Writing SEO content that ranks on search engines’ first page is critical if you’re looking to drive organic traffic to your website.
If your articles don’t appear amongst the first few results or at least on page one then you could be wasting your precious energy and time.
It’s not easy just to write articles using the right words and expect them to rank highly at top of the major search engines. When you first start to write articles, don’t be surprised if you struggle organically to rank high on page one.
The more you blog the more you will learn about which articles work in your industry and which articles don’t work. Words that light fires and potentially see hundreds/thousands/millions of visits and keywords that just don’t do it for your audience at all.
Creating a Blueprint for your blogs is a very important task. Keeping an eye on keywords that work and listening to your client’s demands and interests through stats is very important. After all, everyone writes articles to be read and give you stature in your marketplace. No one writes just for fun for no one to ever read it.
So here are a few proven steps to creating content that will rank in search engines.
Plan your titles
Before you start to write your SEO content, it’s important to know what you are going to write about. Have a few draft titles to work from and as you write your article you will refine the best title that describes what your article is about and one that will attract attention.
Sometimes a wild title will work but attract the wrong attention. For instance, the famous article written by the Sun back in 2011 “Devil otter ate my minivan” Which was an article about an otter that was attacking locals in a small sleepy British village. It catchy and it sold a huge number of papers that day. Sales up by 37% apparently. But its really important to be on target with your headlines.
Using this title and then writing about blogging articles will not get you the right sort of attention or conversion from reader to client.
Plan your keywords
Selecting the right keywords to write into the SEO content of your articles is the most important thing you can do. Think about roughly what you want your SEO content to be and then go off and do a load of keyword searches using free tools like “Google Keyword Planner” or “Yoast” will give you a bunch of good keywords to stick into a document and give you the bases of your articles keywords for SEO Ranking.
It’s really important to start with easy keywords, it’s not worth your while competing on keywords that are very popular and used by all the bigger, well known and established brands until your website has more authority.
Selecting the best keywords through Google Keyword Planner is a really easy place to start and sort keywords from low to medium.
Keyword variations are known as LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords which are just words that relate to your target keywords.
Using keyword Variations make your article more likely to rank against more keywords, Google also understands what your content is about and the latest Google algorithms love keyword variations.
Size matters
An ideal length for a great article or post is between 800 – 2500 words. Even against my wishes (I am a short copy man) long copy outperforms short copy and searching around the internet you will see plenty of research to back this.
People spending more time on your site will improve your rankings. The longer people spend on your site, the more the most popular search engines will rank you higher over others that only have seconds before they exit the site.
Writing short copy is quicker, easier, less time consuming and always a let’s get it done and off the “task list” sort of job. But writing long copy will return dividends and pays off in the long run, Trust us, we know this from experience.
A good way to write longer posts is to research the topic you are writing about find the top 10-15 articles that have grabbed your attention and take a few clips from each to help you expand on it with your own words and keywords. We never recommend copying anyone else’s material but using it for inspiration and fact-finding is something that you may even learn from.
Providing stories, valuable information and even a few funny bits will help you keep your readers interested. It’s quite simple to do and I hope you will love it as much as we do at The Responsive Agency.
Encourage more clicks
STEP 4: Meta titles/descriptions are a way to increase your CTR (Click Through Rate)which is a factor that Google takes into consideration when ranking sites.
The higher the sites ranking the better you are at getting click-throughs. So its imperative to your ranking to have compelling and interesting titles.
Use the power of social media
Using Social channels to share your articles is a great way of getting your articles and your business known. However, the main goal here is to refine your articles to naturally rank high through the use of relevant keywords and carefully crafted useful content.
When sharing your content, here are some ways to boost interest.
Gain more attention than a simple word title
7 is a lucky number and people live to click on anything with a 7 in it.
7 Facts about ……….
5 Tricks to get ……….
Use Positive Psychology
Amazing — Amazing
Ultimate — Ultimate guide to ……
Essential — Essential Guide on how to ……
Best — Best report in the world on ……
Expert — Expert Advise on when to ……
Top — Top advice on how to ……
On the titles, try to leave people on a cliffhanger so they have to click to see more. It’s really important that once you have them reading your article that you keep their attention. (remember above, the longer people stay the higher search engines rank you.) Don’t forget that you only have 160 characters on a meta description so make every character count.