In content marketing, SEO and optimized content can seem like buzzwords that so-called experts love to throw around. But how important is SEO website content to your clients and their websites? Anyone can write a blog post, but only specialists who are well versed in SEO can understand and correctly create content that helps a website rank higher in a search engine.
So what we want to cover today is how essential is it actually for you and your clients to invest in SEO writers for your website content?
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it's the process of strategically altering where a website ranks in search engine results pages for certain keywords.
So for example, a website for a construction company wants to rank on the first page of results for "construction company in [their location]." This helps them to be found more easily by consumers in their area, and if we're being honest, how often does someone actually navigate much further than the first or second page of search results?
How does this construction company get their website to rank higher in search results? With SEO.
So to answer the overall question, yes, SEO really is important to your clients.
Related: SEO Content Marketing: 5 Simple Strategies
How do we increase our search engine ranking?
In order to help your clients' websites to rank higher in search engines, it's essential to regularly update their sites with SEO website content including keywords relevant to their business.
Step 1: Start with keyword research.
For keyword research, you need to start out by understanding which keywords your clients should be ranking for. Get in the minds of their customers. What would they be searching for online in order to find your client's product or service?
Start typing those basic keywords into a search engine. Look at the auto-filled results that pop up after you start typing. Those are long-tail keywords and they're great for blog post topics and keywords.
Use a keyword planner like Google's keyword tool to help you determine how easy it is to rank for particular keywords, what the search volume for each keyword is, and related keywords you may not have thought of before.
Step 2: Create a blog content calendar using your keywords.
Using the keywords you've determined your clients should rank for, put together a blog content calendar with topics based on each keyword. Include the keyword that each blog post should incorporate.
There's no perfect keyword density or ratio for a particular blog post, but a global recommendation is to at least keep it under 5%, or your blog post and website could be flagged for keyword stuffing.
Step 3: Create your SEO website content.
There are a few things that every single search engine optimized piece of content should include:
- A headline that includes your keyword and entices users to click through to your client's blog post.
- Subheadings in the <h2> tag to show search engines that your client's content is broken up into readable sections.
- Your keyword in the first paragraph of your client's blog post.
- Links back to old blog posts when they're relevant to increase backlinks and time on your website.
The keyword should be included throughout the blog post as well, as long as it sounds natural in the sentence. If you can't make the keyword fit well, don't put it in there. That will throw off the readability of a blog post.
So what's the lesson here today? SEO friendly content is essential to helping your clients' websites rank higher in search engine results pages organically. Regardless of whether or not they believe they need blogs consistently updated with SEO website content, it's true. They do. Contact us to get started on a content marketing plan for your clients' blogs.
To learn more, check out our white paper, "What's the Future of SEO?"
