How to create written content that boosts your SEO rankings
If you’ve been creating written content for a while but aren’t seeing improvement to your site traffic, then it’s time to think more strategically about how to curate inspiring, high-ranking pieces that are designed with search engines in mind.
This is where search engine optimisation (SEO) comes into play. Perfecting your SEO strategy can seem like a mammoth task, but in reality there are some very simple adjustments you can make that will improve your SEO massively.
In this article, we’ll explain:
How Google decides to rank websites
The fundamentals of on-page SEO
Quick wins that will help boost your SEO rankings
Utilising AI tools to aid in the writing process
How to ensure that SEO practices are followed correctly, even if you have multiple contributors
A brief look into Google search ranking systems
Thankfully for marketeers, Google shares a huge amount of information around the algorithms and tools they use to rank websites and search results. But if you’re new to the world of SEO this can feel overwhelming – so we’ll quickly break down the basics.
While many factors come into play with a website’s ranking, the two key factors that Google looks at are as follows: how useful the content is and how authoritative your website is.
Creating useful content is as simple as it sounds. If your article is titled ‘How to open a small business bank account’, then Google will look into how effectively you answer that question. Google’s “people-first” update also means that if your content is purposely curated to manipulate search engine results, then you won’t rank as well.
This is a change you can implement straight away. On the other hand, having an authoritative website takes more time. Google will perceive your website as being authoritative if you have the following qualities:
High-quality links, including backlinks
High-quality writing with useful content
A responsive, quick website
Six SEO practices to follow when creating written content
1. Use the correct header tags
This one may seem simple, but you’d be surprised as to how many marketers overlook this step.
When using header tags, it’s key to bear in mind that search engines use headers to understand a page and decide how it should rank. The general rule of thumb is as follows: H1 for the title, H2 for subheaders, H3 for any headers nested within those subheaders, and so on.
2. Choose a keyword – and use it early and often
Keywords are words or phrases that a customer might type into a search engine to generate relevant results. In order to appear at the top of that results page, your content needs to strategically feature the keywords they’re searching for.
If you aren’t familiar with choosing keywords, Moz has a really in-depth explainer on how to choose keywords and how keywords work.
As a general rule, aim to include your main keyword in the title, the first paragraph of your article and in at least one header. Otherwise, how often you mention the keyword really depends on the length of your content. A good guide to stick to is once per 200 words of copy, or five times in total.
For long-tail keywords, this can get pretty clunky. Let’s say your keyword is “benefits of hiring an accountant for a small business”. This can feel repetitive really quickly, and readers will know that you’re trying to jam a keyword in – this is known as keyword stuffing.
In order to avoid keyword stuffing, use a free density checker such as SEO review tools. These tools extract the number of keywords and calculate their frequency, ensuring your content doesn’t negatively impact your ranking.
Luckily, search engines are now more intelligent than ever. Google’s algorithm has progressed enough to understand context, which means it’ll still pick up on the keyword even if it’s ordered slightly differently.
That means as long as the main elements of your long-tail keyword are there (so “benefits” “accountant” and “small business”) you can mix it around to feel natural, whilst avoiding keyword stuffing of course.
3. Break up text regularly
If you want your visitors to keep reading, you need to break up your text and keep in mind how it looks visually.
Use headers, subheaders and lists to make it as easy to scan as possible. It’s best to aim for short sentences and include paragraph breaks every few lines, especially if you’re covering a dense topic.
It’s also beneficial to include linked section headers at the top of your article, so that readers with little time can jump to the content they need quickly.
4. Add the SEO title and meta description
This is a key step that’s easy to miss. The SEO title and meta description are the summary of your content as it appears in the search results page.
At Inkwell, we always add our SEO title and meta description at the same time as writing the article. This way, you’re likely to create the best summaries whilst your head is in the content.
SEO titles should be up to 50 characters, meta descriptions up to 150 – any longer and they risk being cut off in the search results.
5. Optimise your images
Whilst high-res images look great, the file sizes are huge – which will inevitably slow your site down. If your site takes longer to load, users are more likely to bounce, which can ultimately have a negative impact on your SEO.
In order to keep people engaged, take some time to resize and compress your images. Optimising your images takes a matter of minutes, and a quick Google search for image resizing will show tonnes of free sites you can use.
6. Use internal links
Once you’ve got people to your site, you want to keep them there. Using internal links is a key way to do this.
An internal link is a link from one page of your website to another page on your site. While internal links help users find relevant content on your site, they’re also really useful for helping search engines navigate your site.
This is because Google follows links to discover content on websites and rank the content on search. If a page has a lot of links pointing towards it – even internal links – then it’s a sign that it’s an important, high-value page.
However, make sure that you only use internal links when it’s valuable to the reader. If Google flags that you’re filling your articles with unnecessary internal links, then this may damage your SEO.
How can AI tools help?
Artificial intelligence has made leaps and bounds within the last couple of years, and the trend doesn’t show any sign of slowing.
It’s rightful to be wary of using these tools with content marketing – can a robot really evoke the same language and tone as a writer can? Creating content that is written entirely by AI should be avoided, but this doesn’t mean you can’t implement these tools in some shape or form.
To learn more about utilising AI in your written content, read our article on what AI means for the future of content marketing and SEO.
Optimising and formatting content from multiple contributors
Content will not always originate from the same person. You might get blog posts from your marketing team, other departments or freelancers outside of the business.
So, how do you ensure best SEO practice is followed every time?
The easiest way to maintain consistency is to create a template or a set of guidelines. That way, you can quickly communicate what you expect from each article and ensure nothing gets forgotten.
Here’s what we’d include in a typical template:
SEO title and meta description
We include this at the top of every single article, so it doesn’t get forgotten later. Be sure to include the character count, so the text doesn’t get cut off on search results.
Don’t be afraid to remind contributors that SEO titles and meta descriptions don’t just exist to summarise an article, they need to hook people into reading when they’re scrolling search results.
Call to action
Call to actions are a cornerstone of content marketing. You’ve done all the hard work writing and marketing an article and got potential customers to your site, so be clear about where the reader should go next.
And it’s useful to think about this earlier rather than later, because there might be a natural opportunity to link to that page within the text.
Keywords
The purpose of some of your articles will be to rank on search and drive organic traffic to your site. For these cases, include any target keywords that contributors should feature.
However, remember that ranking on search isn’t the be-all and end-all for every article. Blog posts based around stories or thought leadership aren’t usually focused on answering a question and therefore won’t necessarily get a lot of traffic from Google.
Instead, these posts will provide value in different ways – adding personality to your brand, building engagement on social media and positioning your business as a leader in the space.
Want to learn more about what we do? Visit our content strategy services page to see our work, or get in touch with one of the team to see how we can help your business.
