What Is SEO Writing? What You Need to Know in 2024
If you’re new to the digital marketing landscape or just started a blog, you’ll need to know what SEO content writing is.
SEO is one of the most significant factors for brands, bloggers, and marketers to increase their visibility and improve their rankings on search engines. It plays an integral part in growing organic traffic and pinpointing your target audience.
That said, how can you use SEO practices for your content writing?
Read on to learn exactly what SEO writing is, its importance, how to utilise this skill, and more.
! Top Tip: Check out this SEO content guide for beginners if you want a more detailed guide on how to create SEO-rich content for your website
Understanding SEO Writing
Firstly, SEO, or search engine optimisation, is a powerful digital marketing strategy that can improve sales, increase brand awareness, build credibility, and drive traffic.
SEO writing, or “writing for SEO”, is when you create and optimise content with the goal of ranking high on search engines like Google. The process involves doing keyword research and implementing these keywords and keyphrases throughout the copy, meta descriptions, headings, title tags, etc.
You’d add these keywords as naturally as possible to increase your site’s organic visibility and SERP rankings. Lastly, the best way to write for SEO is to combine targeted search terms with high-quality content.
Let’s have a look at the difference between SEO writing and content writing to give you an even better understanding.
SEO Content Writing Vs. Regular Content Writing
Normal content writing focuses on establishing a brand and engaging the reader. Blog posts are a popular form of website content created to establish authority and engage with a target audience.
It’s all about your brand, what it stands for, and what it means to your readers. Other examples include landing pages, newsletters, and social media marketing.
Whereas SEO content writing focuses on improving your website ranking and driving organic traffic. You can use SEO practices to optimise blog posts, newsletters, landing pages, and social media posts to rank on the first page of Google. So, you can achieve this by using relevant keywords, creating optimised content, and answering the user’s intent.
Why Is SEO Writing Important?
So why do you need to become an SEO writer if you could just write high-quality posts and hope for the best? You’re not only writing for humans but for a search engine as well.
Not only will SEO boost your search engine rankings, but it can also help attract more organic traffic to your website. SEO-friendly content performs well since it’s authoritative, high-quality, and optimised for search engines. If your SEO strategy goes well, you’re almost guaranteed long-term results.
What Makes Your Writing SEO-Specific?
Now that you have a better understanding of what SEO writing is, it’s time to look at some foundational aspects that make content SEO-rich. These are some of the top SEO practices to use:
1. Writing a Compelling Meta Description
A meta-description tag is a short, relevant summary of a page’s content and presents it to users in the search results. These are concise, optimised with a target keyword, and should convince the user that the page is exactly what they’re looking for.
This is why yours should be as compelling as possible in order to draw more visitors to your website. It should give users the answer they’re looking for while urging them to click for more.
2. Targeting Specific Keywords and Phrases
Keywords or keyphrases are discovered during the keyword research process. Then, these keywords are added to the content to improve search engine rankings for those terms.
Aim to target only the most relevant keywords and phrases using tools such as Ahrefs and Google Search Console. This will give you the edge you need to rank higher for certain keywords that are already ranking well on search engine results pages.
3. Using Internal Links to Improve Crawlability & Enhance UX
Internal links are a type of hyperlink on anchor text from one page on your website to another. These links can be used to improve crawlability and enhance user experience (UX).
They help Google crawlers find, index, and understand all of the pages on your site. For users, internal links can create a network of connections between related content, making it easier for your audience to navigate your site.
4. Linking to High-Authority Websites
External links, or outbound links, are similar to internal links but lead to a page or resource outside a particular website instead. That said, as an SEO content writer, you’d want to link out to authoritative websites since they are considered reputable, credible, and trustworthy on the internet. This gives your website good link juice in return since Google wants to constantly improve user experience.
5. Optimise for Featured Snippets
Featured snippets appear at the top of the SERPs page and aim to give the most direct answers to search queries. If you optimise your content for featured snippets, then Google might use your page to answer a search query.
This will give your page an instant boost in ranking and help drive more organic traffic to your website. You can win featured snippets by adding quality images or videos, FAQ or “How To” sections, and by answering user’s search queries.
Top Tip: Optimising for featured snippets can, in turn, help you improve the likelihood of your content featuring in AI Overviews as well.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Try adding keywords to your content as naturally as possible, or risk oversaturating your posts. This is not only bad for user experience, but keyword stuffing can also get your website penalised by the search engine.
Optimise Headings and Titles
Optimising the headings and title tags of your pages plays a significant role in organic ranking. It can also improve your website’s visibility, click-through rate, and user experience.
Optimise your headings and subheadings by following a clear and consistent hierarchy and structure. Then, use numbers and unique selling points and place keywords toward the beginning of title tags.
Writing High-Quality Authoritative Content
Writing with authority and expertise gains your reader’s trust and shows Google that users are satisfied with your content. You can achieve this by combining Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines and SEO tools and techniques to produce high-quality, optimised content for your website.
Also Read: The importance of authoritative content.
Start Your SEO Writing Process Today
The benefits of incorporating SEO practices and techniques into your content are far too good to ignore. If you want to get ahead of your competitors and dominate search engine algorithms, SEO writing is your ticket.
! What’s the next step? Contact us for any content writing queries and services.
Matt G Davison
Matt has done marketing for travel and tourism for over a decade. His first love is SEO, with entrepreneurship hotter on its heels than a girlfriend. When he is not looking up flights back to his next destination, you can find him in the garden, making excuses to walk Rusty, strategizing with the team and tinkering on sites until the early morning.
