As mentioned in our previous article, What is SEO?, Search Engine Optimization is a process of affecting the visibility of a website or web page in a search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results. In the last article, we mentioned two ways to improve your search result rank: keywords and heading tags. Keywords should be valued for any content that you create in the future, including content writing. 

An SEO content marketer’s job is to optimize your website for search engines and make it easy for users to find your content. This includes creating meta descriptions and titles that are compelling and keyword-rich, ensuring that the website has good site architecture, using appropriate keywords on each page, and providing links back to other pages on the site.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a form of internet marketing that helps businesses promote their products and services in a way that is valuable for the customer. Content is usually written by the business or its employees, or outsourced to freelance writers.

The idea behind content marketing is that it builds trust between the business and its customers, which leads to more sales. It also helps companies reach new audiences and generate more leads.

According to Hubspot, there are several types of content:

• Blog posts – Entertaining or informative articles like this one.
• Case studies – An example used to demonstrate a premise or principle
• Infographics – It’s in the name. Informational graphics like charts and images.
• Videos – Video increases search results by 157% according to Brightcove.
• Podcasts – Professional and/or entertaining discussions on specific topics
• Social media – One of the most popular ways to share content

For the purpose of this article, we mainly want to focus on blog posts and general text on any given page of your website. After all, your clients or potential customers are likely visiting your website to browse videos, photos, and/or text. As mentioned above, compelling and informative text is what will keep your users on your site for long periods of time with a desire to return for more. Need some assistance with Content Marketing?

How to quickly and easily write a blog…

Blog, short for weblog, is one of the best ways to reach a wider audience. Arguably, the most difficult part about blog writing is choosing a topic. Keywords are a great way of making your job a bit easier. Let’s demonstrate this with an example. 

Let’s say your website’s main function is to advertise a local pet store. If you are an employee or manager of a pet store, there’s a good chance that you are already an authority on pet-related topics and could likely write fantastic articles about pet health, safety, or even toys. However, you could also be a complete novice and write an article. Imagine that! First thing’s first: Head on over to Google and search for one of your chosen keywords followed by the word “articles.” As an example, the result for “pet articles” provides a seemingly infinite amount of articles related to pets. It’s so simple to borrow any of the article titles and then write your own based on the information from that article. That being said, be careful not to plagiarize. We aren’t trying to steal content. We are fishing for ideas and related information. 

Not a great writer? That’s fine! There is a multitude of fantastic writing tools out there like Quillbot’s Paraphraser, Grammarly, and Hemmingway. It may take a bit of time and effort, but you’ll be able to write a top-notch article in no time at all.

Content Readability

According to Yoast, an SEO industry standard WordPress plugin, Google does take readability into account when ranking webpages. When optimizing search results, it is important to keep in mind that most people read at an average level. However, like everything else in life and SEO, this idea is still relative. After all, an audience full of physicists isn’t necessarily going to want to read an elementary school level post. In reverse, an article about “top dollhouses” probably shouldn’t try to rank keywords like “isometric structure.”  These may be extreme or comical cases, but it still makes the point. 

While there are many factors that contribute to an article’s ranking on Google, readability plays an important role. The general rule of thumb is to mainly write in a conversational tone. 

Determine your article’s reading level by checking Yoast’s plugin on WordPress or an equivalent. If not using Yoast or WordPress, there are also free sites that provide similar information, such as Readability Formulas. This article was marked as a high school level, which is likely perfect. We want to be as inclusive as possible so that we don’t discourage a significant portion of our audience. You should aim to do the same with yours.

More Keywords

After having a well-written article, what’s the next step in the process? You guessed it… more keywords! It is possible and even likely that you already inserted a few of your keywords in the blog. Pet store owner options like “best pet shop in Horry County,” “retractable leashes for dogs,” and “pet toys” could be considered helpful keywords for your blog. Regardless of which words or keyphrases you choose, be sure that they are on-topic and what your potential customers might ask our worldwide, mutual friend, Google.

Always use the appropriate heading tags. Your website editor will likely provide a service that allows you to easily select if your heading will contain an h1, h2,h3, or h4 tag. Remember, each page or blog article should only contain one h1 tag, and that will likely be the topic/title of the article. In this article that you are currently reading, the h1 tag is “What is Content Writing? Blog Tips & Tricks.” All of the headings underneath are h2 tags because we believe them to hold equal importance. Not only will Google recognize “Content Writing” as a keyword, but the algorithm will also notice “What is Content Writing” and “Blog Tips & Tricks.” A triple whammy! Be careful though, as Google does not typically respond well to long titles. It’s best to keep them as short as possible while still mentioning the keywords that you want to rank.

Link your website to the world…

There’s one more critical suggestion we have for you when writing a blog article. Links have an appropriate name as they will link your site and page to the rest of the internet. If Google notices many links from different sources pointing to a specific page, then it will likely increase that page’s level of importance relating to your selected keywords. Not all links are created equal since each website has a certain amount of authority on any given topic. Linking an irrelevant website like IGN to a local pet store’s website isn’t going to do much for your search engine optimization. Many SEO specialists call this concept “link juice,” but we will tackle that topic in more detail in another article. The important thing is that you link your article to a relevant and important page on your website. You’ll notice that we’ve already directed you to a previous blog article, and have even provided links to third-party sites. If you follow suit, just be sure to adjust the link so that it opens in a new tab of the browser. We do this so that the user can view the linked webpage while the original blog article stays open. After all, we don’t exactly want clients leaving our website in a hurry, do we? Most popular website editors have dedicated features to open a new tab. Otherwise, you set your target attribute to blank. You can find a quick tutorial.

To Summarize:

1. Find a topic by searching Google, keyword planners, and article aggregators in order to choose a relevant, entertaining, and informative keyword/title. 
2. Write an authoritative and well-written article for your potential customers and add it to your website. Using Quillbot’s Paraphraser or similar tools should be helpful.
3. Reread and rewrite the article by injecting your targeted product or service’s keywords.
4. Use appropriate heading tags and insert internal links pointed toward your homepage or an equally important or relevant page to the article.