Writing content with SEO in mind

When I talk with senior stakeholders about SEO, they always ask for the same thing – will my company’s page be the top of Google’s search results? For me this misses the point. Content must be written for humans and not search engines. After all it's humans who will buy your products and services and not search engines! This means your content must be a compelling combination of being informative, persuasive, knowledgeable, fun, relevant and grammatically correct.

In other words, everything a real person looks for when browsing your website.

My tips for writing with SEO in mind are:

Quality writing
Keywords and phrases
Reflect brand personality
Spider friendly
Humour
Short sentences
Call to action
Alliteration
Page size
Linking out

 

Quality writing

If you can't write quality content, don't. If you can, then make sure you take the time to really hone your copy and make it as good as it can be. Each time your company commits words to its pages, it’s presenting itself to a potentially huge audience.

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Keywords and phrases

Stay conscious of them to ensure they appear as naturally as possible within the text. Don’t try and be clever and stuff your content with key words – search engines will penalise you for this.

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Reflect brand personality

This is an expression of the fundamental core values and characteristics of your company’s brand, described and experienced as human personality traits, e.g. friendly, intelligent, innovative etc. It’s an expression of the relationship between the consumer and the brand. Ensure your language reflects this is a positive way.

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Spider friendly

Use headlines and sub headings with the correct HTML tags and make sure they are relevant, natural, readable and contain your keywords.

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Humour

Even businesses like law or consultancy firms, insurance companies or even central government departments needs to grasp opportunities to inject some suitable humour in their content. People like this. Unless off course your website is about the history of genocide throughout history!

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Short sentences

The online reader is lazy and we know that writing for the web is different to print. To help them read the page more easily, keep sentences short and try to limit paragraphs to just two or three lines.

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Call to action

Unless you are pure information website, your copy should not just exist for the reader to read only. You need to try and secure their business. I’m not saying that your content should be one endless pitch. Rather, don’t be afraid to include a call to action somewhere in it.

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Alliteration

Think intelligence, impact and inspiration. Humans like alliterative phrasing. Looking out for such opportunities will allow you to concentrate on creating elegant copy rather than just functional words.

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Page size

Your page should only deal with one subject. Ideally it should not be longer than 500 – 700 words. People get easily bored online.

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Linking out

There is a lot of confusion out there over links. Most people are happy with the basics: inbound links good, farmed links bad and so on, but some people worry that linking out from your content could devalue your site. I believe there are three important points here:

• If you are a human reading a website, outbound links to sources provide credibility and relevant further information. This increases trust and gives you a positive impression of the website.
• Should a search engine spider be looking at your content, outbound links to relevant pages are no problem. It will only get suspicious if you are linking out all the time and to irrelevant places. This will devalue your site's importance to the search engines and, of course, too many links can make you look very suspicious.
• Inbound links are brilliant; the more the better, particularly if you can receive them from high authority pages. However, the main way to secure these links is to create impressive content that real people will want to link to.

All of these tips will give you a fantastic jump start in putting your content in front of your target audience when they most need it. It’s not about being number one on Google – rather aim to be number one in the eyes of your readers.