Before headlong into your SEO writing, let’s get back to basics and good practices, What makes an article successful? His readers! Above all, a good essay is made to be read by Internet users.
Relevant content will appeal enough to your target audience for your readers to relay it to their loved ones or their network, It will also strengthen your brand image, your notoriety… and your visibility.
You probably want to see your web content obtain a suitable positioning on search engines and, in particular, Google to generate traffic to your website.
If all these statements are undoubtedly apparent, it is pretty common to lose sight of your objectives or need to remember the means to achieve them.
Therefore, preparation and optimization are essential for your article to succeed and follow the best practices and critical optimizations in the editorial agency learnb2bmarketing.
They will also be instrumental if you suffer from white page syndrome, lack of inspiration, or lack of SEO writing experience.
Define your persona
You have surely already heard of this marketing concept: the persona or personae, This fictional character is a mental representation of your ideal clientele, a projection of your future reader.
Focusing on the reader is the first step in web writing. It must share the same characteristics and have its personality, namely:
- His field of activity
- His position occupied
- His areas of interest
- Their demographic characteristics: age, family situation, diplomas, etc.
- His personal and professional goals
- Their expectations of your editorial content
By creating a detailed profile of your persona, you can more easily identify your target audience, You can use your emotional intelligence, empathy, and expertise to understand their wants and needs better.
This will allow you to find a relevant subject that will respond to their desires and questions, increasing your chances that Internet users will take the time to read your article.
Knowing your target audience’s goals, experiences, and expectations will allow you to predict the search intent behind their queries and position yourself on the keywords that meet them, This improves the chances of bots delivering your content to the right audience for your brand.
Determine search intent
What is search intent in SEO? Search intent refers to the purpose of a searcher when entering a specific keyword or phrase, in other words, it is the explicit or implicit motivation for the search.
What does he expect when he types in the “SEO Copywriting” query? Are they looking for advice and best practices for writing, a definition, training, or a service provider in web writing (freelance, editorial agency, etc.)?
Once search intent is understood, it allows content creators and writers to determine what type of content to create to match searcher expectations.
The more a brand understands the expectations of Internet users, the more the content will correspond to them, and the better it will be referenced.
The search intention, therefore, also makes it possible to improve positioning in Google searches and, thus, to increase the notoriety of the brands concerned.
With search intent, brands can target exemplary visitors to turn them into potential customers while reducing the website’s bounce rate.
Search intent will be an essential element to consider in your content marketing strategy to match the content and offers according to the needs of your target. In addition, it will help you determine possible opportunities and niches.
Like a mentalist, you must guess the intent behind every keyword you want to create genuinely optimized articles.
Position yourself on the right keyword
Closely linked to the search intention, the keyword choice will be decisive in the effectiveness of your blog post.
The keyword designates the word or expression that the Internet user will type in the search bar to find answers to his questions.
Regardless of the search engine used (Google, Bing, Qwant, etc.), these keywords are essential for referencing your article.
Indeed, if you choose to address a subject in your activity that you like, but no one is researching it, it will never be read!
To avoid this situation, you will need to carry out keyword research before you start writing. Here are some tips to help you in your search:
- Use keyword research tools.
- Think about how your persona will frame their search
- Know if there is enough search volume
- Evaluate the relevance of the keyword in terms of conversion and the difficulty of positioning yourself
- Spy on the keywords to your competitors
You should thus obtain a list of the most relevant keywords for your activity, showing you the themes to be addressed in your articles and ensuring good indexing by search engines. Select only one keyword per page and optimize your SEO copywriting for that keyword only.
Find relevant content for the audience and the robots.
Search engines are now more and more efficient in understanding the subject covered by the content and offering it to Internet users who have carried out the related search.
It is, therefore, crucial for you to integrate this notion when writing your content, You need to select a topic and content that is relevant to your audience and easy for search bots to understand and index.
To do this, you will need to determine several elements:
- The subject: What is the theme you want to address or the problem you want to solve?
- The format: blog post, guide, list of tips, news, interview, web page, infographic, video, white paper, etc.
- The angle: choose the aspect under which you will treat your subject. It is also an opportunity to determine the voice with which you will address your audience (serious, humorous, sarcastic, quirky, etc.) and precisely define your editorial line.
Research the subject
You now have your subject, and you are ready to start writing. Congratulation! However, you still have a small detail to settle: the sources!
Indeed, to be able to write on a subject and cover the essential aspects, it is necessary to accumulate all the possible knowledge to master your theme at your fingertips.
This will allow you to address your problem in depth and create content with high-added value.
Finding and studying as many reliable sources as possible concerning the subject you have chosen is necessary.
These sources can be internal (collaborators, internal resources, etc.) or external (media, competitors, forums, etc.).
You will be able to find inspiration and identify the points on which you can stand out and bring new knowledge.
Be vigilant about the provenance and integrity of your sources, It is essential to verify the origin of your seeds so as not to peddle insufficient information and negatively impact your brand image.
Be sure to diversify your sources to add value to your content, Thus, you will offer a complete, quality, captivating text for your audience.
Vigilance is required regarding the recovery of content, Take text from your competitors’ sites and integrate it into your writing.
This practice exposes you to duplicate content, which reduces the weight of your SEO writing in the eyes of Google, which can even penalize it.
Remember to rewrite everything with your tone, words, and examples of inspiration broken down to stand out and enrich your editorial content.
Estimate the number of words
A question often arises about SEO writing: what is the correct length for an SEO article? Excellent question, but difficult to answer. At least, an answer for all the newsrooms.
The number of words will be adapted according to the competition of the keyword you wish to position yourself.
Indeed, some queries will require a text of around 800 words to ensure good positioning, while others will require more than 2000! To determine the exact number of words your text should contain, you can use specialized tools such as Optimiz Content.
This platform will allow you to optimize your text by helping you work on your semantics, syntax, and metadata while showing you the ideal number of words your reader will have to contain to face the competition.
Be that as it may, get ready to spill some ink because it will be challenging to benefit from good SEO referencing using a 200-word article only on a competitive query. So, to your keyboards! In SEO writing, focus on the quality of the content rather than the quantity.
Work on semantics
If you want your text to be SEO optimized, it will have to be recognized and valued by search engine algorithms. To do this, you will have to integrate into your text the lexical terms relating to your keyword.
You will thus reinforce your semantics, indicating to the search engines that your content deals entirely with the chosen subject and that it is relevant to offer it to Internet users entering this keyword.
Be careful to maintain the quality of your writing in the hope of integrating all the words relating to your query, Indeed, Google can determine if your text makes sense and penalizes keyword stuffing.
It will therefore be necessary to exploit the lexical field of the subject by noting the relevant keywords and integrating them coherently in your writing.
Write quality content
To optimize your SEO writing, keep this rule in mind: produce quality content!
On the Internet, content is legion, and the same themes are approached in precisely the same way on many platforms.
The Internet user does his research and finds himself faced with the identical content site after site. It is, therefore, essential to stand out and work on your content.
Find your difference, take time to create it, and bring real expertise to your reader. The more qualitative your content, the more you will increase your chances of being better referenced!
Work on readability
Who says quality content? It says understandable text! It is essential to work on the readability of your text so that your readers can easily understand the subject you are discussing.
Indeed, it remains a safe bet that if your writing is simple enough, Internet users may get bored and leave your site before even finishing your article, thus going no chance of making a conversion.
Conversely, if your text is readable and engaging, you increase your chances of leading your prospects where you want them.
It is, therefore, essential to pay attention to several points to improve the readability of your text:
- Ask yourself if your text is easy to understand.
- Limit the use of overly long sentences.
- Work on the structure of your titles.
- Avoid writing too dense paragraphs.
- Include photos, videos, and infographics for easy reading.
By following these tips, you should get more readable text and increase your chances of success.
Proofread and correct
It is only possible to talk about SEO writing by talking about proofreading.
In the Internet age, it is more than expected to find yourself with articles full of spelling mistakes, conjugation, and syntactic errors, thus reducing the excellent user experience or, worse… attracting the wrath of the netizens after a mocking post on social media.
You must proofread your content to avoid as many errors as possible. Indeed, an Internet user will tend to trust a faultless site more quickly than the reverse.
The ideal, if you can, would be to write your content and then return to it the next day to benefit from a new look at your text.
Having someone else correct your article is also a good strategy, especially if experts surround you with seasoned eyes! Once your article has been written, you can begin the last stage of your editorial journey: optimizing your structure and metadata.
Structure HN: H1, H2, H3 ETC.
This is the part of SEO writing that is the most technical. By definition, the Hn structure designates all the titles you will insert in your content.
In HTML code, Hn tags represent the tags used to denote titles and indicate their level of importance in the text as follows:
- H1 Main title
- H2 Paragraph title
- H3 Subtitle
- H4…
- H5…
- H6…
Although it is possible to reach six different levels, it remains scarce to use tags beyond h3,This structure is essential for adequately understanding your text by search engine robots.
Thus, inserting your keyword in your H1 tag will be necessary to signify that your article deals well with this subject.
It is, however, optional to recall it in each title,The lower-level titles could integrate variants of the keyword or secondary keywords.
By structuring your text, you also make reading easier for Internet users. At a glance, readers should understand what the text is about through headings, Adding a table of contents or a summary to your article or guide will also allow Internet users to navigate more quickly to the passage that interests them.
Meta-Title and Meta-Description
The title is what we see first when results appear in search engines. It must be catchy to encourage the Internet user to click on it and must imperatively contain the keyword to be indexed in the correct category. Distrust on one point: your H1 must be different from your meta-title to avoid duplicate content.
Example :
- Meta-title: How to write your meta-titles? | Blog 1st Position
- H1: Writing the meta-title
The meta-description, on the other hand, refers to the small text located just below the meta-title. It must summarize the subject in a limited number of characters your article addresses.
Just like the title, it must encourage the click! These elements together form the metadata and are essential for good SEO optimization of your text.
URL structure
Just like your metadata, it is essential to optimize your web page URL to improve your site’s natural referencing. Here are some recommendations for getting “SEO friendly” URLs:
- Rewrite its URL: do not keep the URL generated by default when creating your page, but personalize it to reflect the content you offer there.
- Insert your keyword: once again, make it easier for search engines to read your page by indicating your keyword in the URL
- Reduce the length of your URL: To prevent your page address from being truncated by search engines, limit yourself to 60 simple and compelling characters without special characters.
Image tag – ALT
We often need to remember them, but images can also be optimized thanks to the alt tag, Very useful for the blind, this tag also allows you to insert your keyword to tell Google (which cannot read images) what is on your image.
It’s also great to see your visuals rank on image searches via the most popular engines. This is decisive if your activity or your subject has visual importance.
Internal/external linking
Finally, to perfect the optimization of your SEO writing, it will be essential to work on your text’s internal and external meshing.
Internal linking consists of anchoring a link directly to a word or group of words in your text to send your reader to another page on your site dealing with a similar subject. It aims to:
- Demonstrate the relevance of your content
- Develop the relationship between the pages of your site
- Improve the popularity of your pages
The internal mesh will therefore be helpful to indicate to search engines the overall consistency of your site,The external mesh allows it to refer to other sites, eventually earning backlinks and increasing traffic to your site.
Whether it’s internal or external networking, make sure that the links open in new tabs so as not to cut off Internet users in their navigation on your site.
So you keep your visitor. You improve the user experience.
Optimizing your SEO writing is a very effective method to benefit from better referencing by search engines and a better conversion rate for the traffic generated.
However, this practice takes a lot of effort and time to bear fruit, The job of an SEO writer is a real job that requires specific knowledge and training, which is why many agencies and freelancers offer their writing services.