A Detailed Guide on Creating SEO-Friendly Content

How do you think – is it worth your time to create content that generates no traffic to your blog?

Apparently, content that brings zero results doesn’t make any sense in terms of your content marketing strategy. This content should be stopped producing or it must be optimized.

Consequently, you must apply SEO fundamentals that would improve your content and let you boost more traffic to your web-resource.

This guide will help you get familiar with 10 useful tips for creating SEO-friendly content.

SEO-Copywriting Basics You Should Know

First and foremost, “SEO-copywriting” is not the type of activity that is based on some technical aspects. It doesn’t require any in-depth SEO knowledge and there is nothing super-hard to deal with.

SEO-copywriting is an ordinary process of writing content that would engage with a certain target audience, rank well on Google, and accomplish one of the marketing funnel’s stages such as conversion.

To make sure your SEO-copywriting efforts are not in vain, you must follow your business objectives and needs.

Now, let’s review 10 tips that will help you in creating SEO-friendly content.

1. Search Intent Is Your Priority Number One

SEO-copywriting principles start with following search intent. Search intent is what your target audience wants to get by typing inquiries inĀ  Google. It is not just predicting what people want to find in search but how it might be understood from a content standpoint

  • Type (blog articles, product, categories)

Let’s say you’re exploring an inquiry “toyota camry 2020”, you will get the eCommerce category pages mostly:

Search Intent Is Your Priority Number One

But if you type “best toyota models”, you will see the lists articles and ordinary blog posts:

best toyota models

  • Format (reviews, how-to/news articles, lists posts)

If you’re searching for “saint valentine’s day gifts ideas”, Google will provide you with the lists blog posts:

Format

  • Angle

The content angle should follow your selling objectives. For instance, by searching a query “how to play dominoes”, you will get the results of blog posts oriented to people who have no idea how to play this game:

angle

2. Conduct a Top-Ranking Pages Analysis for Creating Content

Google always tries to provide people with the most relevant results per their requests. And it brings to the forefront the best content only.

However, how to force Google to put your content on the first page of the search?

By covering the topics Google wants to see. In other words, you must analyze top-pages in SERP and align your content with the formats suggested.

Let’s assume you decided to write a post on “best content marketing techniques.” Google suggests a bunch of articles on this topic. You can see that each post has a different number of techniques included:

Creating Content

Your task is to review all the techniques mentioned in these posts and create a comprehensive “lists” article that would include some new techniques.

3. Always Include a Table of Contents

Nobody likes to waste time. Especially busy people who live with the statement “time is money” in their heads.

You must respect your target audience’s time and try to save it. Therefore, there is no better solution on how to do this than creating a table of contents:

Always Include a Table of Contents

A table of contents allows people to see if they could find solutions to the issues they have with the help of your content.

4. Don’t Forget to Add Links During Writing Your Content

Links are one of the ranking factors Google draws attention to. Hence, your task is to analyze why people link to the specific pages and what you’ll get when someone links to your piece of content back.

The best way to clarify this question is by reviewing the “SERP overview” report exploring the topic you would like to cover. For instance, you want to write a post on “email marketing tips”:

Add Links During Writing Your Content

As you can see, this topic is quite competitive because you will need lots of domains that would refer to your piece of content.

But why did these top-results get so many references?

To find out you should analyze the “Anchors” report that you can find using Site Explorer from Ahrefs:

Anchors

This report will let you know what simple and long-tail keywords the author uses in the content.

5. Write Easily Readable Content

When you write a piece of content, you should keep in mind that half of the US population read below an 8th-grade reading level.

Use simple words, short sentences, and stay away from huge passages. Make sure your content would be easy to read for your kids.

Advice – try not to write but to communicate with your target audience. It will pay off.

6. Boost CTR With Using a Couple of Title Tag’s Tricks

If you want to get “clicks”, you should be able to write “clickable” title tags. And here is a couple of tricks that will help you optimize your title tags:

  • Include power words

The idea behind using “power words” is to trigger emotions. Let’s say you’ve created a standard title tag like “5 ways to tighten a belt”. It sounds pretty generic and doesn’t trigger any emotions. However, if you add some power words, your title tag will look more compelling and actionable – “5 exceptional ways to tighten a belt.”

  • Add the year to your title tags

When you are searching for “best summer resorts to attend”, you want to get the latest trends on this topic. The search engine tries to provide you with the freshest results and suggests up to date content.

Consequently, you should add the year to the title tag description that would look in the following manner “best summer resorts to attend 2020.”

7. Speak With Your Audience the Same Language

Understanding the language of your target audience is one of the rules for creating engaging content.

Let’s say, you’re writing a blog post about wrestling. In this case, you must never use the term “leotard” in the context of wrestling. The correct term that should be used is “singlet” – a standard uniform that wrestles wear during their competitions.

In other words, you must understand the topic you’re writing about enough. If you lack some information, you can explore topic-related forums, communities and get familiar with the terminology people use.

8. PAS Formula

Every email you receive starts with an introduction part that is supposed to take your attention and force you to read the whole message.

The same happens with any blog post you produce. If the intro is not worth your readers’ attention, nobody is going to read the whole piece of content.

Due to this fact, if you want to write a catchy introduction to every post you create, you should apply a PAS (Problem-Agitate-Solve) formula. It works simply:

1) Find the problem

For instance, you found the problem and you know that “Newbies marketers don’t know how to do keywords research properly.”

2) Agitate this problem

You go into the problem and agitate it further “Marketers don’t know how to prioritize keywords effectively.”

3) Suggest a solution

Your solution to this problem is “Fortunately, this guide will help you find our how to do keywords research step-by-step.”

9. Add CTAs Within Your Content

Whatever content you publish on your blog, it must be aligned with each stage of a marketing funnel.

As you know, a standard marketing funnel consists of four stages. According to the specific stage, a blog post must include different call-to-action words. Now, let’s review each stage:

  1. Awareness – this stage works for letting people know about your brand recognition. You should try to find the issues your target audience might have.
  2. Interest – you must kindle your target audience’s interest and show that you have a solution for the problem
  3. Consideration – persuade your target audience that your solution is the only one that can help resolve the existing problem.
  4. Conversion – this stage is all about a final argument that convinces people to purchase your product.

10. ASMR Formula

ASMR formula helps you create content that would be convenient to read. It consists of:

  • Annotations (add various side-notes, short annotations throughout the text)
  • Short sentences (split long sentences using different parenthesis like “Hence”, “Moreover”, “However”, etc.)
  • Multimedia (avoid making your content boring by mixing it with images, infographics, charts, videos, etc.)
  • Read what you’re writing for yourself (thus, you will see if the post is readable enough)

To Sum Up

Don’t delude yourself – creating SEO-friendly content is not all about getting to Google’s first page. It is more related to producing well-optimized content that moves your potential leads through a funnel and generates traffic.

Therefore, if you know how to create SEO-friendly content, you can be sure that your content marketing strategy is at the top level.

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