add some white space to your article. Bullet points help to grab readers’ attention and are best for mobile users.

When writing long-form content, you should make sure to have a new angle to your content with new insights. You should avoid writing content on topics that already have lots of information online. 

Long-form content takes significant time to create, but the results are long-term because they rank higher in the search results compared to short pieces.

14- Use Valuable and Catchy Headlines

A headline is everything to your content. 

Moreover, your headline, which is displayed as an H1 tag, might be picked by Google and displayed in the search results.

Sometimes, Google ignores the meta title and picks up the main heading to be displayed in the organic results.

Here are more tips for writing irresistible headlines that people would like to click and read:

• Keep the headlines short and on point.
• Use your main keyword in the heading, and if possible, start your heading with the primary keyword.
• Use numbers in your headline because a study shows that headlines with numbers are 36% more popular.

• Perform competitor research to see the headlines used by your competitors. You can use software such as BuzzSumo to reveal popular headlines on every topic.
• Use questions in your headlines but make sure not to include questions that have an obvious answer.
• Use tools like the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer to test your headlines because the tool helps you gauge the type of emotion your headline conveys and also lets you measure the readability of your headline based on grade level.
• Imagine the picture that comes to your mind when you read your headline. Use the picture you would like your audiences to have on their minds when they read your headline.
• Keep the headlines within 50-60 characters.
• Don’t be afraid to use CTAs in your headings. 

15- Leverage Link building to Boost Search Ranking 

To increase your content’s search ranking, you should employ link building. 

Link building is vital for your website because it increases the authority of your content. More authority leads to better search ranking.

Having links from authority sites to your blog posts makes your content more trustworthy in the eyes of search engines like Google. 

When Google considers your website more valuable, it will rank your content higher in the organic search results.

Therefore, when you write content, you should be more resourceful. 

Create content that other websites would like to hyperlink. To make your content clickable, you can include valuable assets in your content, such as original data. 

16- Add Alt Text to Images 

Alt tags help Google and other search engines understand the contents of the images. It also helps visually impaired people understand the images because the screen readers read the contents of the alt tag so that visually impaired people can also understand the contents of the image.

When you add alt text on your images, you should remain descriptive and include your primary target keywords. 

For example, if you are adding an image of a kid eating an ice cream, you should add the alt text ‘kid eating an ice cream’. 

Here are the other tips to help with adding alt text.

• Keep it short: the alt text should be short and easy to read and understand.
• Avoid quotes: Adding quotations on alt text will cause the HTML to break.
• Add proper punctuation: Use the right punctuation in your alt text to know where to pause when you read.
• Do not repeat image captions: Alt text adds information to the images, and repeating captions make them look irrelevant.
• Focus on context: Ensure the images in your content relate to the main text.

17- Compress Images to Make Your Pages Load Fast 

Adding images to your content increases user experience, but you should also ensure it doesn’t affect the page loading speed. 

Google uses page speed as a metric to rank pages. Hence, pages with higher loading speed rank higher. 

Having larger images in your content decreases your loading speed. For example, if you have lots of pictures and most of them are above 100 KB in size, it is most likely to affect the loading speed. 

You can use apps like Squoosh.app to compress images and make them look lighter without affecting quality.

If you are using WordPress, you can use speed optimization plugins, like Smush to turn on lazy load and optimise images up to 2x more compression than regular plugins.

18- Scout on People Also Ask (PAA) Section

When you search with your target question-based keywords on Google, it shows you the People Also Ask (PAA) section. 

The People Also Ask is a Google SERP feature that provides users with additional questions related to the original search query.

For instance, if you enter the keyword “Why invest in seo”, Google presents a list of question-based keywords, as shown below.

This section is useful when creating or writing content to post on your site. 

Pick questions from this section that may be relevant to your topic and answer all of them in your content. When you click on one question, Google adds more and more. So you have plenty to choose from. 

Include an FAQ section in your content because snippets from the FAQ section might be picked up by Google for voice searches. Hence, you increase the chances of ranking under featured snippets if you answer lots of relevant questions of the readers associated with your primary content. 

When you insert these questions in your blog post, you are simply making your website more valuable to your audience. Always remember to only pick questions relevant to the target keyword and audience you are writing for.

19- Write Conclusions to Convert Your Readers 

Writing a firm conclusion is one way of closing your article. Most people consider writing a conclusion the most challenging part of an article. 

A conclusion should highlight the article’s essential aspects and offer clarity to the topic. Besides, it should convert your readers because the main purpose of your content is to improve conversions from your website.

Here are some top tips for writing the best conclusion for your articles and blog posts:

• Reinstate topic: Your conclusion should remind your readers of the primary objective of the content. 
• Add a solution: Your conclusion should offer a solution to the problem you were talking about.
• Use emotional appeal: A good conclusion should use emotional language to create a powerful and lasting image in the reader’s mind. 
• Add call to action: Your last words should have some call to action and should instruct your readers what they should do next after reading the article.  

When you write a conclusion, you should maintain the tone you have used in the rest of the blog and should avoid introducing new ideas that you haven’t talked about in the main content. 

Final Thoughts 

SEO and content writing goes hand in hand. Unless you perform SEO copywriting on your existing content pieces, it is hard to make them rank highly in the organic search results. 

When you write content for SEO, you should start by setting the goals you want to achieve, doing keyword research, and keeping your audience’s pain points in mind. 

Follow the SEO content writing tips suggested in this Article to help your content stand out from your competitors.