Why your SEO Strategies Need Powerful, Smart Content

Today, many (if not most) of a business's marketing efforts happen online. Clients and potential customers look you up on LinkedIn, check out your social media feeds – and of course need to be able to find you via your website and blog.

Enter search engine optimisation. SEO, the concept of maximising visitor numbers to a particular website, works by ensuring that the site appears high on the returned-results list for important keywords closely related to a business.

Sounds simple enough … But Google (and other search engines) update their algorithms frequently; sometimes even daily.

How to Become a SEO Content Hero

Without keyword-optimised, engaging fresh content your other online marketing efforts could quickly become utterly useless. And therefore powerful, clever SEO copywriting is absolutely key.

Grab a coffee (or your cape), and find out how to let your SEO content soar with these nine content writing super-powers:

#1 – Research Your Keywords

To start, take a good look at what terms and phrases you want to be found for. You might need outside help to dig deeply into this with a competitor analysis. But you know your business, so even without hiring an expert to do your keyword research you can create a list of terms and phrases that your clients use(d) to find you.

#2 – Never Keyword-Stuff Your Website

Once you get writing, the temptation is great to ensure your chosen keyword pops up all the time. More is better, right? Wrong. It will make for terrible reading – and create awful SEO results. You want your SEO content to feature your targeted keyword in no more than 2.5% – 3.5% of your text. Any more and you’ll get punished by being ranked badly.

#3 – You What? ... About Those Long-Tail Keywords + LSI

Using the one keyword over and over on your website or blog won’t get you good results. And it is a poor writing style. For a long text or a full website it can be challenging to achieve great ranking results without using related keywords, grammatical variations, synonyms, long-tail keywords or LSI (latent semantic index based keywords). For highly-competed for search terms this is an excellent way to focus searches and carve out your own niche.

#4 – Tease Them, Then Deliver

Your keyword should feature in your blog post title or page headline, but there’s more to an irresistible headline. It sets expectations (which you must fulfil), the tone of your writing and makes your first impression. Here are some powerful tried-and-tested headline formulas that will get you started.

#5 – Lists Increase Engagement

Us humans, we’re a funny lot. We do love lists, well, our brains do. Because they create order and are easy to spot when numbered. They help us digest concepts with more ease by creating context. So if you want people to read your articles, use number in headlines. And if you want extra cut-through, make those numbers odd ones. You’ll get about 20% more clicks than using the same headline but listing an even number.

#6 – Get Emotional ... Use Power Words

Emotions create engagement. And power words create the emotions that will have your readers glued to their screens. Those power words will make a good story extraordinary and unforgettable. Here are 317 of them to start you off.

#7 – Stay Classy: Copywrite for More Than SEO

Optimising your writing for SEO should never, ever interfere with content quality. Awkward, verbose, repetitive text will turn both your potential clients and Google et al off your site. You’re better off to leave that keyword out – and save it for another time.

#8 – Learn About SEO Tools

Write great content – and then run a smart tool over it to SEO-optimise it. Whether you are, like me, using the Yoast SEO plugin for your site or any other of the myriad of SEO tools; there are nifty ways to double check that your copy ticks all the right SEO boxes.

#9 – Too Much Trouble? Buy Great SEO for Your Website

Not everyone is a writer, or has the time to write. And that’s ok – not everyone is made to be a dentist or plumber, either. So if it’s all too daunting or time-consuming simply outsource your blogging, webcopy and SEO copywriting to clever content writers.

Power-Up Your SEO Content

Top-notch content will get both, search-engine algorithms and your human readers, hooked, engaged – and coming back for more.

Only carefully search engine optimised content will ensure your site will rank well, and stand out from all those competing websites on the net.

Are you ready for the challenge?

About the author:

Daniela Cavalletti is an accomplished copywriter, editor and ghostwriter who heads the international tribe of wordsmiths at Cavalletti Communications ('CavaCom'). They help business owners, authors and brands find their unique voice, boldly stand out and become leaders in their marketplace. A bookworm since the tender age of three, Daniela feels lucky to have spent most of her life as a creative content and communications addict who connects people and makes words work.