Writing SEO content for digital marketing in order to drive up website visibility is a matter of strategy. It requires structure and preparation. As a business owner you know your product and industry the best. But are you communicating that information to your customer in the format that they best understand? That is the question that SEO writing seeks to answer.
Writing for Search Engine Optimization or SEO isn’t just writing blogs either. Landing pages, category pages, local pages, product pages, and similar pages are as much a part of content that ranks as any other. This article will outline the most important stages in preparing optimized content.
Finding and Qualifying your Keywords
The first plan of attack when trying to penetrate the audience for a product is collecting and sorting your keywords. These are phrases and terms that your intended audience has historically searched for while browsing through the cyber landscape.
Finding keywords is the easy part because tools like Google’s Keyword Planner do it for you. Here’s an authoritative guide to using the Keyword Planner.
Qualifying keywords is more difficult because it requires discretion on your part. The main criteria that most professionals use are:
- Search Volume
- The Keyword’s Historical Performance on Search
- User Engagement Numbers on Forums and Quorums (obtained by using the search bar on forums such as Reddit or Quora)
- Find Hidden Keywords by using the search function on Social Media
- Find out if your competitors have backlinks for content written on the same keyword, i.e., find out whether those keywords are backlink-worthy.
Analyze your Competition
Most businesses are not selling a revolutionary product that has never been sold before. Therefore there are others who have come before you, whose historical performance you can observe and analyze. This competitor data includes a number of parameters mentioned below.
In order to get at this data, you may need to download a free SEO keyword analyzer toolbar for your browser that for the sake of neutrality we will not name here. Once you’ve done that check for these indicators of good keyword prospects:
- Those keywords are found on Low-Authority sites, preferably with DA or PA less than 50. This is key because you can’t seriously think of overcoming gigantic competitors with meager resources. Besides, taking on immensely competitive sites for content-richness would take far longer.
- Most of the information for that keyword is found on YouTube. YouTube videos are not content-rich and therefore, you could be the first to put that content, in words, on a hit landing page.
- If the content for a certain keyword or question hasn’t been updated in many years, then that keyword is ripe for the taking because people and Google have been searching for newer, more relevant content.
- If the information your keyword search points to, is mostly available on forums and/or Quora, then this is also a good indicator because content on the latter is unorganized.
- If Google places value on a certain keyword by including many SERP features for that keyword, then this arena could be too competitive for beginning your SEO journey.
- Advertisers on Google Adwords going after a particular keyword can drive up demand and the price of that keyword. If you see the Cost-per-Click for a certain keyword going up then that is a sure way of knowing that the keyword has value.
- Sometimes you may find that certain important keywords have only generic content written about them, perhaps, in digital magazines, or perhaps, they have only been touched upon in a sweeping manner in rare articles. If this is the case, then this keywords is ripe for the taking.
Answer the Public
While the sub-heading above may be the name of a popular keyword research tool, the purpose of this step is to answer as many queries as arise on a Google search page for a particular keyword that you type in.