SEO Content Writing Tips For Faster Google Rankings
Looking for the best SEO content writing tips for Faster Google rankings? These tips are proven to work. These are the eight proven steps that I use on a daily basis.
When you think of online writing or even marketing in general, do you think SEO? You should. Here's why.
Google is the most visited online platform in the world. Google processes over 40, 000 searches every second, which is actually 3.5 billion searches per day.
The amount of people using Google every day is staggering. I am able to rank my clients blogs over the past five years and help them to become SEO experts.
This client ranks for thousands of organic keyword positions and those inbound rankings bring us 4,000 site visitors per day.
In this blog I'm going to share with you eight tips that will really help your writing get to the top of Google. Consider these your ultimate SEO content writing tips for now and in the future.
Write to the right people with targeted keywords
Your site content won't reach the right people if you're not targeting the right terms. And by targeted keywords, I mean terms that your audience is actively searching for on Google.
So, it's why you need to understand your buyer, who they are, what problems they have and why they are looking for these terms.
Then you need to know the exact terms they're looking up online and don't leave that up to guesswork. My favorite tools are SEM Rush and Spyfu, for looking up accurate keyword data.
Focus on a readability
SEO content that shoots to the top of SERPs is incredibly readable. When your audience clicks your link, every element on that page should keep them there.
The content should be engaging enough to grab and hold their interest and really provide value and when they stay and read, that makes your page look great to Google.
It tells Google: "Hey, this was relevant to the searcher, because they found the content they were looking for."
This ranking signal is called dwell time and it's basically from the point of time we click on a result to when you go back to search results in Google.
So, how do we create breathable content. Readability can be defined as clarity of your content. It should be super clear content, it should command a clear voice, and it should be organised.
I like to think of my blogs as many books and I like to organise them and structure them in a way that's readable. This also means logic and simplicity. Your content needs to be logical but also simple.
So, just remember to be readable, the content on your site must be understandable. And I'll leave some examples of extremely readable content from some of my favorite blogs, Search Engine Journal, Copyblogger and Elegant Themes blog.
Go deeper in your content
A really big SEO trend for 2020 and beyond is to go deeper and further into a topic.
According to industry thought leader Eric Andy, Google is intensifying its focus on the quality of content.
Here's what Andy said in a recent Search Engine Journal article: “We tracked the SEO performance of a number of different sites, the sites that provided exceptional depth in quality content coverage, literally soared in rankings throughout the year; sites that were weaker in their content depth, suffered in comparison.”
So, according to Andy, this trend is only going to continue. Knowing that, how can we go about creating deeper content and writing long-form content? The sweet spot here is content with 2,000 or more words that explore topics, have many different facets, and create great ultimate guides that go further than surface level research.
So, instead of just quickly Googling for statistics, dig deeper.
Improve your page speed
A really simple way to improve your SEO content ranking today would be to increase your page speed.
The slower your page loads the more frustrated your end user gets and especially today, no one wants to just sit there and wait for a site to load.
And studies show this is true; according to a BBC news report, shoppers won't wait more than three seconds for a page to load.
When they're looking up a retail product, research from the Nielsen Norman group has found that most people leave your site completely, if they're waiting 10, 20 seconds for it to load.
So, make sure you don't have a lot of pop-ups, scripts, code pieces, JavaScript, heavy videos that are slowing down your site speed. Invest in a good web designer or developer to help you with your web presence.
Visuals matter
Mark Schafer thought leader and the author of the new book “Marketing Rebellion”, recently made great points. Today's content should be artisanal, that means it should be hand-crafted and what better content to have hand-designed and created than your images.
All of the blog content is actually hand-drawn on paper and then created in an Adobe program by our full-time designer.
You can find great designers on places like upwork.com, fiverr.com and studies have shown that articles with images get 94% more views than articles without.
But today crummy stock photos are just not going to cut it, you need to have really good well-designed images to stand out.
So, compliment copy with great images and you'll see more SEO success.
Provide facts (and probably cite them)
This goes back to a point we made in the third point about going deeper in your content, but I thought this point deserved its own little soapbox.
So, today the internet has made it really easy for anyone to say anything without backing up outlandish claims.
So, it's actually a differentiation point to go straight to an original study and pull an awesome statistics fact that you've properly cited and include those in your content.
So, the key for that trustworthy factor in SEO content is going to be research.
Format your online content for the featured snippets:
Featured snippets are getting a ton of attention in Google lately and this will only increase, so these are little blocks of information that literally appear in Google search results, when someone asks Google a question.
So, featured snippets get the first spot in Google above organic results, this is a hugely desirable place for your content to rank.
To increase the likelihood of your content getting sniffed for Google here are a few things to know:
- Answer questions definitively in your content either final answer.
- Make your content the highest quality possible readable, well-written full of statistic and thorough.
- Use numbered and bulleted lists.
That format will actually show up in the snippets. We see a lot of number and bulleted lists in the snippets, also include statistics and data and structure your content and logically.
So, if I am writing ultimate guide, I like to come up with a table of contents, that tells the reader what they're in for, so I'll create that and then put it at the top of my blog before the intro.
I'll link to Brian Dean Content Writing Formula where you can see that in action.
And sometimes the table of contents is what gets indexed in the featured snippets.
Be the expert
So these days, people are really valuing that expert or authority authorship in content more than ever before. And this goes back to the consistency of your content, and how often you show up.
Your content can position you over time as an expert, if you stick with it and reputation also matters.
So, in Google's recently updated search quality, evaluate the guidelines. The creator of that content and their history both relate to that page’s rankings.
So, reputation evidence can include these things.
First personal experience, you've been practicing your trade for 10 years. Let's say you talk about horseback riding, maybe you own a ranch, you did that for 10 years, or you've written a book. You speak on your topic and check what the wider web thinks about you and says online. That includes reviews, forum posts, and ratings.
So, the content you need to create to position yourself as an expert, is an About page that has thorough detailed information of your career, your expertise, what you're good at, what you've done for clients, how long you've been doing it along with dates.
You also need to make sure you have bio pages, set up your blog and if you guess blog, make sure you have strong bios for your guest blogs as well.
So, that's it! Those are my eight key tips for SEO rankings with your writing in 2020 and beyond. If you've any questions about any of these points, feel free to drop them in the comments below, so I will get back to you. And if you want to learn SEO fast and effectively this blog post will help you.