SEO Content Writing Tips for 2021

What is an SEO-optimized article?

An SEO article is a piece of content of substantial length that you write for your website. Writing articles of about 2000 words is one component that you can add to your website to make it easier to find. The more SEO content you write, the higher your website will rank in Google. 

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which in short means that you design your website in such a way that it is easy to find with search engines such as Google. In this article, we will give you tips on how to write SEO content, and you will find a handy checklist that you can use to get started right away.

How do articles contribute to SEO?

Articles contribute to SEO because you have more content on your website that people may be looking for. Therefore, the articles must be relevant to the product or service you offer. In the articles, you can process keywords. By putting them in context, the chance that people Googling something and end up on your website increases. 

The more answers you give to questions people ask Google, the more relevant your website is considered by the search engine. Make sure that people can find all possible information related to your product or service on your website.

What are the keywords?

Keywords are terms that people enter into the Google search bar to gather information or find an answer to a question they have. SEO articles are meant to contain keywords. People searching for something specific are guided to your article to get answers. “Keywords” is a bit of a misleading term because it implies that they are single words, while they can be longer terms or even whole sentences. 

Loose words or a single word are of little use these days. This is for two reasons.

Firstly, because there is a lot of competition, which means that there are several websites that try to rank on one particular word. High competition means a smaller chance of coming out on top.

Secondly, because the search intention is often not clear from one word. Search intent is exactly what the word says: with what intention do people enter certain search bar words? What exactly do they want to know exactly? Google wants to provide people with the most relevant answer to them as quickly as possible. 

This means that you have to write content that provides context so that Google can better understand which articles are relevant and which are not.

An example to clarify: you can process the keyword ‘website,’ but what does that actually say? Do people want to know what a website is, do they want to make a website themselves, or do they perhaps want to have a website made? If your website aims to help people create their own website, then ‘create your own website,’ ‘own website,’ or ‘website creation tool’ is probably better. In short, the tip is to use several longers (long-tail) keywords.

Where can I find keywords?

You can find keywords at https://neilpatel.com/en/ubersuggest/. Think of words that may be relevant to your service or product and enter them on ubersuggest. You will then see how strong the competition is for that keyword and what related keywords are that people are using. Competition on keywords means that you are probably not the only one who wants to rank for that exact keyword. 

More websites have that keyword in their content. When the competition is very high, the chance that you will end up at the top of Google with that keyword is less. Try to find the right balance between high competition and search volume. 

It is best to use keywords that are not extremely competitive but are often used by people (= large search volume). It is also helpful to look at the related keywords that ubersuggest is offering you. For example, you can use synonyms of a certain keyword to reach a greater reach with the subject. 

For example, this article about SEO articles contains ‘SEO article writing’ and ‘SEO content writing tips‘ and ‘SEO content writing.’

How do I write a good SEO article?

Now you know everything about an SEO article, what keywords are, and how to find keywords. Your next question is probably how to pour this into a barrel to actually be useful on your website. Here is the step-by-step plan:

1. Start making a mind map. You put a topic that you think people will find interesting, which has to do with your product or service, in the middle. Around it, you put all sub-topics related to the main topic. Think of about 5. It should finally be an article of 2000+ words. For example, you have a website about jewelry and offer your services there as a goldsmith. People probably find ‘gold jewelry’ interesting, so that will be your main topic. Related to that are the sub-topics ‘what is gold?’, ‘Where is gold found?’ or ‘where does gold come from?’, ‘what different types of gold are there?’, ‘How can you work gold?’ ‘how do you make a piece of jewelry from gold?’, ‘can you combine gold with other materials?’ etc.
2. Complete your mind map with information you can find on your topic in the top 10 pages on google. Also, look at the related keywords that Ubersuggest gives and then look at the related searches Google indicates. These are keywords that google gives away to you that are searched for and related to your topic. It doesn’t get any easier!
3. Write a short and powerful title (H1) related to the main topic. Your title contains the main keyword, as mentioned before, and is no longer than 6 words.
4. Make a list of subheadings about the sub-topics you wrote down. Each sub-heading (H2 / H3) contains a sub-topic (and, therefore, a keyword!)
5. Then you will fill in the subheadings: write 300-500 words per sub-topic. Combine different sources, for example, websites, books, or information that you have been told by other people. You do not need to provide citations, but you should be careful not to copy content literally from other websites. Google penalizes ‘duplicated content,’ which means that Google does not index your website as soon as it contains content that is already displayed on another website.
6. Finally, write a short summary of your entire article and place it at the top, below the title. This is your introduction and briefly describes what the article is about. This introduction to the article can make you win the rich snippet. You don’t even have to be the top 1 result to win the rich snippet, but you still get an average of 8% of the clicks.

SEO article checklist

1. Make sure the keyword you want to score on is mentioned as early as possible in the article. Why? Because the earlier a keyword occurs, the more important it is in Google’s eyes. For example, if you sell 2nd hand mobile phones, put ‘2nd hand mobile phones’ in one of your articles’ titles.
2. Include the keyword in the meta description. Meta-description is a piece of content of 120-155 characters, in which you provide a summary of your article. You write meta text to convince, so make sure it is easy to read.
3. Put the keyword in the title tag. The title tag is the title you want to display in the search results.
4. Provide an SEO friendly URL. Don’t forget that Google is not human and only processes codes. A URL is a code for Google, and it should not be too long for Google to be able to read it.
5. Put the keyword in the header, the so-called H1 tag. You can have a maximum of 1 of these on each page of your website. Google only indexes 1 H1 header, so multiple places make no sense. The H1 tag is very important to Google because Google works with codes and keywords in H1 are considered indicative for the rest of the article.
6. Include the keyword in the first sentence or paragraph of your article. Ensure that the article does not become keyword spam: the text must be legible for visitors to your website.
7. Also, put the keyword in other subheadings: H2 and H3. If necessary, use synonyms to increase readability.

Where on my site do I post SEO articles?

We have chosen to create a knowledge base ourselves. A knowledge base is a kind of mini Wikipedia around your product or service. There you collect the SEO articles. You can divide this knowledge base into different categories. Always make sure that the structure is logical and that articles within your site are easy to find. Of course, you can also just create the articles as pages or put them down as a blog. 

WordPress and blogs’ big advantage is that an archive page is often automatically created where all articles you publish are automatically neatly archived.

Practical tips for writing SEO content 

• Enrich your article with images, videos, MP3s, etc. Google is happy when you offer the information in different ways. After all, everyone is different. Some like to read. Others prefer to listen or watch. Media makes your article more relevant.
• Make use of internal links. Internal links are links within your own website, with which you refer on one page to information on another page. For example, at loreleiweb.com, you can see a 7-step plan on the homepage. The first step is target group analysis. Audience analysis links to an article about what a target audience is and how you determine it.
• Use valuable external links: you can place links to other websites that are relevant to your topic. For example, the article you are reading now contains a link to https://neilpatel.com/en/ubersuggest/ for keywords.
• Read your article aloud to yourself or to someone so that you can check if the text is easy to read. Readability is essential for SEO.
• The easiest way is often not the best way. If you want to achieve a lot of results quickly, there are many possibilities for this. For example, you can translate articles in English, ask guest writers, or buy content. However, nothing is as good as an article that you have written yourself. Your visitors will stay longer on a good page, which will make the page higher in google.
• Is there a clear answer to a particular question? Then you have a chance to win a rich snippet in Google. A rich snippet is a box that appears at the top of the search query and displays a piece of information from your website directly in the search results. A rich snippet always means more clicks to your site!