SEO Content: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Content

SEO content is necessary to optimize the page for a specific group of search queries. These texts are found on the pages of service websites or product categories in online stores. SEO-optimized text is distinguished by the presence of included keywords (user requests), which are used to promote the page. How to create SEO content and use it successfully for the website?

What Is SEO Content?

SEO content is designed to attract organic traffic due to a high ranking in search engines. If you understand SEO content, you can apply it anywhere: a blog, a landing page, or a product page. It all depends on where you want to place your content and what you want to get from it.

Why Is SEO Content Important?

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website. Search optimization is aimed exclusively at organic traffic and has vast potential.

You want to attract any user who could benefit from what you offer on your website. This includes people who aren’t looking for your product or need to know it exists. But SEO content can also attract them.

SEO is about understanding what users are looking for so you can plan content that provides those specific answers. But most importantly, you need to know how they search. Even the best content is only valuable if search engines can show it to your target audience. If you know how to write content SEO, you will help search engines do their job.

In the long run, you need high-quality, reader-oriented texts that follow SEO principles to deliver the desired results and satisfy your target audience’s needs.

Types of SEO Content

SEO content may include the following:

Product pages are the bread and butter of any retail e-commerce site. A good product page can serve as both SEO content and a PPC landing page.
Blog posts. A blog is one of the easiest ways to create a regular stream of SEO content. Blog posts are more attractive and attract more backlinks than product pages, so they can significantly increase your site’s authority.
SEO articles. Consider a news article, an interview, or a thematic article. This is the primary type of content you’ll find on most newspaper or magazine sites.
Lists. A list is just an article but formatted as a list. For example, “100 things I hate on Google”. These names also seem more clickable in search results or social networks.
Guides. A guide is a kind of SEO website content explaining how to do something in detail. You can publish the complete manual on your website, requiring visitors to fill out a registration form to read the full guide. This can be an excellent way to get leads, but keep in mind that installing a registration wall will likely reduce the amount of SEO traffic you can drive to this guide.
Video. In general, there are fewer videos on the Internet than pages of text. Therefore, it may be easier to rank a competitive keyword on the first page by creating a video instead of an article. Depending on the type of website or business you are running, video can be a great way to engage your audience. Consider creating video tutorials on how to use your products. Or illustrate a process related to your business – for example, a plumber can make a video showing how to unclog a sink.
Infographics or large-format images that contain a lot of data (often in the form of graphs or charts) on one topic can get a lot of page views and links. However, since most of the content is embedded in the image and cannot be read by search engines as text, optimizing the rest of the page carefully is essential.
Slide show. A slideshow is a way of displaying a series of related images. Sometimes pictures are more important than text – say, you’re trying to show what all the stars wore to the Oscars. Again, optimizing your title and image file names is essential because search engines “read” them.
Glossaries. More people use Google to look up terms than a dictionary. A well-written glossary can be an excellent way to attract search traffic if you work in a specialized industry. Think of cooking conditions, medical conditions, fashion, and architectural conditions.
Catalogs. The directory is a helpful taxonomy of links to sites or resources on a given topic. For example, a blog about perfumery can create a catalog of places where you can buy perfume, from large department stores to independent shops across the country.

These are just some of the main types of content in SEO, but don’t let this list limit you – the possibilities are virtually endless.

Using Keywords in Content Writing

A keyword is a word in the text that, together with other keys from the text, can give an understanding of what the text is about. By keywords, search engines determine how relevant the material is to the user’s request.

Optimizing one text for all your topic requests is impossible at once. Analyze what and how the user searches most often. Identify his needs. Explore search queries. And then collect the semantic core for future material. The semantic core is a list of key phrases.

How to use keys from the semantic core in the text?

It is enough to insert the phrase into the text once.
Words can be inflected and interchanged.
You can use other words to make the key look natural.
Prepositions and conjunctions do not affect the key – they can be removed or added.
It is undesirable to separate the key with a comma, and it is impossible to separate it with a period.
The phrase should be natural.

What Should Be the Structure of SEO Content

Heading H1

Each article on your portal should have a clear structure. The article should have an H1 heading. It is the only one on the page and is usually placed above the article. The title should contain the main key that you optimize your page for.

Meta Tag Title

The meta title is another mandatory element of content writing. This is an alternative name for the material displayed in the open browser tab. Search engines also consider it and, therefore, must contain the main keys from the semantic core.

The content of the H1 header and the title tag must be different. But they should not contradict each other. If their content is the same, search engines may consider the site a dishonest resource and pessimize it.

Meta Tag Description

This is a description of the site page. Its content does not directly affect the site’s position in the search results. Search engines often consider the description text when generating snippets in the output. A snippet is a short explanation of each search result. The better it describes the page’s content, the higher the probability that the user will go to this page. This tag enables search engines to index and ranks a site or page quickly.

Completing the description tag does not significantly affect the ranking of the site. It was pointed out that when filling in this tag, the rank of the site in the Google system increased. For example: after filling in the description tag for each page, traffic to the site from this search system increased by 20%.

It is essential that the content of the description tag should not coincide with the H1 heading and the title tag. Otherwise, its content will be ignored by the search engine.

Lists

Search engines love lists. When creating lists, use HTML tags. Do not write item numbers manually. Otherwise, the search engine will not understand that this is a list. It is recommended to use at least one of the lists in the article – marked or numbered.

However, do not forget that people will read your article. And if it is not possible to make a list, it should not be forcibly drawn up. The text must be natural and easy to read.

Headings and Subheadings

We said it is essential to fill in the H1 header – the title of the entire article. Equally important is the competent use of subtitles.

Each article should have a structure and hierarchy.

First, such material is more accessible for the user to read and easier to perceive. We get the point without paying attention to the details, scan the text with our eyes and close the page. But you are writing an article so the user reads it, finds it helpful, and spends more time on your site. Headings and subheadings encourage the user to move from simply viewing the article to reading it.

Secondly, the search engine pays attention to whether your article is structured. If the material is just a wall of text, then for the search engine, this is an excellent reason to pessimize the site. He simply believes that your site is being used for black promotion.

You can’t just make headlines wherever you want. The use of each subtitle must be justified. Follow the logic of the narration. If you first talk about how cat food is made, then move on to how a cat should be fed. Subheadings must separate these two blocks. The subtitle should reflect the essence of the block. For example, the first block can be called “How cat food is made,” and the second – is “How to properly feed a cat.”

If the reader does not care how the food is made, he needs to read only about how to feed a cat properly. The title will help him find the answer precisely to his question. If there are no subtitles, the user will simply see a wall of text and leave the site to search further. He will not bother and waste time reading the entire material but will thoroughly look for another article where the problem that interests him is highlighted.

Also include search queries in the subheadings. This will speed up the indexing of your site. Three levels of headings will be quite enough.

SEO Article Writing Checklist

How to create SEO content? First of all, it is necessary to think over the work plan. Let’s outline the main points you should include so that writing an SEO article for the site does not cause difficulties.

1. Search and Analysis of the Topic

This is the first stage you should start work with. It is necessary to decide on the topic if it was not specified by SEO specialists before. It must correspond to the content of the site (section) and key requests.

Next, it is necessary to analyze the relevance of the selected topic. The Google Trends service is worth using for this. In the service, it is convenient to track the dynamics of the significance of the title. If it is positive, you can safely write a text on this topic since it is popular, which means the article will attract users’ attention and lead to the site. Conversely, unpopular headlines will not attract interest.

2. Audit of Competitors

Having analyzed the topic, you need to research competitors in the niche and check their articles on the site. If there is an opportunity, then for the completeness of the picture, it is worth studying the statistics of views or going to the profile on social networks and checking the likes and comments.

It is also necessary to determine the key requests used by competitors. For this, you can use special services that show repetitions of words. Next, collect a list of requests to evaluate the target and additional keywords from competitors to examine their relevance.

3. Selection of Keywords for SEO Text

The core should contain keywords and other words defining the topic:

about 3 – with a high frequency;
up to 15 – additional keywords.

Semantic Core plays an essential role in SEO-driven content marketing and promoting resources, so it is necessary to treat it carefully. In addition to this task, the SEO service of site promotion includes other measures. However, the complex of essential works in this direction necessarily consists of forming the Semantic Core.

4. SEO Text Optimization

This measure refers to distributing key phrases and words throughout the material. SEO optimization of the text helps rank, bringing the resource to the top. Search algorithms react to keywords and phrases, as well as their frequency, the principle of arrangement when forming a ranking of results. If all these points meet the system’s requirements, then the website has more chances to get to the top.

When optimizing, it is crucial to consider such a point as the frequency of key usage. There is no need to be diligent: if the text has too many keywords, it could be better.

5. Check for Errors

This stage is necessary to understand how well the SEO article is written and whether it meets the current requirements of search algorithms. The material is evaluated according to many parameters:

Nausea – this is an indicator of the frequency of occurrence of individual words;
Spam – This parameter shows how the keys are distributed;
Watery – This concept means the ratio of little words and phrases to the central mass of content;
Uniqueness – One of the most critical parameters. It shows the originality of the material. Search engines react very loudly to this property. If you fill the site with copied articles, it is unlikely that you will be able to get it to the top. The uniqueness must be at least 80-90 %.

They check for errors with the help of special programs, and there are various services for checking content.

6. Publication and Verification of the Article Effectiveness

This is the last stage of working on the article. You publish SEO text on the main page or in product categories and fill blogs with them.

As for the effectiveness check, it is necessary to understand whether the goal of attracting visitors to the site has been achieved. The analysis takes into account the following indicators:

Number of views;
Attendance;
The time people stay on the site;
Percentage of views with interest;
Scroll rate.

Conclusion

It is challenging to write quality material, but if you break this process into successive stages of formation and elaboration, writing and accepting an article becomes much more manageable. The described content & SEO approach makes it possible to make the article useful for users and, therefore, high-quality from the point of view of search engines.

How to Create SEO Content that Your Audience and Google Will Like