Do you want to write SEO friendly content?
Well, this is an art which could take your blog or your writing career to the next level.
Anyone can write an article, but it takes special kind of practice to write SEO optimized articles.
In this article, I will share some tips for writing SEO-optimized articles that will rank better in search engines.
Every blog post is like a web page in terms of search engine ranking and you can optimize each post with specific keywords for search engines.
When writing these SEO friendly articles, there are several things that you should keep in mind.
Whenever I hire a new author to work on one of our blogs, I have to give them manual inputs and checklists to help them to write better articles. Apart from selecting topics, there is a complete SEO checklist that must be followed.
(Note: I used to send this information out in an email to all the authors in my blog network. So I thought it would be a good idea to compile all of this information into a post. This way, readers will also benefit from this information and learn how to write SEO articles as well.)
Also, note that in this post I will not be covering keyword research as it requires a detailed post of its own.
For more on keyword research, check out:
- Keyword research: The Beginners Guide
- SEMrush: A Practical Guide For Growing Blog Traffic
- Best Keyword Research Tools For SEO: Latest Edition
How to Start Writing SEO-Optimized Articles
Step 1- Start with research
If you really want to make a difference for yourself or for your clients, without research, you are simply shooting in the dark.
In this stage, you want to determine a few things:
- Keyword to target
- Length of the article
- Type of the article
- Analyze existing articles for outline
- People also ask questions
Do yourself a favor and get a tool like SEMrush first.
SEMrush offer free trial which will help you to do better research your topic and help in proper optimization of Keyword. This will help you to understand what is the right keyword you should be targeting.
Step 2- Type of content: Keyword Search Intent
Also, put your target keyword in the Google search to see what kind of articles are currently ranking. This is part of the research and will help you understand what kind of article Google think is better for such queries.
You may notice some pattern in the search result. For example, certain queries will only show listicles as shown in below screenshot:
Step 3- Find the idle Length of the article
Use a SEMrush writing assistant to identify what is the idle word limit you should have to increase your chance for ranking on the first page.
To use this,
- Login to SEMrush dashboard (Get 14 days free trial here)
- Under On-page & Tech SEO > SEO content template
- Enter your target keyword
- Select the Country and device you want to target
Click on “Create SEO template”
and it will show you the result as shown in the screenshot below:
As shown in the screenshot above, the first-page average word for my target keyword is 2182.
I would naturally ensure that my SEO optimized article should be at least 2100+ words. I have actually talked about this in-depth in my earlier guide on “Long-form content for SEO“.
Alright, once we are ready with these data, now is the time to create an outline.
Analyze the top 10 results for your target keyword. I know it’s a lot of tasks but again, if your goal is to Rank#1 on search, you need to take these extra step to stand out.
Here is a video tutorial where I have shown an example from another content optimization tool called Frase to find the idle length of an article:
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