How to use SEO in content writing

If you’re like most business owners, you want to write great content that will help your website rank high in search engine results. Unfortunately, many business owners don’t know how to use SEO (search engine optimization) in their content writing to achieve this goal.

Creating great content is essential for any business, but it’s even more critical when trying to rank high in search engines. SEO can help your content reach a wider audience and increase the chance of you seeing increased traffic and sales. By following some simple tips and utilizing the right tools, you can ensure your content is optimized for search engine visibility and success.

Whether you’re using AI Writing Software or producing research-based content yourself SEO optimization must be there. SEO-optimized content enables search engine bots to understand what about your topic and what keywords you’re targeting.

In this article, I’ll provide a step-by-step guide on how to use SEO in content writing so that your website can get more traffic and better rankings.

Why is SEO important for content writing?

The scope of content writing in the world of digital marketing is vast and encompasses a range of topics from creating blog posts to social media updates. The question should not be why SEO is important for content writing, but why not? All written content eventually ends up on web pages and SEO is all about increasing the visibility of a website and its web page.

When combined with good content, SEO enables blog posts or articles to get more visibility on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) when people enter specific keywords.

As per some estimates, there are roughly 5.6 billion google searches per day. If you implement SEO into your content and write for a few of these search terms, you can get a good number of visitors to your website. But the importance of SEO for content writing is not limited to just gaining visitors.

With SEO content writing, you can build brand authority, increase brand awareness, build relationships with customers, generate new leads, and more. The primary goal of content writing is to connect with the target audience. Integrating SEO into content writing will ensure that your content will reach your target audience.

The question now is-

How to use SEO in content?

You do not use SEO in content. SEO is not a distinct activity; it is the process of optimizing websites, and content, and implementing digital marketing strategies to ensure that they meet the standards of the google algorithm and get a high ranking on SERP.

As such, you do not use the Search engine in content – rather, you optimize the content for the Search engine and write SEO-friendly content. So the question is “How do you Optimize Content?” rather than “How to use SEO in content?”

Regardless, the question remains “How?”

There are many ways to ensure that your content is well optimized for Search Engines. Some of the best methods to optimize your content for SEO are:

1) Write for the Audience

If you are a content writer, we no longer need to tell you this. Writing content for people is the golden rule of content writing that shall not be broken. Regardless of your content- article, caption, blog or marketing content, are to be written for the people.

By this, we mean that your content should be easy to understand and have adequate information regarding your content topic. If your content is hard to read, people will click off; if it doesn’t contain enough information, people will click off.

But isn’t writing content all about connecting with people? Besides connecting with people, your content needs to meet a few parameters in the Google algorithm and Crawlers to get a good ranking. However, the priority for your content should be your target audience.

2) Good Headings

There are different ways to attract your target audience to your content, and one of the most effective ways is by writing a good heading. Headings are among the most crucial elements in both attracting your target audience and letting the web crawlers know what your content is about.

Let’s be honest; you came here because you got curious about the content behind the heading, right? But suppose if the heading was something like “The process to integrate SEO into content writing” instead of what we have now, it would sound boring, and most of you would have just skipped it.

Make sure you’re using your blog headline attention-grabbing.

3) Proper Heading Tags

So here is the thing – if you are a pure content writer, you generally do not care about heading tags. It is not within your field, after all. But, if you write content for a website and know a bit about the interface, you should know a thing or two about heading tags.

In Layman’s terms, they are simply tags that separate headings and subheadings on a website. They rank in the order of importance that ranges from H1 to H6, with H1 being the primary heading tag. The greater the number, the lesser their importance.

Using proper heading tags is not just important for web crawlers; they help visitors as well. Using heading tags modifies the typography of the text and helps the visitors separate primary headings from subheadings.

4) Content Structure

Along with headings and heading tags, you also need to be careful about the structure of your content. As we said earlier, your content should be easy to read and understand. Take this one, for example; you can easily understand what we are talking about and even predict when the core content within a specific topic will change.

But imagine what would happen if we didn’t use any heading tags to separate the content, wrote all of this in one paragraph, and talked about everything at once? It would be nothing short of rambling that is hard to read and even harder to understand. The point is, you will ensure that the visitors will have an easier time going through it by structuring your content properly.

At the same time, the bots will also find it easier to go through your content. A well-structured content also makes it easier for the content writer to plant relevant keywords and heading tags while letting the content flow smoothly.

5) Relevant Keywords

As we discussed earlier, keywords are words that define your content’s core theme. In our context, the keywords are “Content, SEO, and Content writing” as this one is all about optimizing content for SEO. But if your content is about Jackets, using these ones will not do you any good.

The point is to do keyword research based on your content. There is a little bit of confusion regarding keywords, though. Many people think that content can only have one phrase as a keyword when in reality, it can have multiple. Furthermore, besides the primary keywords, there are LSI keywords as well. For those curious, LSI stands for Latent Semantic Index(ing) and is just words and phrases related to or similar to the primary keywords.

There are many SEO tools that make your keyword research process easy. The popular tools that people use are Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Keyword Tool Dominator

6) Keyword Density

Besides using appropriate keywords, if you want to optimize your content for SEO while keeping them readable for the audience, then you should be careful regarding the keyword density in your writing. In other words, we can also term this as:

“DO NOT USE KEYWORDS MORE THAN NECESSARY”, since overusing the same word can make the entire writing feel repetitive and somewhat annoying.

Not only is this annoying to people, but even the bots hate it, and the term is “Stuffing” or “Keyword Stuffing”. That said, there is a general rule of thumb or a general ratio. The ratio is roughly 10 keywords per 100 words. But this is only for the bots. If it sounds bad, then you are free to half the amount, and your content will still be good for SEO.

7) Image Optimization

As it is said, pictures are worth a thousand words. However, when it comes to SEO writing, images are worth a few keywords. Humans are visual creatures, and adding images to your content is a great way to keep them engaged. Besides a few types of content, such as research papers and novels, images are always a welcome sight in content.

But, if you want to optimize your content, you can’t just use any ordinary image. Your image should be relevant, copyright free, high-quality, and have a small file size, preferably under 100KB. Along with this, you also use the appropriate title for the image and alt_text.

Some of you may ask, “Why to go through all this hassle?” The simple answer is “to get your content ranked on SERP through images”. When you have an image, the search engine algorithms scan the images and use the Alt_text, title, and captions to rank them on the image section of the search engine.

Therefore, optimizing images in your content will not only make it look aesthetically better but also aid in search engine rankings.

8) Links

So now you have decently written content with appropriate keywords and images; what should you do next? Insert links, of course. If someone is interested in content on a website, they will naturally want to read more from the same source than having to search for more separately. You can easily keep your visitors engaged by inserting links to other relevant articles within your website.

Along with this, you can also use links to redirect your visitor to another content with details on a particular important phrase or your service page. At the same time, you can also use linking to promote other content creators by linking their articles.

Linking is useful to keep your readers engaged and provide them with additional information. The more time visitors spend on your website through content, the better optimized it is for SEO.

9) Optimize your Abstract

This one might be a bit easier for you since we optimize abstracts for a lot of things, including school projects. In fact, writing abstract is a part of most school curricula. The good news is that optimizing the abstract of your content for SEO is exactly the same as writing an abstract for your school project.

Your abstract should be around 150 words long and contain your content’s core theme. The only additional step you need to do for content is to ensure that you have a keyword in your abstract.

The keyword is for the google algorithm to know that your abstract matches the rest of your content. The rest of the abstract is to give your visitors a quick glimpse into the content.

10) Grammar and Plagiarism

Nobody likes to read content with bad grammar, which is a fact. Would you like it if the content had sentences like “The one we are writing right this instant?”

The answer is obviously “No”. Content with bad grammar is difficult to read and understand. Along with this, minor spelling mistakes can also ruin a perfectly good keyword. Content with improper grammar is ignored by the algorithm as well. Content may have great keyword placement, good content, and even great image optimization – but bad grammar can ruin it all.

Along with this, there is the issue of plagiarism as well. Stolen content is always under the constant threat of being struck by DMCA copyright actions. Now while the reader may not recognize the plagiarism, unless the content is plagiarized from an obvious source, the web crawlers will. If such a thing happens, the content is immediately downgraded on the list.

Now, we understand that depending on the content, sometimes it is nearly impossible to keep it completely plagiarism free, especially for technical and historical content. Parts of content like quotes from renowned people and technical phrases will be the same. However, both people and web crawlers forgive these minor instances.

In Conclusion,

There are many things you can do to use SEO in content writing. In fact, you must integrate the process of Search Engine Optimization into content writing if you are writing for a website through the methods we mentioned above. While there are a lot more ways to optimize your content besides the ones we mentioned here, we have covered the overall gist.

That said, you must never forget that the primary purpose of any form of content is to connect with your target audience and ensure that they find value in your content. Once you write content that can provide value, then it’s time to integrate SEO into it to make it visible to the target audience.