How to Write Great Content and Optimise Your SEO

Is your business running you rather than the other way around? Are you completely overworked and overwhelmed? Your to do list keeps getting bigger and bigger but you can’t seem to tick any of it off. You are always busy and on the go, but are you actually being productive with your time? When you’re working around the clock and racing against time, it’s so easy for little and larger things to get missed, such as getting new content out into the World, sending out your monthly newsletter or email blast, that amazing article that you started writing but didn’t have time to finish so it sits in your documents gathering virtual dust. It’s great that you have ideas and a strategy in place but if you don’t have time to implement them they wont be of much use.

‘SEO is like a résumé, you polish it so you have your best foot forward’ Matt Cutts, Google

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) depicts how high your content will rank when people search for it through search engines such as Google and how easy it will be to find. Google has stated that for an organic search, “content” is ranked amongst its top three ranking categories.

How do you you go about writing great content that will rank high in a search engine along with knowing what key factors you need to implement to make the content high quality from a SEO perspective?

The first thing that you need to do, is have a clear and defined understanding of what your target audience looks like and who they are. You need to know what problems they may face that you can solve. Before you start writing your content ask yourself, ‘What problem is this solving for my audience?’ and ‘How can this piece add value?’

The most engaging and best blog posts online, are the ones that are written with the authors tone of voice. Rather than being very formal to get your point across, the best thing to do is write how you talk, in a way that your target audience will understand. There is a common misconception that to rank higher on a search engine you need to use as many keywords as possible, however this is simply not true. Search engines soon caught onto this and realised what people were doing, it’s called ‘keyword stuffing’, and they will now penalise you for this. If someone is solely focused on squeezing in as many keywords as possible then the content will soon lose value and not speak to the target audience in the correct way. 

Keywords still play an important factor in ranking for SEO, but you need to use them in the correct way that they were intended. Use them as and when you find that they naturally fit with the ebb and flow of your writing. The same can be said for your headings, page titles and other ‘microcontent’ – here, use your keywords strategically and naturally in order to create the best, most enticing titles.

Now that you’ve created your fantastic piece of value filled content, it’s a great idea to double check it to make sure that it will engage your audience. Read through it to make sure that it conveys your message in the way that you initially set out to do. This is also a good time to pair up with an editor or proof reader so that you can have a second opinion, but also they can pick through your piece of content for any spelling or grammar mistakes along with any sentences that may need phrasing differently.

Is there anything as off-putting in terms of a piece’s credibility as a typo or grammatical error in an otherwise engaging piece?

Let’s face it, we can all make mistakes in our writing, or end up using the same words or term over and over without realising. Having someone edit and check your work is a sure fire way to turn a good piece of content into a great piece of content.

How do you go about ensuring flawless, engaging content that your readers will love and want to share?

Virtual Assistants (VA’s) are highly skilled administrative professionals with a meticulous eye for detail. The majority of VA’s support a wide range of clients across a number of sectors and many have also come from a background as in-house Personal Assistants or Executive Assistants. Virtual Assistants have honed their writing and editing skills throughout their careers, having worked with so much varied content, social media and high-level documentation. They understand your business’s need for creating accurate, snappy and engaging content that looks great and appeals to your audience. So whether they’re getting creative by writing your blogs, transcribing your content, proofreading your documents or giving your teams CV’s a makeover – to name but a few tasks – you can rest assured that your writing and editing tasks are in a safe pair of hands. In fact in no time at all your Virtual Assistant will have added so much value that they really feel like part of the family and you’ll wonder how your business ever got by without one!

It’s often surprising the wide range of time-consuming writing and editing tasks that can be outsourced to a Virtual Assistant. Tasks include, but are in no way limited to:

 -Article writing

-Blog writing

-Proofreading

-Data entry

-Internet research

-CV writing

-Transcription

-Newsletters

-E-books

What could you achieve with all of that extra time if you weren’t juggling all these tasks on top of trying to scale your business further? What could it mean for your bottom line? What could it mean for your work-life balance?

If you want to free up more of your time so that you can focus on the tasks that are making you money, you can arrange a free consultation with me now https://consultationwithselina.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php