10 SEO Writing Rules You Should Always Follow

EDITOR’S NOTE: We know that SEO writing is an important part of being able to rank on Google without sacrificing the user experience on your website. The better your SEO writing skills are, the more likely it will be that people click over to your website when they see it appear in search engine results. This blog post by Rock Content breaks down 10 ways you can improve your SEO writing skills. You want to make sure that your website contains all the usual SEO rules: has a solid SEO strategy that follows best practices and links to high quality sites. What sets apart great SEO writing, is the ability to not only please Google’s algorithm, but humans too! Tell a story, and make it easy on the eye. Instead of walls of text, break it up with interactive content. If you have any questions about SEO or want us to take care of it for you, reach out to us at Prebuilt Sites or The BBS Agency. We’d love to help you out!

Getting organic traffic is an important part of any Digital Marketing strategy. And the best way to increase your traffic is by getting better rankings on Google.

A solid SEO strategy will help you with that, but there’s more than applying on-page and off-page SEO rules to your blog.

SEO writing is a must, and it will guarantee that you’re not neglecting the user experience in your pages. After all, the page experience is one of the most important ranking factors.

If you want to better understand SEO writing, keep reading!

What Is SEO Writing?

SEO writing is a way to write content so that it is easy for search engines to see what the content pertains to and whether it is of high quality.

Google, for example, uses “spiders” that crawl content to see what it’s about. During this crawl, they learn a lot about the web page by the language used on it.

SEO writing optimizes the content on the page so that search engines will more easily crawl its content and judge it favorably. When it is judged more favorably, it is given a better placement in the SERP.

If the content is created without SEO writing, it may not come across as search engine friendly, and the crawlers may not even figure out what the page is about.

Why Is Writing for SEO Important?

SEO writing is done to help content rank better on Google. If the content is not optimized, it will come up several pages back in a search.

And why is it so important to get on that first page?

A study found that the number of clicks that pages get depends not only on getting onto that first page of search results, it also depends greatly on getting as high up on that page as possible.

The first result on the first page gets clicked on by more than 28% of people doing the searching. After that first result, the percentages go down with each spot on the page. So you need your site to be one of the first results that people see.

Writing for SEO is also important because it is a marketing technique that keeps going for the life of your website.

Many people do well with PPC advertising, but if they stop paying for that advertising, it will no longer bring traffic.

Good SEO content keeps working for your website no matter what else you do to market your site.

What Are The Basics of SEO Writing?

SEO writing is fairly straightforward, but it isn’t always easy to do.

There is no magic formula for ranking the best in search engine results, but there are several parts of the Google algorithm that we do know about. Content should be written with those aspects in mind in order to rank better.

One of the most important aspects of SEO writing is using the proper keywords. This means knowing what people are searching for when they are looking for sites like yours.

This requires the SEO copywriter to do some keyword research and create a list of words and phrases that need to be included.

It’s also important to use a lot of related words in the content. That means words that go well with the keywords that were researched.

Google looks at whether there are a lot of words related to the main keywords to be sure of what the content is about.

Using these related words is called latent semantic indexing, and it helps tremendously with SEO.

The crawlers also assess whether the content is written for an audience or purely for SEO.

This is why SEO copywriters have to avoid keyword stuffing — or putting the same keywords in over and over again so that the content isn’t suitable for a human audience.

The balance that must be struck is for the content to appeal to human readers as well as search engine spiders.

The use of complex language is another factor in search engine crawls. If the language is too simple and uses too few unique words, it is not assessed as being of high value.

SEO writing has to flow well and be complex enough to impart a lot of information on its topic while using language naturally.

What Is an SEO Copywriter?

An SEO copywriter is a writing specialist that uses the known aspects of search engine rankings to create content that is well optimized for them.

They must deeply understand Google’s ranking factors, as well as the best practices to use in a text. The know-how on on-page SEO is also expected since this person will be responsible for optimizing the articles.

The language used must be straightforward enough for human readers to connect with it. The copywriter must use keywords throughout, but also use them in a natural fashion.

What Skills Should an SEO Copywriter Have?

An SEO copywriter should understand how to write content with a unique voice and a writing style that flows well.

They should know exactly who the intended audience will be so that they can factor that into the way the copy is written.

The copywriter needs to know what the competition is doing with its copy, and should be able to do a quick research and see what it will take to rank well for a page of content.

They need to be able to write in a persuasive tone so that the copy will convert, and also need to have enough creativity to come up with new content topic ideas, especially for blogs.

A good SEO copywriter will also understand the basics of latent semantic indexing to further boost the position of the content. They have to be able to pack text with as much information as possible to provide a good experience for both readers and search engine crawlers.

An SEO copywriter also has to stay up on all the new changes to search engine algorithms that are announced.

Periodically, there will be changes in the algorithm to make one aspect of content more important than before. An SEO copywriter has to stay on top of these changes so that they can be integrated into his work.

10 Must-Follow SEO Writing Rules

1. Write for Humans

Know your audience and write for them.

SEO copywriting is only one part of SEO. Another important part is backlinking. The content you write must attract backlinks from other sites in order to improve its SEO.

Therefore, the copy that you write has to be written for a human audience first. If it sounds too robotic or is keyword-stuffed, few sites will want to link to it later.

2. Understand Google’s Algorithm

Understand the latest algorithms of Google. As the largest search engine, it is important to know how to drive more traffic to your blog.

They tweak their search algorithm regularly so that the best-quality pages get ranked more highly. Google is concerned about wanting the search engine to be as effective as possible.

When you understand all that the search engines are looking for, you can better deliver it.

3. Know How to Find Keywords

You have to know how to perform keyword research and how to pick the best keywords for the content you’re writing.

This includes being able to assess how popular the main keyword is and how to choose long-tail keywords.

Often, the main keywords for a topic have far too much competition for the first few places in search engine results.

This makes it necessary to go for keywords that have a lower search volume. An SEO copywriter has to be able to assess the amount of competition for each word or phrase and choose the best ones to use.

4. Write Long Content

The Google Panda 4.1 algorithm update was put in place to reward longer, more informative content and to penalize thin content.

A good rule of thumb is to have each page contain at least 1,000 words of high-quality content. Shorter pages may simply not have enough complexity for the current algorithms.

Writing longer content also gives you the freedom to serve up information in a number of ways such as lists and tables.

You need to pack a lot of information into each page, and having some varied methods of presenting information can be helpful to both people and search engines.

5. Make Every Sentence Unique

Search engine algorithms all reward unique content. If parts of a page are copied from another web page, it may get marked as spam and given a poor ranking.

Using sites like Copyscape can help you to make sure that every part of your SEO copy is unique.

If you find any duplicates, reword those parts while keeping the copy sounding natural.

6. Use Related Words

The latest algorithms look for common words that accompany the keywords that you use.

That lets the search engine know that the content is really about that topic. It usually isn’t necessary to research which accompanying words to use, as they are generally the basic words that something about that topic would use.

If you aren’t sure how to use these companion words, study up latent semantic indexing and put that knowledge to use.

7. Link to High-Quality Sites

Using links as information citations is a common way to show where the information came from.

However, your site should not be using information from low-quality sites. If you have links to spammy sites, the information on your page will be assumed to be spammy as well.

Always link to high-level websites that are popular in their own right.

The overall goal of search engines is to make good information universally available. When you link to good sites, you show search engines that you are connected to other sites and that you get your information from useful sites.

8. Use Varied Content Types

A great web page may include a number of different ways to impart information. These often include other types of media to back up and expand on the information in the text.

The use of videos on the page is excellent for this purpose. Using helpful pictures is also useful to readers.

Too much gray text can be hard for people to read. Breaking it up makes it flow better and allows for easier reading.

9. Write Meta Information

Every piece of content needs meta tags and a meta description. This allows search engines to display a short description of the content you created.

You also need a title tag that will be displayed as the title of the page. This should be no longer than about 70 characters. his is the maximum allowed for titles by Google.

The meta description should be no longer than 160 characters. If you aren’t up on basic HTML, learn some of the basics so that you can create these valuable pieces for your content.

10. Use Plenty of Subheadings

No matter how narrow your topic is, it can be broken up with subheadings. This also allows you to have your keywords where they are prominent.

Subheadings help to break up the text, and they make it easier for readers to find exact the information they are looking for.

In SEO writing, you need to consider the goals set for your strategy and the ranking factors of search engines.

However, writing content is much more of a process to meet user demand than SEO requirements.

When you provide a qualified and unique experience of reading and visiting the page, with high-quality content, it automatically favors the position of your page in the SERPs.

An SEO strategy needs to be mature in order to work well. Take our SEO Maturity Assessment and identify where to focus efforts to evolve to the next stage on the maturity curve!

Originally posted on Rock Content.