SEO copywriting is a specific type of Internet writing that helps in the ranking of created content in search engine results such as Google. Another main goal is to attract a more targeted audience to the website where the text is published.
Basic Guidelines for Writing SEO Articles for a Blog
When composing SEO articles, several techniques are important for the texts to be successful. They are as follows:
Keywords — keywords should be relevant to the topic you’re writing about for the texts to appear in the first search results.
Adding title and subheadings — they are mandatory, and it’s highly recommended to include keywords.
Unique and high-quality content — to increase traffic and keep the audience’s interest, your article should be informative and written in an easy and accessible language. You mustn’t copy texts from other pages. Including cited studies or statistical data from reputable sources of information is recommended.
Internal and external links — internal ones connect separate pages on your website. External links are important because they connect your text to authoritative and relevant articles on other websites. This will increase your visibility in search engines.
In this article, you will read more about these and other important techniques and rules to follow to succeed. You will also learn where to get ideas and inspiration for writing better SEO articles.
Audience Analysis
Preparation is always essential for a well-written text. Before you begin writing your article, you must decide whom it is intended for.
Define your target users — identify their gender, age, education, interests, etc.
Keywords and phrases — check the keywords your target audience searches for online with Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs.
Competitive analysis — researching competitive websites in your niche is an important aspect of SEO writing. Read what information they provide to their users and how the text is optimized to contain specific keywords and match relevant searches.
User behavior analysis — before starting to write an SEO blog article, research how your target audience searches for information online and how it interacts with the content they find. This will assist you in understanding their needs and desires and how to be more useful to them. Check social networks, forums, and blogs to understand your users better.
Creating a persona — a persona represents the ideal customer of your brand. To create one, consider different segments of your target audience divided by age, gender, location, values, and behavior. The persona will help you understand your users’ motivations, preferences, and behaviors.
Data analysis — use analytical tools like Google Analytics to study the behavior of users on your website. Explore different traffic data: your most visited pages; how much time visitors spend on each page; where they come from, and whether they continue to browse more by following links on the page. This will give you an idea of how your audience interacts with your content.
UX analysis of your website — UX represents the user experience of a website. It’s how customers interact with it and how they feel while browsing it. The easier and more enjoyable a site is to use, providing a positive experience to the client, the more likely they are to return to it and recommend it to others. You can try tools such as Hotjar, which records user sessions. It allows you to track every scroll, click, and attention given to specific parts of the page. This tool helps you better understand user behavior on your website. It will give you a clearer idea of whether your website has good UX and is easy to use or if customers face difficulties, become impatient, and leave the site quickly.
Testing and optimization — make adjustments based on the results of your research to determine what works best for you and your users.
Keywords and Phrases for SEO Articles
After you have decided what to write about, you need to research the most commonly used relevant words and phrases that users search for in search engines. These will be the keywords you want to rank your SEO publication for.
Determination
The first step is to choose the most suitable phrases and words to use in your article in a non-intrusive way. They will drive more traffic to your page. Analyze the niche for which you will write the specific SEO blog. Check the texts of competitors in the industry to see what keywords they have used in their content.
Keyword Distribution
Keywords should appear in the headings, subheadings, and in the main text. Spread them evenly. It’s important for the main keyword or phrase to appear in the first paragraph of the article. It is believed that this helps search engines understand the context of your content faster and connect it to relevant searches.
Remember that overloading your text with keywords will negatively affect search engine optimization. This would be considered an attempt at manipulation, and, as a result, your content will not rank highly. The density of the keywords and phrases in the text should be between 1 and 3%. This translates between 4-6 and 10-12 repetitions, depending on the length of the paragraph.
How to Choose the Right Keywords
There are three main factors to consider when analyzing and selecting your keywords. Since the tools will provide you with thousands of options, you need to filter the ones that will be useful to you. This is what you should keep in mind:
Search Volume — it represents the monthly search volume of keywords in the browser search engines. Remember that each search engine uses different tools and methods to process its data. The search volume can serve as a measure of the potential traffic you can attract.
Relevance — choose only words that are relevant to your topic. High relevance is also associated with a high Click-Through Rate (CTR), the number of clicks an advertisement receives divided by the number of impressions.
Keyword Difficulty — the keyword difficulty indicates how hard it would be for your content to appear on the first page of a browser search engine for a specific keyword. If it is too high, ranking for specific keywords will require more time, effort, and dedication.
High-Quality Content for SEO Articles
First and foremost, your text should focus on your target audience and be maximally useful to them. In this paragraph, we will give you some guidelines for writing SEO articles that are precise, clear, and error-free.
If you want to provide your customers with easily accessible and understandable high-quality content, write in short paragraphs, following the principle of the “inverted pyramid.” This approach structures the text so that the most important and informative elements are placed at the beginning, making them visible at a glance.
When you write the article, begin with an introduction to the main information on which the text will be based. Then expose facts and examples related to the topic.
Write a structure that includes headings, subheadings, and bullet points, so that the text is organized, coherent, and visually easier to read.
The criteria you should think about are:
Informativeness and readability — in addition to the main information on the topic, incorporate answers to customer questions and advice on solving their problems. Be sure your content is informative and readable.
Length of the text — it depends on the topic, but what matters most is to provide high-quality content to your users rather than aiming for a specific word count at the expense of unnecessary information.
Spelling and punctuation — a grammatically correct text without spelling and stylistic errors always stands out.
Optimization of Meta Heading and Description
The gripping heading and the short text below it, called meta description, that are visualized in the search result, are the first things, attracting the audience.
A meta description is an HTML element. It should include short information for your content with the first most searched keywords and be under 156 symbols long.
The heading and meta description help for the better optimization of your SEO articles.
Optimization of Visual Elements
Visualization (photos, videos, graphics) of the text eases its readability. However, do not forget to find the balance between the text and the visual elements.
When you add an image to your article, keep in mind the following requirements for its optimization:
Choose a suitable name for the file — it should contain keywords and terms that help the search engines to understand the image’s content.
Alt text — also known as an alt attribute or description, it connects with the image and shows when the image cannot load. It’s recommended to insert keywords in the alt text. They will increase the relevance of the page in the searches.
Size and format, in accordance with the specific requirements of the site.
Sources of Inspiration for SEO Articles
There are different methods to use if you look for inspiration for your next article. Some popular examples are:
Google Trends — this instrument allows you to find out which tendencies and searches your customers are interested in. You can examine the keywords for specific topics; to make comparisons and research geographic interests. Have in mind that some of the functionalities like Daily Search Trends and Realtime Search Trends have restrictions and are not available for some regions, including Bulgaria.
Google Suggest — it offers automatic suggestions to users when they type a keyword in the search engine. Google Suggest helps you to understand which are the frequently searched phrases and questions for a concrete topic.
View the results in People also ask — these are Google’s suggestions, often like questions, appearing in the searches. They are a wonderful indicator if there is interest in your given word, which you can turn into an article.
Read the forums — forums are often a great way to find inspiration and ideas that thrill people. By using them, you can find out what you can emphasize in your texts to address a problem more clearly and how your product or services solve it successfully.
Review of the popular hashtags — they are the keywords used in social media. Check out which are used by the leaders in your business niche or try different instruments like Hashtagify.
Analyze the tendencies — social media is a source of the latest tendencies. Go over what is published in your business niche and create posts that are interesting for your customers.
In this article, you learned about the main rules and sources of inspiration for writing SEO articles.
If you need professional assistance and an experienced team in creating high-quality and interesting content for sites, we, at CreateX, are here to help you.
