SEO writing tips: Writing for rankings

Where do I begin writing the perfectly optimized page? Is there such a thing?

One thing I can tell you is there’s no exact way, but there are many ways to come close.

From doing my research and trying to write the perfectly optimized page myself, what I’ve found is that the most important thing to consider is your reader. Before anything else, you must build credibility and trust with your readers; making you worthy of their business.

When writing for rankings, it is essential that your readers feel as though they’ve taken away an important piece of information from your site. The last thing you want them doing is bouncing from your website back to the search engine. Here are a few simple SEO writing tips.

SEO copywriting requires keyword research

There are 3 types of searches that people generally perform, according to Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide to SEO”, resulting in 3 distinct types of searchers. Highly emotional clickers are going to click on multiple links to get various opinions, but are likely to share good content if they find it. Casual searchers or concept searchers don’t really know what they want, but if you have done enough research to know that someone searching for “Disney vacations” is very likely to search for hotels, parks and restaurants as well, then the more chances you have to generate leads from the decisions they are inclined to make.

Finally, the sharpshooter, the person that knows what they want; they’re the reason long-tail keywords work! What they’re looking for is more specific and not searched as often, but they are more likely to generate a sale when they do search. Copywriters beware: if they don’t like what they see, they will pogo-stick right back to Google and try again. You can prevent this in two ways: making sure your headline is relevant to your title tag and using your primary keyword in the title, and by having a clean and easy to read page.

Readability and uniqueness

Keywords of all shapes and sizes statistically boost a websites position and ranking in the search engines, but when weighting out the elements that make up a highly optimized page, keyword usage only amounts to 6%. Content length, uniqueness and readability compose of almost 10%, according to an infographic by Rand Fishkin of Moz.com, making the value of your page an important factor when visitors are deciding who to lend their loyalty to.

Don’t make your writing solely around keywords; use them naturally and readers will notice. Cramming them into your content will sound repetitive and is a red flag for Google.

Write to be shared

Simultaneously, adding social widgets to your page allows for sharing on social media, but make sure that your content is worthy of being shared. Who’s going to read your stuff?

Relevance is the key; as is thinking about the community you are writing for and what they would like to know.

Use internal links to guide visitors to other pages of quality content on your website, or link out to healthy, relevant thought leaders in your community. In return, sharing will be rewarded, possibly with return shares from other authority figures in your niche.

The rundown

Remember that ultimately you are writing for other humans. People are the ones making the decisions; computers just help us get started. Do the research, find out what questions need answering, use a subtle amount of key words, and write to be shared. The rest is up to you.