SEO content writing: 5 mistakes to avoid
Today, content is ROI for small to medium businesses … literally. Content marketing costs on average 62% less than Outbound Marketing (outbound marketing) and yet brings in 3 times more leads, for an impressive return on investment (Return On Investment).
Unfortunately, when it comes to writing for the web, many small businesses make mistakes that prevent them from achieving optimal results.
But do not worry! In this article, we share with you the 5 most common mistakes made by SMEs when writing SEO content and we explain how to avoid them.
Are your articles aimed at students? Single-parent fathers? Grannies who love bungee and thrills? No matter what product or service you offer, your SEO content writing will need to adapt to the type of customer (or persona) you want to attract.
Why Defining Your Persona Improves Your SEO Content Writing
Defining your persona will allow you to:
1-Determine which keywords your persona is likely to search for on Google
2-Produce more relevant, engaging and better targeted content
3-Generate more engagement and shares on social media
4-Keep your readers on your site longer
5-Increase your conversion rate
Gone are the days of choosing between writing keyword-packed SEO content for Google bots or writing for the web smoothly and naturally for real readers. Today, search engines themselves favor sites that optimize their user experience more than ever.
How does a bad user experience hurt your SEO?
Google now wants to promote the sites it deems most likely to appeal to its users and answer their queries. It is no longer enough for an Internet user to click on your site in the results page for your natural referencing to improve: they must stay there.
Google measures the time each visitor spends on your website in order to draw conclusions about the relevance and quality of your website. If the proportion of visitors who leave your site quickly after accessing it is large, Google concludes that the user experience you have to offer is poorer, which is affecting your rankings.
You can access this data, called Bounce Rate, on Google Analytics:
In addition to sites with a high Bounce Rate, Google also penalizes sites with poor loading speed. So, if your pages take a long time to load, the search engine will stop highlighting it and promoting it to Internet users, judging the site to be of poor quality. This penalty even applies to mobile sites since the last Google algorithm update!
Best practices for a quality user experience
1-Write fluidly and naturally, avoiding keyword stuffing.
2-Support your text with examples, case studies, and metaphors and add visual aids to make it less monotonous.
3-Make sure your site is secure (ie your URLs start with “https” and not “http”).
4-Adapt to mobile devices with a responsive site.
5-Optimize the loading speed of your site by optimizing the size of your images.
There is nothing more frustrating than spending hours writing an article and optimizing it only to realize that your chosen keyword isn’t getting enough monthly Google queries. A keyword strategy can help you prevent such situations from happening again in the future.
Why invest in a keyword strategy before writing for the web?
Keywords allow Google to identify the subject of your pages or articles and to determine if the information offered there corresponds to the requests of Internet users
While a keyword sounds promising, it doesn’t have to be! Choosing relevant and most importantly, frequently searched keywords on Google is the key to writing SEO content.
A clear and effective keyword strategy will allow you to optimize each of your pages for a specific, carefully selected keyword. In the long run, your site will appear on a maximum of queries related to your industry and industry, increasing your traffic and conversions exponentially.
How to set up a keyword strategy for SEO content writing?
The first step in deploying a keyword strategy is to determine which words or groups of words are most commonly searched for by your persona. This initial analysis is called the keyword study.
This analysis allows you to identify the keywords your target audience is looking for and determine how often they are searched for on search engines. Here are our three favourite tools to make it happen:
- SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool
- Google Ads Keyword Planner
- Moz Keyword Explorer
Our guide to web marketing strategy explains how to use these tools to perform comprehensive and effective keyword research.
If you clicked on this article, then you want to improve your SEO content writing. So you absolutely cannot afford to ignore good SEO practices when it comes time to write for the web.
- Write articles of 700 words or more.
- Maintain a keyword density of 1 to 2%
- Don’t hesitate to add internal and external links
- Seek to get backlinks
- Structure your article to appear in Featured Snippet
To learn more about good SEO practices to adopt for writing on the web, we advise you to consult our web writing guide as well as our article on how to optimize your website for SEO.
Why spend hours writing for the web and polishing your SEO content writing if no one is reading your masterpieces?
Like a movie trailer or the back cover of a book, meta tags can give people a taste of your story before they even click on it. This makes them a vital part of your content marketing strategy, as they help attract new readers to your site.
In short, do not neglect the meta-tags! Make sure your SEO titles contain your keywords, that they are engaging, and that they will allow you to capture maximum search engine traffic.
Also, take a few minutes to write attention-grabbing meta descriptions that pique the curiosity of Internet users to encourage curious visitors to click through to your site and read your article.
Congratulations! You are officially a pro at SEO content writing
Has this article convinced you of the importance of a more professional content marketing strategy, but that you don’t have time to correct these mistakes yourself?
Delegate SEO content writing for your site to our content marketing agency and continue to sleep soundly!
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions, comments or suggestions: it will be our pleasure to help you.
