5 SEO Content Writing Tips Guaranteed to Boost Online Traffic

Content drives search engine traffic.

Online marketing starts with choosing the right keywords and then delivering on that content. Whether you own a product or have a service that you are interested in selling online, writing SEO content is simply a must, if you want traffic that is.

According to an interesting statistic by Mashable, “It’s not uncommon for 150,000 new domains to be registered with generic TLDs alone in a single day.” Of course, this doesn’t mean that all those domains are fully built but it does mean that competition for online web traffic is getting stiffer.

So how is your website going to be found?

If you don’t have a content marketing strategy in place, then the truth is it won’t. Content matters more than ever to be found in the search engines and if your website lacks copy, then you can bet that your website will be buried in the search engine results making it more difficult for prospects to find you.

A Brief Explanation of SEO Content Writing

Content and keywords are king when it comes to search engine marketing.

An indepth study undertaken by Outbrain, with the purpose of finding out how people discover content on the web, found that nearly 41% of external referral traffic derived from the search engines, with Google accounting for a majority of it.

And if you are still not convinced yet of the power of search engines, then take a look at some more statistics gathered by Sempo.org which came to the following conclusions:

The vast majority of online adults who purchase online (88%) conduct research at least sometimes prior to completing their purchase. Three-fourths (74%) of those who use search engines to research products/services before making an online purchase cited investigating/learning more about the product/service they intended to buy as a reason for using search engines.

One thing to note is that this study was done in 2005 but it still holds true today that more people than ever, especially with the prevalence of smart phones, are beginning to use search engines to conduct research into products they want or services they need.

If you can position your product or services in front of those people, then you can pretty much guarantee the success of your business but it first starts with an online content marketing plan.

SEO content writing then is the practice of writing content that is optimized for the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to deliver quality traffic while also being relevant to the searcher in helping them to make a decision, either through a purchase or a lead.

The following are five SEO content writing tips which are guaranteed to boost online traffic.

1. Choose relevant keywords

Depending on what products or services you sell, the keywords that you target will naturally be different. For example, a yoga studio in New York will want to optimize their web copy to be found for terms such as “yoga studios in New York” or “New York yoga”.

Likewise, a firm which offers services in data backup will want to optimize their content for “remote data backup services” and related keyword phrases so the company website can appear on the first page of Google.

Keyword research can easily take hours to undertake but this step cannot be ignored. Searching for keywords that prospects might use to find a service or product that you offer can be tricky but it doesn’t have to be all that difficult either. One very good resource is to use Google’s keyword autosuggest tool.

This is extremely valuable as Google suggests additional keywords that you can use which often don’t even show up in their own AdWords Keyword Tool. I used the autosuggest tool to come up with the phrase “SEO content writing tips” for this post:

The great thing about this tool is that it also gives you great content ideas as you know that people are actually searching for these keyword phrases. For example, an idea for a future post for this site might be “How to Write Good SEO Content That Converts” or “A Complete Tutorial to Writing SEO Online Copy”.

Another idea is to also use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool as it provides some other ideas for keywords that you can target on your site. It also provides traffic figures which is helpful when determining which keywords to target:

Ideally, you want to find keywords which have a high number of searches but with low competition. Ranking for a phrase such as “credit cards” would be next to impossible but ranking for a phrase like “unsecured credit cards for damaged credit” would be much easier especially if you have an authority site in the niche.

Long tail keywords (phrases which are usually three words or more) tend to get less traffic but they also have an added benefit of higher conversion rates and bringing in traffic as a website gains more authority with the search engines. They are also much easier to rank for and tend to drive a lot of targeted traffic.

Writing content for SEO around such phrases is definitely great for building up a new site and incidentally, this is the very tactic that I will be employing to get this site ranking as well.

You can also use the Google AdWords keyword to compare certain keyword phrases to determine which one has more traffic:

You’ll notice that the first keyword phrase gets about 140 global searches while the second gets less than 10. These are certainly low numbers so why am I still writing a post on it? First, I don’t believe that you should always write content just based purely on traffic figures from Google. These numbers are notorious for being inaccurate.

And also, keep in mind that this post is not targeted only for the phrase SEO content writing tips. Instead, it is my intention for this post to get additional traffic through long tail searches which is a great way to build online traffic especially with brand new sites.

By targeting phrases that most large sized companies wouldn’t even bother with, you can get traffic for hundreds of related keywords just by knowing how to theme your content which brings us to our next point.

2. Theme your content by using LSI keyword phrases

To understand LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), you have to understand the main goal of Google and other search engines: To provide the best and most relevant results for its searchers. If you are looking for treatments for a certain skin condition, you don’t care about what the basketball score was for last night’s game.

You want search engine results which detail exactly what the skin condition is, what the symptoms are, the best way to treat it and maybe even personal stories of how others treated the condition. Google then has to analyze billions of webpages and deliver the results that it deems best fit for your search query which is no easy task.

To help, Google makes use of LSI keyword technology to determine what a page is about based on surrounding text. This might sound confusing so let me give an example.

Let’s say you write a page about Apple. If you have keywords such as computer, technology, iPhone and company in your article then Google knows that your webpage is about the Apple technology company.

However, if you have words such as food, recipe, pie and restaurant in your text then Google knows that your page is most likely about apple pies and knows not to display your page if someone types in Apple iPhone into their search engine.

So how can you use this to your advantage?

Many years ago, it was extremely easy to optimize content for certain keyword phrases by including it in the title, sprinkling that exact phrase throughout the content and getting backlinks with that keyword phrase as the anchor text via article marketing.

Things are much different now and search engines have become much smarter. While these things worked very well in the past, doing them now can actually significantly harm your website and its rankings. One of the most recent changes to the Google algorithm is the penguin update. According to the Wikipedia page:

Google Penguin is a code name for a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. The update is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, participating in link schemes, deliberate creation of duplicate content, and others.

One thing this update did was reduce rankings for pages that were over optimized for certain phrases. Here’s what Matt Cutts has to say about the manner in a recent SXSW session about search engine optimization penalties:

We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on a page, or whether they exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect in a particular area.

Going forward, it’s quite clear that such strategies are no longer effective. Instead the best way to build traffic to your website is to provide content that is unique and valuable to visitors.

But, you can also use LSI keywords in your copy to increase traffic. For example, I want this page to rank for “seo content writing tips” but I also want it to bring me traffic for other long tail phrases. After doing a simple query on LSIKeywords.com, it came up with the following list:

So what exactly are we looking at? This tool acts like a search engine. You input a keyword phrase and it will then crawl through the top 10 results of Google and return the most common single, two word and three word phrases that appear.

Why is this important?

This is important because Google is telling you which words and phrases it deems most relevant for the query. Using these phrases throughout your content can greatly increase the chances of your webpage getting traffic from long tail phrases. This is why it’s important to optimize web copy for more than just one phrase.

The best part too is that you can even rank for such content without needing too many backlinks. As other companies will fight for keyword phrases with high competition, you can be able to optimize your page for long tail phrases and actually gain a lot more traffic that way just by simply theming your content.

And for your reference, I underlined some of the keywords that I plan to use in this article:

The key though is to choose words that make sense within the context. When trying to add in keywords, it should be used naturally without it seeming like it was forced.

Be careful not to keyword stuff

Of course, I’m not suggesting at all that you keyword stuff your copy. As we have seen, doing so can harm your webpage and negatively impact your rankings. Instead, I recommend writing for your visitors first and then including those SEO keywords in a natural way so as not to affect the readability of the content.

Nothing is perhaps more unprofessional than having copy that has grammatical or spelling errors. So write for your visitors first and then optimize it later. Doing this takes a lot of time but it is absolutely worth it. Writing just one quality article can easily bring you traffic and sales for years.

3. Write a compelling headline

Headlines matter.

Writing effective headlines take practice but perhaps the best way is to simply draw inspiration from how others have written their headlines. For example, I did a simple query for “how to write a headline” in Google and here are the results I got:

Out of these results, only three of them stood out for me and I’ll explain why:

How to Write Magnetic Headlines

 This one from CopyBlogger states a benefit that after reading this article, I’ll be able to write headlines which are “magnetic” and get clicks.

5 Easy Tricks to Write Catchy Headlines

Who doesn’t like easy? If I can gain more information on how to do something in an easier way, then I’m all for it!

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Incredible Headlines

The word “ultimate” is a really strong one. Just by reading the title, I’m more likely to click through and check out the content. Content that teaches people how to do something is always powerful, especially guides and tutorials.

All the other titles were rather bland and weren’t compelling enough for me to click through. As mentioned above, writing effective titles take a lot of practice.

One tactic that you can employ is to check out popular blogs in your niche and look at the sidebar. Most of them have links to their most popular content and their titles. This screenshot is from CopyBlogger:

It’s never right to copy anyone’s title word for word but you can easily use it for your own ideas.

The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Marketing could become something like The Ultimate Guide to Building an Online Store

How to Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254% could become How to Increase Your Blog Traffic by 150%

You get the idea. Compelling headlines make a difference but it’s also important that you deliver on your title by writing a quality article.

Headlines such as these are much more likely to get clicked on versus those that are simply optimized to be search engine friendly.

4. Make the content readable and shareable

In an article titled, “How Users Read on the Web” the main take away is that people don’t. According to the article:

We found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.

The key then is make your content so that it is easily readable and scannable. This can be done by

• Using headlines to highlight key ideas
• Using bullet lists (like this one)
• Separating your content into small paragraphs
• Using images to break up content
• Bolding and italicizing important points in the article
• Using quotes to emphasize key points

Generally, visitors are turned off by huge blocks of text. Proper formatting is a must and if you ignore this step, then you risk the chance of turning off visitors from your site who might otherwise have shared that content to their social networks.

The rapid growth of social media

Facebook.com: Facebook has over 1 billion active users with more than half of them logging on every day.

Twitter.com: Twitter has over 500 million active users and is one of the most popular websites on the web for following and connecting with influential people.

LinkedIn.com: LinkedIn has over 175 million active users and is seen more as a social network for professionals.

These are three of the largest social media networks and they account for a huge portion of online traffic. Obviously, there are many more such as Pinterest and StumbleUpon but the point is that more and more users are starting to use these networks to connect with others and to discover new content.

Getting your content shared is one of the best ways for small business owners to reach potential prospects and increase brand awareness.

While optimizing your content for search engines is necessary to increase traffic, social media networks simply cannot be ignored so make it easy for your content to be shared by your visitors.

With WordPress, this is extremely easy as you can choose from numerous social media plugins and customize accordingly.

5. Link out to resources

And now we reach the last step for how to write good SEO content that ranks in the search engines while increasing online traffic. Just from browsing boards online for webmasters looking for article content writers, the ads generally make it clear that they want unique content and will run it through CopyScape to ensure that it is not rewritten elsewhere.

But, anyone can write unique content. Just take an article from a directory, rewrite it using the same ideas and you have a completely rewritten article in about 20 minutes. Writing great, professional content involves a great deal of research especially if you are serious about your industry.

Just in this article alone, I linked out to and quoted several references that I have used in crafting my content. Did I have to keyword stuff anything? Nope. Did I impart useful information? I hope so.

Linking out to authority sites in your niche can actually work in your favor as it tells Google that you are not afraid of linking out. In fact, this is what Google has to say on the official Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Relevant outbound links can help your visitors.

• Provide your readers in-depth information about similar topics
• Offer readers your unique commentary on existing resources

 

Thoughtful outbound links can help your credibility.

• Show that you’ve done your research and have expertise in the subject manner
• Make visitors want to come back for more analysis on future topics
• Build relationships with other domain experts (e.g. sending visitors can get you on the radar of other successful bloggers and begin a business relationship

That last point is perhaps the most important. By linking out to other websites or blogs in your niche, you have the chance to gain the attention from other blog owners with similar interests.

This can definitely work in your favor as it can lead to guest posting opportunities so don’t be afraid to link out to other resources especially if you feel that the content would be useful for your visitors.

One Last Tip

Another tip to writing great SEO content is to have a clear and logical structure. An example would be this post as I broke down SEO content writing guidelines to five tips and then went into each one in detail while doing the necessary research to get facts and figures.

By implementing these content writing tips, you can greatly boost the traffic to your website. However, implementing such a strategy takes time and patience. In another post, I’ll talk about SEO methodology and strategies that you can implement to build quality backlinks.

Hire Me as Your SEO Content Writer

If you are not already making use of content marketing strategies for your business, then you are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table as you can bet that your competitors are.

Marketing your business online by publishing content brands you as an expert in your industry and also builds trust with potential prospects.

Quality content matters especially if you have an online presence which is essentially a must in today’s world.

If you are interested in hiring me and having me implement a content writing strategy for your website, then be sure to check out my SEO content writing services for more details.