Nothing happens until someone reads, hears, or watches some content. We all know great content when we see it. Good SEO content draws you in, holds your attention, and influences your behavior and decisions.
So, how do you do it? Where does all this great content come from? And how can you create great content of your very own?
Well, Simple Intelligent Systems is a company that has experience in thousands of different marketing campaigns. We are pleased to apprise you with some of the best SEO content writing tips to level up your content game in 2021, be it for your website, blog, ads, or anything you need to create content for.
1. What’s the point?
Just like anything in life: be it your writeup, business, or marketing, you’ve got to have a clear understanding of your goals. You should know what you are trying to get with what you are doing. So, before you sit down to write anything, you must know: ” What’s the point of this content?”
Is it a better search engine ranking? Is it brand awareness? Are you writing an ad for an engagement, or traffic, or for generating leads? Whatever it is, you’ve got to be very clear about why you are doing this.
Different objectives mean writing in different ways, with a different type of content, or how it will be delivered in the end. For example, let’s say you are framing content for an ad: The very first objective of this ad may be to get the click. If you are writing content for a website “About page,” you will build a trust factor, hopefully leading your audience to some call to action. The keyword is that you should keep in mind what action you want your readers to take after consuming your content. There are considerable differences when you write content for a business or marketing purpose instead of just fun and fictional purposes. Marketing and business content should lead to some action.
2. Target the right audience with focussed keywords.
Whenever you think of online writing or even marketing in general, you must think of SEO. Here’s why:
Google is the most visited platform online. Over 40000 searches are processed by Google every second, which is 3.5 billion searches per day. The number of people visiting Google every day is staggering.
Your site’s content will not reach the right people if you are not targeting the correct terms, and by targeted keywords, we mean the words that your audience is actively searching for on Google. It is essential that you know your clients, where they are, their problems, and what led them to search for the terms; then, you need to know the exact terms they are looking up online. Don’t leave this for guesswork. SEMrush and Huge binder can be used to look up accurate keyword data.
3. Focus on clarity over creativity
SEO content that shows to the top of SERPs is incredibly clear. When your audience clicks on your link, every element on that page should keep them glued there. The content should be absorbing enough to grab and hold their attention and must provide value. When your audience stays back and reads your content, your page looks great to Google. It tells Google that your content was relevant to the searcher.
When it comes to advertising, you will put money behind the content you are paying to promote. It is also a trap for many novice and experienced marketers in general to fall into because we tend to prioritize the creative aspect. We tend to write something that is flowing, beautiful. But, at the end of the day, none of the creativity matters if it does not yield results. Your content will not deliver results if you do not prioritize clarity because a confused customer does not act. If nobody understands what you do, whom you do it for, or how you can help them, then all the world’s creativity will not help your content. When we talk about prioritizing clarity over creativity, we are not talking about just the bulk of the content. We talk about all the facets around it, including the headline. The headline is the most essential part of the content. This is what 80% of the people are going to read. Many will not continue to the body of the content.
4. Audience Avatar
An audience avatar is a fictional representation of the perfect client or customer or target audience you want to write content for.
Before you sit down to write a single piece of content, you have to be very clear about who you are writing this content for; otherwise, you will miss the mark. For doing this, you have to dive in to understand the following things about your audience:
- Demographic details, such as age, gender, income, occupation.
- Geographic location, such as the city, state, country, or province that they live in.
- Psychographic information such as attitudes, interests, and beliefs may be any clubs, organizations, or affiliations they are a part of.
Having prior know-how of all the above information will make your content much more effective.
5. Go deeper into your SEO content.
Google is reinforcing its focus on the quality of content. Industry thought leader Eric Andy, in a journal article on Search Engine, had this to say, “We tracked the SEO performance of several different websites. The sites that exhibited exceptional depth in quality content coverage soared in rankings throughout the year. Sites that were weaker in content depth suffered in comparison.”
This trend will continue, knowing how we can create deeper content and write long-form words: the sweet spot here is 2000 or more. Explore topics, have many different facets, excellent ultimate guides, go further than surface level. So, instead of just googling for statistics, dig deeper.
6. Improve your page speed
A really simple way to improve your Google SEO content rankings in 2021 is to improve your page speed. The websites that take too much time lose their audience. The slower your page loads, the more frustrated your end-user gets. Today no one wants to sit there and wait for a site to load. As per a BBC news report, shoppers won’t wait for more than 20 seconds to load a page. Make sure you do not have many popups, scripts, code pieces, javascript, heavy videos slowing down your site speed.
7. Take things Line by Line.
When we talk about writing great content, the goal of the headline is to get your audience to read the first line. The purpose of the first line is to make them read the second and so on. That is why it is imperative to hook your audience at the very beginning by :
- Letting the audience know whom the content is for.
- Letting them know why they should care and what is there in it for them.
This approach is essential because there is too much content out there for your audience. When you let your audience know who the content is for, you respect their time.
8. Miracles and miseries
When it comes to creating any content or marketing strategy, the goal is to generate some action from the audience. Here you should leverage those powerful human emotions that we all have, specifically the desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Make sure that your SEO content focuses on one of these two aspects.
Help them avoid their miseries, which could be things that caused pain, fear, or frustration.
OR
Help them realize their miracles, desires, wants, goals.
The stronger you can appeal to their emotional sides, the more your content will resonate with your audience.
9. Infotainment
Some of the best high-ranking content out there, specifically the one created for marketing purposes, uses a form of content marketing called “infotainment.”
We take the two words information and entertainment and slam them together to get this new concept.
The principle behind this is what makes it a very effective strategy.
First, let us take information. Now with information, we educate someone, and we are teaching them something because we have skills, knowledge, or expertise that we can help them with.
The beauty of using information or education as part of your marketing strategy is that it positions you as an expert and authority of the subject. It subconsciously elevates your status as that teacher role or as the person who is helping them out. So, it is a powerful psychological tool.
The next side is entertainment because ain’t nobody got time for boring content. People do not want to see boring content.
All you need to do is, be a little fun, be unique and be yourself.
10 . Visuals matter
Mark Schafer, thought leader and author of the book rebellion, commented: “Today, content should be artisanal.” That means content should be hand-crafted. Studies have shown that articles with images get 94% more reviews than articles without them. To compliment your content with great images and you will see more SEO success.
11. Storytelling
We as humans learn through stories. It is how it’s been done for generations and generations. People cannot resist a good story. One of the most potent lines in creating your content is
“Let me tell you a story…” You can start a piece of content with it. You can also interject it somewhere in the middle of your content or even near the end. By doing this, you naturally peek and engage the interest of your audience.
12. Provide facts and properly cite them.
Today the Internet has made it trivial for anyone to say anything without backing up outlandish claims. So it is a very good practice to go straight to an original study, pull an astonishing statistics fact that you have correctly cited and included in your writeup. So, research is the key to make your content more trustworthy and hence acceptable to your audience.
13. Native content
By native content, we mean respecting the platform that your content is going to be published on. For example, are you writing content for a website? If so, you have to keep in mind who your audience is that will consume your content. Are they going to view your website from a mobile device or a desktop computer? All this will influence your text size, font, and length of the content.
If, on the other hand, you are creating content for a social media platform, you need to be aware that this is going to affect the style, tone, and theme of your content.
For instance, an Instagram caption, a Facebook post, or writing a script for a Youtube video will be very different from one another. An undeniable example of this would be writing for a LinkedIn article. LinkedIn, being a business social media site, has its style and theme.
To sum it all, you have to ensure that the content you are publishing looks like it belongs there.
14. Format your online content for featured snippets.
Featured snippets are getting much attention in Google lately. These are blocks of information that show up in Google search results when someone types in a query. So featured snippets gain the first spot in Google over organic search results. This is an immensely desirable place for your content to rank; to increase the likelihood of your content getting snipped by Google, here are a few things to know:
- Answer questions definitively in your content.
- Make your content the highest quality possible- readable, well-written, full of statistics, and thorough.
- Use numbered and bulleted lists because that format will show up in the snippets.
- Structure your content logically.
Conclusion: Nowadays, people are valuing authorship in content more than ever before: how often you show up, your content can position you overtime as an expert.
We hope that following the above tips will help expedite your SEO content writing skills for all the tough competition that 2021 has in store for you.
