It takes a lot of preparation and a significant amount of work to write a blog post or article. Generally, this process demands hours before it's reasonable to push publish.
If you go to all that trouble and still don't see the traffic you expected, it can be a major letdown. We know how that can feel.
Fortunately, we've gathered some of our favorite ways to combat low organic traffic and improve your ability to capture relevant traffic with the content you write.
As you're working to improve your content, we've got you covered. In this article, we go through the ins and outs of making sure your efforts are worthwhile. We'll dive into 15 tips for writing content that ranks on Google, along with a few bonuses.
What is SEO Writing?
SEO Writing or SEO Copywriting is the process of writing content to rank on the first page of search engines. This process involves researching the keywords people are using, writing high-quality content that maps to the user intent, and optimizing your headers to make sure the structure is easy to crawl.
Why is SEO copywriting important?
Based on what the ongoing click-through rate study from Advanced Web Ranking suggests, depending on the SERP features that are shown, you can see the CTR varies heavily.
When we look at the position one ranking, we see the average CTR can be anywhere from 17-43%, and then it begins to drop off heavily as we move towards position two in the SERP.
Position 2 on Google brings in a CTR of anywhere from 10-17%, and then by position ten, we're looking at 1-2%.
Basically, the idea here is this: If your site isn't on page one, it's not likely you're going to get much organic traffic. If you're not getting much organic traffic, that means you're having trouble getting organic leads and, ultimately, revenue as well.
SEO Copywriting Basics
Successful SEO copywriting involves laser-focused keyword research, a true understanding of search intent, creating content that is highly relevant through the use of contextual keywords that users are leveraging to search, and the use of on-page SEO best practices to ensure it's easy to digest.
While the organic algorithms frequently change (+4500 times a year), there isn't a magic formula for ranking, but we do know about several parts that support better rankings.
As we mentioned, if your keywords aren't selected carefully, it's as if you're aiming at the wrong target. The proper keywords mean the difference between high volume / high quality and low volume / low quality.
You want to make sure you write in a way that is beneficial to the end user. This brings into consideration the Google quality rater guidelines. The guardrails that we utilize to ensure our content hits the target.
E-E-A-T is an acronym that Google coined to familiarize publishers and content creators with its own prioritization when it comes to ranking content. - how Google thinks about the quality of content.
We'll focus on diving in deep in another article, but for now, keep in mind:
- Experience: Does our content demonstrate a reasonable degree of experience? Such as communicating value and perspectives that we personally and collectively experience within the niche.
- Expertise: Google wants users to know why the author of the content has the authority to write on a specific topic. If you have advice and make claims, why should they listen? Potentially, think author bio page in the simplest form.
- Authoritativeness: Of the domain. Google needs to be able to understand that the domain you operate and publish content on, as a whole, is authoritative on a specific topic. Search engines require context to understand the connection to the topics you cover. Once you establish stronger relevance to a topic, it becomes easier to be viewed as a topical authority.
- Trustworthiness: Generally thought of via a reputation metric. The higher the reputation score, the more trustworthy a domain becomes. Think about improving this by leveraging external links to other high-quality domains and by gaining relevant backlinks within the space from other high-quality domains.
By keeping these aspects in mind as you create content and build out your site, in addition to patience and consistency within your niche, it's possible you'll not only begin to see content rank but you will set your site up for long-term success.
Skills required to be a great SEO copywriter
Mastering SEO writing is an important skill for any business with an online presence.
Regardless of where you operate, with the right content, you can leverage local and global audiences and provide your expertise to a larger customer base.
Don't take my word for it. Google processes 8.5 billion searches every day as of 2022 data.
That turns out to be 99,000 searches on Google every second of the day.
This means anyone with access to the internet has the unique ability to reach billions of people each day with their special product or offer.
A key skill set that any writer needs when working towards driving organic traffic is a thorough understanding of search intent.
If you don't know who your intended audience is, how they are currently searching, what kind of content they are looking for, or what they need, then it's impossible you will be able to serve, much less get in front of those new customers.
Once you know the intended audience inside and out, you can better create and structure the content required to help accomplish their unique goal.
A great idea would be to look at what your competition is doing to solve a specific need and then iterate and apply your own topic-specific research to come up with content ideas and blogs that you can publish.
In addition to knowing who you're writing for or how to generate those ideas, you need to be able to write in a persuasive tone so that the copy you create will have a better chance of converting traffic into readers and readers into customers.
What does excellent SEO writing look like?
There are a few things that stand out as the main aspects of quality SEO copywriting. It's easy to recognize when you see it, and we've all read some portion of copy that drove us to action; that's what we aim to do as we create more content for our own sites.
We need to focus on readability and make sure it's easy for humans, our customers, to digest.
- Appropriate Tone:
The right tone is the difference between an answer to the customer's prayers and another product that feels fake and overly marketed so that it can't be true. The voice used in great writing makes the reader feel understood and comfortable with their new decision to purchase. It needs to instill a strong sense of trust in the domain, author, and product or solution. Failure to do that can result in weak performance and disconnect from your customers.
- Terrific Readability:
Sometimes you land on a site, and everything feels like it's being shouted at you, and there is an unreasonable amount of information presented all at once that no one can digest.
Although it might be great information, and the goal was always to help a customer in their time of need, it just wasn't delivered in a way that was easy to digest.
We want to make sure our content is clear and concise. Has all of the information in a way that is easy to digest and skim, but if our customer needs to dig in can easily opt for more at any time.
13 tips for writing content that ranks on Google
1. Start w/ Keyword research.
We already discussed how Google processed over 99,000 searches per second in 2022.
In order to leverage even a minute fraction of that potential, you need to make sure you're utilizing the keywords people are searching within your industry that relate to the products you sell and the services you offer.
It's about understanding what people care about before you begin to write your content.
You need to make sure you are targeting one to two keywords for the page and that you know the high-volume keywords that are related as you structure your page.
Doing all of this upfront work can ensure that you end up with content that solves the questions customers are frequently asking within your topic niche and industry.
For instance, think about the keyword "Bake Pads": 90k monthly search volume, generally pretty difficult to rank for and what we would call a head term. 
It's easy to see how if you plan to create content that fits the intent around a keyword like "brake pads" and other related terms, you are in the running for a potential of tens of thousands in traffic each month.
If you sell brake pads, this would mean a significant amount of revenue for your business, depending on your conversion rate (CVR) and the average order value (AOV) within that category.
You want to make sure you prepare thoroughly at the beginning so that the result of this hard work is more users to your website directly from the organic channel and improved business outcomes in the long term.
2. Write for humans, not search engines.
Your north star should be your customers and the customers you hope to serve.
Create content for the people you want to serve before you even think about what the search engines prioritize.
Google has a list of 'helpful content' guidelines that help you as a creator self-assess the content you make as you go.
To ensure compliance take a look at these questions:
- Does my content serve and help a specific audience?
- Does my content show first-hand experience within the niche I'm looking for?
- After reading my content, would the reader feel more informed about the topic?
- Will the reader feel satisfied by my content?
As long as you're confident in your ability to answer 'yes' to these questions, you're well on your way to start ranking on search engines.
It's still imperative that you leverage search engine best practices when writing, structuring, and publishing your content, but first and foremost, create value for your audience.
You will get more traffic, convert them to customers and ultimately increase your revenue if you aim to serve and provide the most value possible.
3. Find questions people ask.
It's easy to fully cover a topic if you look into the topic from the search engine perspective.
What is Google or Bing returning to the user when they search 'x keyword'?
Is Google suggesting other related questions users are asking? A great asset is to leverage the People Also Ask feature of the SERP and leverage that information to build a more complete and increased value of the content you create.
In order to see this type of content in a more aggregate view, you can leverage SaaS platforms like also asked and AnswerThePublic, or KeywordsPeopleUse.
These enable you to see the topic as a full picture and will prompt you to generate more content ideas as you begin to fully build out expertise and authority within a topic.
It's important to remember that you don't need to cover everything with one piece of content, and you can segment out sub-categories and subtopics to cover in additional articles.
4. Nail down the search intent.
Unfortunately, this crucial step is one that many content creators overlook. If you want to write excellent content and improve your SEO traffic, you need to nail down the search intent.
This reflects the intent of the user that's searching specific keywords. If you're not familiar with the search intent of your target keywords and haven't prepared in advance to writing your content, you're likely going to see lackluster results when it comes to search rankings.
There are four different types of search intent; Informational, Commercial, Transactional, and Navigational intent.
Here are some quick descriptions of each:
- Informational intent - the searcher is looking for information on the topic. Generally, longer-form content will rank in the SERP.
- Commercial intent - the searcher is doing research on a potential or upcoming purchase and requires additional information.
- Transactional intent - the searcher is trying to make a purchase
- Navigational intent - the searcher is looking for a specific destination on the internet
When a user searches on Google, the result is based on Google's perception of the search intent based on billions of previous searches that work to inform that perspective.
Take the search term 'Rawlings catchers mitt.'
We can see that Google perceives this to be a transactional search and the result is lists of retailers showing exactly where to purchase a 'Rawlings catchers mitt'.
If your goal was to rank for this keyword and you wanted to design content that had a chance of being listed in this SERP, it would be imperative to make sure you actually sold Rawlings catchers mitts.
You would essentially be dealing with a branded (Rawlings) sub-category (Baseball glove > Catchers Mitt) product list page, and there are tons of content types that would work on this page, but most importantly, you would need to link to product pages.
The bottom line here. It's best practice to fully understand what type of content is ranking before you embark on building or designing content that completely misses its mark.
5. Use headings to your benefit.
Regardless of how narrow your topic is, it can be broken up into subheadings that will enable you to utilize keywords in the page structure where they are more prominent.
Subheadings not only help to break up the text and make it easier to digest, but they also help readers find exactly what they need faster.
In SEO writing, you should aim to create sub-headings that build and expand on your page title by drawing the reader deeper into the topic.
- Generally, the main heading or title leverages the H1.
- Your main sub-headings are marked with an H2
- any headings throughout these sub-heading blocks should leverage H3-H6
- Generally, headings should be concise, 50-60 characters in length, and leverage keywords you want to rank for
- You can use more than one H1 (per Google) but not so many that it is just spam
Reality is pretty simple. Leverage headings as you would to create a table of contents almost, and tag the topics with the appropriate 'layer' as they are nested in your information hierarchy.
6. Build to leverage featured snippets.
Featured snippets are search features that Google leverages to show a direct answer to a question.
For example, if you search 'how to screenshot on Mac.'
Google leverages these throughout the SERP, but typically they can be seen in what some call 'position 0' or "#0' spot.
Simply put, it's a bit of information that is a direct answer to a query, and Google sees this "snippet" as a succinct answer that will enable mobile and especially voice search users to find the solution and move forward.
7. Include keywords in your meta description.
Google's own data suggests that strong, well-written meta-descriptions positively influence organic click-through rates.
Although it's not a direct ranking factor, it's a piece of content we can edit that is directly shown in the SERPs, which makes the description an expensive piece of search real estate.
It's best to make your descriptions unique for each page and spend time summarizing your page in a way that drives quality and high-quantity search traffic.
8. Make sure your title tag packs a punch.
Google can choose whatever title content it wants, but you want to make sure the one you write is what they stick with when showing your content in the SERPs.
Here are a few quick aspects to consider when making a title that clearly describes your page and helps improve your ranking on Google:
- Focus on an accurate description of the page's content
- Create a unique title for each page
- keep it brief (50-60 characters) but descriptive
Remember, the title is one of the primary SEO elements that a user will see when the page is displayed in the SERPs.
You want your title to include the primary keyword as prominently in your title as possible without going overboard and stuffing it. It needs to be intriguing enough to entice the reader to learn what else your content has to say.
Sometimes, adding a number in the title can be an effective way to capture attention. Numbers tend to prime the reader on what to expect, assuring them that they'll learn in an organized and thoughtful way that is easy to skim.
9. Add alt text to your images
Another commonly overlooked facet of your page is image alt text.
This HTML feature not only improves accessibility for your content by enabling screen readers to accurately explain the visualizations. But it also enables search engines to fully understand those images as well when crawling your site.
This feature helps add more context to your content and images so that not only can your page rank better in regular search but within image search as well.
According to Moz, almost 21% of search results include images. That ends up being 1.7b Google searches per day, so you're dealing with a potential for serious return off of simple optimizations.
- Make sure you leverage this space to improve your customers' overall experience if they are visually impaired.
- Utilize this in a way that is detailed and descriptive rather than keyword-heavy.
- Air on the side of specific vs. broad in your description.
- If you can, use this space to add helpful context that relates to the topic of the page.
- Alt text should be less than 125 characters if possible.
- Don't waste characters on "image of..." or "picture of"; just jump right into the description.
- You can use keywords but do so as necessary.
10. Link to other high-authority sites
It's pretty much common knowledge, but just as you wouldn't leverage a resource for your paper that wasn't high quality, don't link to sites that are low quality, either.
You want to make sure that when you link to sites for attribution of an idea, the site is high-level and has a good following.
The idea here is this. When you link to sites that have good standing and high-quality information, you build a connection and show search engines that you get your information from quality resources within your niche.
11. Compress your images for faster page load speeds
Page speed is a serious user experience and, therefore SEO aspect.
It involves many aspects, like architecture and your server or CDN setup, but one piece that is relatively easy to optimize is image compression.
You should make sure that each one of the images you use on the page is in the ideal format, sized properly, and sustained high resolution while not bogging down your load times.
Note that image size/ dimension and file size is not the same thing, but both need to be addressed for optimal load times.
If you're using Adobe Photoshop, there is a slick 'save for the web' option, and it will automatically minimize the file size while optimizing the image quality as well.
There are plenty of free options out there that help you do the same thing as well.
- pixlr
- JPEG Mini
When you feel like you're ready to test, here are a few options that will enable you to see your speeds and verify if users will have trouble loading your content.
- Gtmetrix
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- WebPageTest
12. Aim for scannable, longer posts.
You want content that answers the user as thoroughly as possible without taking too many words to do so.
You also want to make sure that your content can be digested quickly and won't frustrate your readers as they are viewing the page.
Keeping both of these in mind, along with data that suggests longer posts (more thorough content) tends to rank higher in the SERP on average, you might want to go deeper rather than skimp when you create content.
We tend to see shorter pages lacking the detail and context for ranking on complex and nuanced topics.
13. Build internal links to support your other content
When you build a new piece of content, it's essentially a needle in a haystack.
In order for your content to rank, you need to secure links to your new page.
The only way Google and other search engines will find your page is if it is linked to other pages it already knows about.
This can be simply the site map, the navigation, your home page, etc.
But we don't want to stop there. We want to link to our content with contextual hyperlinks throughout your content.
With the right internal linking strategy, you can funnel internal link equity (or link value) or, more simply, priority to your new content.
When Google crawls, it adds up all of the times it sees your page linked to, from your own site and other sites.
If we link to a page more often, we are telling Google that this page is important and it needs to take a look.
Additionally, as we link to our pages more often, that means more users will see that page as well, and we are telling them that this page is very helpful.
The right internal linking strategy is a massively powerful tactic for increasing your rankings and organic traffic.
Use SEO copywriting to boost User Experience Signals.
At this point, it's pretty clear that content with positive UX signals ranks better.
A somewhat newer saying is "Good SEO is Good User Experience." The idea is that you're not creating content for search engines, you're not stuffing keywords, you're focused on answering questions, mapping directly to user needs, and solving real problems for real humans.
The structure is important. It's not just about writing long posts and throwing a few images or embedding a video and calling it a day.
There are facets of content that really improve the ability of your content to convey meaning to your users.
Some features might be Q&A segments where you easily and readily answer the questions users are asking, along with providing a place for new users to submit a question.
In that same vein, you can knock out FAQ as well. Some other content features we see leveraged commonly for a product are the rating and review or a purchase counter.
The idea is to share information in highly digestible bite sizes that have visual aspects drawing the user in.
When we pull these levers, it triggers familiarity across other experiences where a user made a purchase, and more overtly, it provides social proof and assurance they aren't alone in their decision to buy.
The power of improving your UX in combination with content written to capture search volume is one that takes good to great and improves the revenue value of your content in the long run.
Boost your organic click-through rate.
Earlier on, we made sure we were aligned with a relevant and high-volume search query. That's a big first step.
Creative titles go a long way:
You need to spend some time improving the title as it's one of the main facets of your page that captures user attention in SERP.
Many people discount that split-second scrolling past the blue links, don't lose out because you're lazy.
Avoid heavy title tags; they tend to be boring and don't garner added interaction.
If you can, utilize brackets in your headlines. A study from HubSpot found that brackets increased headline clicks by 40%
Using descriptive headlines is great, but you should be testing titles wherever you can.
It's easy to leverage PPC Ads, Facebook Posts, and Tweets to see what kind of engagement different options provide. Learn and iterate as often as you can until you find one that works.
A descriptive URL that lets the user know what the page is about tends to be way more engaging than a string of numbers. Suppose you can leverage a short phrase rather than a string that isn't readable.
Sell your content in the meta description. This is the second feature you control in the SERP; if people are seeing it, you need to make sure it aligns with their intent.
Utilize 'power words' to improve your click-through rate and drive more users to your site.
You can also leverage the calendar year in your description if it's not already included in your title. The more best practices you can check between the headline and the description, the better off you'll be.
Additionally, there are a few types of structured data that increase your SERP landscape when leveraged correctly.
Common types of schema markup that can increase your visibility in SERP are:
- Organization
- Person
- Local Business
- Product & Offer
- Breadcrumbs
- Article
- Video
- Event
- FAQ
SEO copywriting tools
A few that I find helpful. I'll add a more robust list as I update this article.
SEMRush: a ton of specific use cases that each provide benefits when leveraged for SEO copywriting.
- Keyword Magic Tool
- Topic Research
- Organic Research
- SEO Writing Assistant
- On-Page SEO Checker
- SEO Content Template
Google Search Console: A free set of tools to help you monitor and fix search performance and traffic.
Google Analytics: A free tool that enables you to measure organic traffic as well as keep your advertising ROI in focus.
Google Trends: This helps you understand what people are searching for and how often they are searching those topics.
Also Asked: Aggregated view of the People Also Asked section in the Google SERP.
What's Next? How do I take my SEO Writing to the next level?
If you follow the steps and suggestions listed above, you'll be well on your way to creating more high-quality content.
As you go on this journey, please feel free to reach out and ask me questions or send me a link to check out once you've hit publish - @mcaramen
Upcoming content that I'm working on and will add some links to as it goes live. Be sure to check back
- Search Intent Deep Dive
- Content Marketing Strategy: Full Guide
- Create your own Content Plan
- More SEO Copywriting tips and optimization techniques