How Good Writing Can Take Your SEO to New Levels
SEO – writing for business. How do you balance your desire to rank well in the search engines, with the need to engage your visitors?
The answer is, good writing is right at the heart of search engine optimization (SEO), and by putting your human visitors at the centre of your offerings, you’ll also find you tick a lot of SEO boxes.
We’ve put together some simple techniques you can use to improve your writing while making sure you take care of the SEO essentials at the same time.
So, here are some simple things your writing can do that will help take your SEO writing for business to new levels.
Grab People’s Attention
Whatever it is you are writing about, there’s bound to be lots of competition out there. Whenever people come to your web page, they always have an alternative option, and if you don’t satisfy their needs early on in your content, then they will find a website that does.
You work extremely hard to bring people to your website, so you need people to engage with the content when they get there. Not only is this important for your conversion goals such as getting leads and making sales, but it’s also important for your SEO.
If Google sends people to your website, and those people only spend a few seconds on the page before bouncing back to the search results, then it’s going to send the signal that your content isn’t satisfying people’s needs.
The amount of time people spend on your page is known as dwell time and it will factor into your SEO. When you’re putting out great content though, people are naturally going to want to hang around and spend more time consuming it.
SEO – Writing for Business – What Can You Do?
There are some simple ways you can draw people into spending more time on your page and it all starts with the title. This is your first chance to create some excitement and entice your readers into committing to reading the content.
You’ve got about 15 seconds to grab someone’s attention, so you’ve got to act quickly. The main way you can do this is by providing an answer to people’s questions right away. For example, if people are coming to your site from the search query “when’s the next full moon,” don’t beat around the bush, give them a simple answer in the first paragraph.
Once you got their attention, that’s when you can start to expand on your answer and be a little bit more creative.
Another big thing that really puts people off is when they come to a page and see a massive wall of text. No matter how good a writer you are, you’ve still got to break things up, which you can do by adding videos, images, lots of headings, and short paragraphs.
- Use engaging titles to draw people in
- Answer the reader’s question early on
- Break the page up
- Make use of multimedia
Help Establish Expertise
We know that EAT (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) plays a big part in how Google decides which pages rank where, and your writing is essential for establishing the first part – expertise.
Google’s basic job is to send people to the page that best answers their query and the reason it’s so popular, and so widely used is because it does that job extremely well. This means that if you want to rank number one, then more often than not, you’ve got to write the best content out there.
You can do this by using your expert knowledge to create an amazing article that:
- Understands the questions/problems your target audience has.
- Answers those questions/ problems in depth.
- It is easy to consume.
- It gives people practical next steps to follow.
We might be talking about SEO here, but people are always at the centre of what you should be offering. It’s as much about how you present your knowledge as it is the knowledge itself, and this is where your writing comes in.
By using your expertise to effectively answer the questions of your target audience, you’re going to start finding yourself ranking for your keywords.
SEO – Writing for Business Solutions
A big part of being an expert is understanding what it is your audience needs. You need to have a clear picture of what your audience looks like, the questions they have, and how they want them to be answered.
There are lots of tools available that can help you do this such as Google Search Console, Moz, and Ahrefs, but sometimes the best way to do it is simply by getting feedback from your existing visitors and customers.
Once you’ve got the answer “straight from the horse’s mouth,” then it’s down to your writing to get your expertise across.
- Ask your audience about their questions/problems.
- Do keyword research to find popular search terms.
- Look at the top pages for your search terms, and find areas you can improve on the information to offer the most complete answer to the question.
- Always offer as much value as possible to the reader.
Help Build Your Authority
If your friend Bob tells you there’s going to be a blue moon tonight, then you might be inclined to believe him, or you may think he’s having you on. However, if you see NASA’s top scientist and the BBC weather forecaster are saying the same thing, then you’re going to get your telescope out and your camera ready.
Google works similarly. Just because you’re saying something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right, but the more experts they see agreeing with what you’re saying, the more likely they are to believe it. The way they judge this is by looking at the backlinks that link from other people’s websites back to yours.
The more links you have from other expert websites in your niche, the better your chances of ranking.
So, how can you go about building these links?
Well, when you’re putting out amazing content, you give people much more reason to link back to you.
Take the links in this article. We’ve linked to these sites because they offer valuable information from an authoritative source, but if the content wasn’t good, then we would have found different websites to link to.
If you’re going to grow your link profile organically, then you need to have good content, otherwise, there’s little reason for anyone to link to you.
Help Build Trust
‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’
(Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2)
William Shakespeare
Give people a reason to trust what you’re saying by including an author bio on your page with all your credentials. People will trust your content much more if there’s something that says “written by Bob, former NASA employee who has spent 20 years studying moon cycles” than they will if it just says “by Bob.”
Share your amazing content on your social media pages, send it to your email lists, share it on platforms like Medium, and get it in front of people. You never know who it might reach, and you never know who might link to it, so make sure you’re publicising it.
Once you get those first few links, you’ll have greater ranking ability, which brings more people to your page, getting you more links, so it’s a bit of a snowball effect.
Likewise, don’t be shy about link building. Write to people and say “I wrote this article on blue moons” and I’ve had a really great reaction to it, I was hoping you might want to link to it in your article about moon patterns.”
- Give people a reason to link to you by providing them with exceptional content.
- Share your articles on all your platforms.
- Don’t be afraid to reach out to people and open a dialogue about link building.
Takeaways for SEO Writing for Business
When people think about SEO they often think the important thing is pleasing Google, but it’s about pleasing the people. When the people are happy Google is happy, and when Google’s happy with you, that’s when they start sending you visitors.
If you’re going to please the people, then you’ve got to start taking your content seriously and focusing on your writing. When you go to a website, you want to have your question answered, and your website needs to do that for other people.
That question could be as simple as “how to put a shirt on” or as complex as “how to build a rocket that can take you to the moon,” the important thing is that you’re answering the questions your audience has.
The more you can do this, the more your visitors are going to engage with your pages, and the more inclined Google is going to be to send people to them.
If you found this article of help, and you’d like to discover more great tips for creating content for your websites, social media, and newsletters, I invite you to grab your copy of the “5 Best Content Creation Secrets” ebook.
Why not join us in the Content Creation Cafe private Facebook group, where we can help you with your content creation conundrums?
Bring a coffee, we’ll bring the expertise!
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