The most successful content writing strategy is the one that attracts lots of visitors and gives them something they can really use. The information or entertainment value of your content engages visitors, and that’s a good thing. Good writing certainly supports that.
But it takes more than just good copy to get the attention of quality visitors in the first place. So strategic content writing has to be geared toward generating superior SEO.
Go natural with your style.
Conversational writing is in, over-use of keywords for the sheer sake of volume is out, because Google now looks at many more factors. So concentrate on writing with a voice and tone that are appealing to your target audience and appropriate for your brand and the products or services you sell.
You can be funny or just-the-facts straightforward, but remember that it’s the informative part of your content that should take center stage, not the creativity of your tone.
Go natural with your keywords.
Wordstream says keyword research can improve the relevance and exposure of what you write. And isn’t that your goal? Among their tips:
- Do your research first, because having the keyword in mind as you’re writing makes it easier to compose natural, easily readable sentences. Trying to edit the keywords in after the fact never flows well.
- Use your keywords not only in the body of your writing, but in the title and the subheads.
- Include keywords in your meta title, meta description, image file names and anchor text. And, again, write naturally.
Brandon Gaille notes that related keywords, synonyms and grammatical variations are all used by Google to match a searcher’s apparent intent with the best results to display. It’s called Latent Semantic Indexing. And he says there’s one embarrassingly easy way to research keyword synonyms -- Google Tilde.
Just search for “~keyword” then scroll down to the bottom of the results page where it says “Searches related to …” So I tried it. The keyword for this article is content writing strategy, and here’s what I found:
- writing in the content area strategies
- website content writing tips
- seo content writing tips
- copy writing tips
- content writing advice
Don’t you wish all your research was this easy? That related phrases list always appears on every search page, actually, though perhaps you’ve never noticed it when searching because you’re focused on the actual results displayed. But it’s a no-brainer tool to instantly obtain keyword alternatives guaranteed to be effective with Google.
Repurposing content that’s already demonstrated value for you via your analytics is another good way to strengthen SEO. Google and other search engines look for variety and freshness as well as things like backlinks when assessing your rankings. That’s one reason your blog has such great search value.
It’s more polite to take smaller bites.
Probably when your mom taught you that she wasn’t thinking of mobile technology, but perhaps she was prescient. Breaking your content into short paragraphs, using lots of subheads to give a scanning overview of the content and similar techniques not only give your content a visual boost on a desktop monitor or printed page, they make it much easier for those using a petite screen to capture a useful portion of your content.
But sometimes good content writing strategy requires longer articles.
Formatting that offers a smaller-bite structure has distinct benefits, but search engines are looking for value within your content, too. And providing value – for your readers as well as search engines – requires you to be as informative as you can. Very short articles have less to offer search engines and people, too, in every way, whereas longer, meatier writing has exponentially greater value. Longer articles tend to be shared liked more often, too.
Who’s in charge here?
That’s all fine, I hear you say. But I write for clients who tell me what keywords to use. They write the title and handle all the behind-the-scenes work, too. All I do is write the copy.
Fine, I reply. Lucky that you’re handed those vital content writing strategy elements on a silver platter so you don’t have to do so much research. But you can still incorporate all these other ideas. Hone your copy writing skills. And do everything you can to understand the audience and the client’s business objective for each piece you write.
