Writing content for others is difficult at best. Here’s how to do it effectively and efficiently to optimise sites for Google.
The digital world is full of competing businesses in the same way that the old high street was. Competition is a healthy thing; it keeps us on our toes and ensures we always seek to improve. Unfortunately, with the mass migration of the high street to the digital marketplace after Covid-19, everyone is starting to struggle with how crowded it is.
What we want to answer today, is how we go about standing out in a world where all our competitors are trying to do the same? How do we make sure our businesses are being marketed correctly in the online world?
SEO: Writing Optimised Content in 5 Easy Steps
The short answer is that therefore we have SEO… but writing content that is Search Engine Optimised is difficult for small business owners who never had to do it before. With this in mind, we put together these 5 top tips for writing SEO content for your website.
1 – Learn the Value of SEO
Before we begin, we need to be on the same page with regards to what SEO is. Your webpage is laid out in a series of headers and text, images and information like charts or graphs. The way you lay your page out should be aligned with Google algorithms when we are trying to optimise to reach higher rankings in their lists.
According to WebMarkets, on-page SEO accounts for about 20% of your page’s natural reach. That’s a full fifth of all visitors, or a fifth of the percentage of your total score, as worked out by Google when they rank your page. So, getting your SEO right is important for online visibility of your page.
Now that we know exactly how important it is, we can start to study the ways we can improve our content.
2 – Finding your Keywords
First, you need to know what keywords apply to your business before you can write anything about it. Finding our keywords is easier than you might think and there are two simple ways you can work it out.
First, go to the Google homepage, and type in your main product or service. Straight away, you should see a string of words come up following your typing. Say I work in a restaurant and want to promote myself; I might type in “restaurant” and see what comes up. Normally, what arises will be different things associated with that word, which people commonly search for.
For example, my search for “restaurant” might bring up “best restaurant near me” or “where is the nearest Italian restaurant”, or similar types of phrases. It might only bring up one or two words instead of a whole question, like “Chinese restaurant”, “Restaurant First Dates” or something similar. Whatever words, phrases, or questions it brings up are your keywords. Write them down.
The second way to find your keywords is even easier. Go to a keyword search tool and type in the same words. The tool will search for keywords relevant to you and list them in one easy place. These tools are usually paid for but will give you a limited number of free searches.
Of course, there is a third way. Find out your keywords by handing control of your on-page SEO to an expert… but we’re trying to save you money.
3 – Integrate those Keywords
Next, you are going to integrate those keywords into your on=page text. Doing this is easier than you would think. The best way to use this trick is to do a blog for your page and let the keywords decide what you will write about. Going back to the restaurant example for a moment, you might write about Italian restaurants and what sort of food they sell. This would allow you to include “best Italian restaurant near me” naturally in your blog content, thereby drawing more traffic to your site. To learn mor on such topic visit TheBrightAcademy.
Of course, if you want to make this traffic more permanent, incorporate the questions often asked into a Frequently Asked Questions page.
4 – Format your Content
Formatting is important in the digital marketplace. Think about it, if your storefront looks a mess, why would anyone come inside? Thus, it is with web pages. Good spelling, excellent grammar, and a contrarily conversational tone are what Google wants from you. The way you write things out is as important as what it is that you are writing, because of this.
How do you format? You write keywords into your headers, you tag, label, and include a meta description, you use keywords tow or three times per article, then you make sure it has the correct images incorporated. Google will rank those whose information is valuable, whose content is consistently well created, and whose site is ‘worthwhile’.
5 – Making Content Worthwhile
Which brings us to our final point… that Google classes things in ranks depending on how valuable it finds your site to be. This depends on several factors, such as how well you use those keywords, how much information you have, and whether or not you have experts on your site.
Things that might mark you down in their results include:
- Long sentences and paragraphs – your average internet user skips through information to find what they need. Keeping paragraphs and sentences short and snappy keeps their attention longer.
- Bad grammar, misuse of the language the site is written in, and information that has nothing to do with the title of the page, are all likely to be marked down.
- Competitors having better SEO than you, in which case call in a professional.
- Misleading text, overloading with ads, and pages with spam content are all considered irrelevant.
- Pages whose text has been copy and pasted from elsewhere.
Which almost brings us full circle. If you want Google to rank your site higher, you need viable content. If you don’t have personally written, unique content that is tailored to your company – what’s the point in even having a website? Google doesn’t want those that cut and paste – they want relevance.
Make your content relevant and the rest will fall into place.
Rhydian Choi 
Kim Marks