SEO is not dead – despite the phrase doing the rounds again and again. What is dead are the multiple ways marketers could game the systems a few years ago when algorithms weren’t so clever. Today, effective SEO content is even more important because sneaky tricks like stuffing keywords and black-hat tactics no longer help get your brand to the top page of Google.
This just means you need to work a bit harder – and smarter – to achieve the same result now. Every content marketing strategy targets genuine leads to help you reach bigger audiences. You can achieve this by combining informative and persuasive copy with content that is optimised for search.
Research shows that a vast majority (70+%) of people research brands online1 before making a purchase – and 3 out of 4 of them won’t go beyond the first page of google. That is why – for whatever specific query you want to be visible for – you need to work on writing effective, SEO-driven content to drive customer traffic to your website.
Here’s a breakdown for how you can do just that.
1. Write for people, optimise for engines
The key to SEO content is to have it make sense to people as well as algorithms. You cannot just put all the keywords into one sentence – an algorithm may like it, but a human will definitely find the sentence clunky and badly written.
So, do proper keyword research, find the best search terms – long or short – that people are searching for relevant to your business, and then write content that contains these terms in an organic way.
Use your keywords naturally within the copy and heading/subheadings. Putting too many of them or ‘stuffing’ your pages can attract penalties and negatively impact your ranking.
Remember, though, that keywords with high search volume numbers are more competitive, making them harder to rank for.
2. Answer your audience’s pain points
Too many brands end up only talking about themselves and not thinking about the customer. In today’s world, with so many brands out there, it doesn’t matter what you want to talk about, you need to get inside your audience’s mind and give them what they’re looking for.
Matching your content to lead your customers through a purchase journey – from awareness to exploration to comparison to finally purchasing from you – makes them feel understood and comfortable with your brand.
Once again, here, doing proper research to find out what precise solutions your company can provide and what solutions your ideal customer is looking for from you will be immensely helpful. You can also consider peppering these ‘answers’ throughout your social media channels also to help drive even more awareness and traffic.
3. Spend time on back-end SEO components
SEO has both on-page as well as off-page, or back-end aspects. It is not enough to just write content for the ‘front-end’ of your website – what is visible to your customers, like your home page content or your blogs.
You also need to optimise it from the back-end: this means writing proper meta titles, descriptions, choosing your H tags correctly, and so on. All this together is often clubbed under the heading ‘metadata’.
Proper metadata is crucial to educate the search engines about what each of your website pages focuses on, and what primary and secondary keywords you are targeting in that space. This will help the engine direct user search queries more effectively to your website.
Another factor that really helps is having strong internal links – where every page on your website has meaningful links between itself and the other pages on your site, thus creating a complex but easily navigable pathway to lead your customers from one of your services to the next.
We hope these simple insights help you understand how to write effective SEO content. The good news is that you don’t have to do it all by yourself! Our SEO and content experts are here to guide you on the best ways to gain more visibility and organic traffic for your brand.
Want to know how we can help? Drop us a line and we’re happy to give you a free consultation to show just what we can do!
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References:
1. Semrush, Online Shopping Stats
2. Hubspot, Inbound Marketing Stats
