In 2023, typical online advertising strategies are stagnating. With the average user seeing up to 10,000 ads per day, it’s getting harder and harder to stand out from the noise.
The modern consumer values authenticity more than anything these days. And a yappy YouTube ad or a traditional billboard will do more to alienate your target audience in many cases. So, how can you connect with potential customers on a deeper level? For certain businesses, SEO content writing service is the perfect fit.
SEO content services work best for businesses that have a longer customer lifecycle. That is, your average customer needs to get to know you a bit first before committing to a purchase. Examples of perfect candidates for an SEO strategy are SaaS companies and car dealerships. But nearly any business can benefit from SEO writing services when they’re executed properly.
In this article, we will give you an overview of how SEO works and how to develop a website content strategy. While we wouldn’t recommend doing it all by yourself, you should be well-equipped to hire the correct professionals to carry out your content strategy after reading.
Why SEO Content Services?
SEO content services serve 2 main purposes. The first, as we already mentioned, is to build a relationship with your audience. On the other hand, SEO also facilitates another important component of marketing: visibility.
After several months, a well-designed SEO copywriting strategy should begin getting your pages ranked at or near the top of Google’s search rankings. When potential customers see your business’ name displayed over and over, they’ll begin to internalize that you’re a leader in your market, even if they don’t click on your articles or use your services.
Here’s an overview of what makes SEO writing services so powerful.
Bring In Qualified Leads
Regular advertisements, like Google Ads, can get pretty granular with the types of audiences you can target. The thing is, it’s difficult for a single pay-per-click ad to build a relationship with your audience. By writing engaging content that targets the types of problems that your audience needs solving, you might narrow down your potential customers by a lot, but studies show that they’ll be a lot more likely to buy from you. It’s a matter of trust, but also, it’s a matter of demonstrating to the customer that you’re competent and that you’ve designed a product that meets their needs.
More Affordable Than PPC (Sometimes)
Google Ads bid prices have skyrocketed in recent years. As a result, your return on investment won’t be as high, on average, as it was before. For certain industries, like eCommerce, the Google Ads market is especially saturated.
So, what’s the solution? We won’t delude you by pretending that content writing is free. Rather, by hiring a copywriter or an agency to write articles for your website, you stand to get a lot of free traffic to your web pages. Whereas a Google Ad alone can exclusively provide you with customers while the campaign is running, an SEO article can keep feeding you leads for years, after you paid for it, so long as you keep up to date with SEO best practices.
Build A Brand
Content writing, like other long-form content, will hold your website visitors’ attention above all. And while you have their attention, you get to control the narrative. How do you want your target market to think of you? You might prefer to project a sensible, solutions-focused approach to your industry. Or alternatively, you might want visitors to regard you as a quick-witted, fun-loving brand. It’s all up to you. With the right writers, anything is possible. You just need to communicate your brand message to them, and they’ll work with you to bring it out on screen.
If you’re thinking long-term, ensuring that you have a rock-solid brand identity is essential. A lot of common growth challenges can be avoided when you have a large, core user base that believes in your product. And creating a brand through copywriting is an excellent first step in that direction.
Professionals Do It Better
Most of the issues commonly associated with SEO and content writing stem from individuals attempting to make shortcuts and DIY the process. SEO is a game that requires precision and patience. Seldom do articles rank on the first page of Google immediately after they’re posted on your website. And when they do, it’s usually the result of a feat of targeted keyword research, fantastically written prose, and an existing SEO strategy that’s already going strong.
Getting to the top of Google’s search engine rankings is rarely the result of luck. At the very least, it’s reflective of someone who knows SEO well paying for various professional SEO tools and analyzing the options available to them. However, an SEO’s work isn’t done there. It never is. And this next part is what can make or break your digital marketing strategy.
You see, some businesses attempt to cut costs by either having an overworked employee write articles in-house, paying cheap writers, or more recently, over-relying on AI. These cost-cutting strategies put your brand’s authenticity and quality into question. And so, sometimes, brands rank at the top of Google but don’t really see good results because they don’t provide helpful, brand-focused content. We want to emphasize that taking a holistic view of your content strategy is what will prove the most rewarding in the long run.
How SEO Works
What does the holistic, birds-eye view look like? It’s time to dive deep into all the tasks and roles that enable a content marketing strategy to unfold. We’re going to be as expansive as possible with our overview, but note that the information here can only help to form the basis of a successful content strategy. An SEO expert will have plenty of more obscure (but legitimate) strategies up their sleeve, depending on your specific case.
Keyword Research
This stage comes at the very beginning of any successful SEO strategy. Keywords, in essence, are the words or phrases that your target audience searches for. Sometimes, they can be directly related to your products, but otherwise, they can also be related in some other way. For example, it is obvious that somebody who is searching for “Top 10 productivity tools” is searching for a productivity tool. However, someone who searches, “Pomodoro method alternatives” (Pomodoro is a concentration technique) could also be looking to boost their productivity.
The aim of keyword research is to find keywords that have a high likelihood of getting you clicks on your website so that you can write articles about them. You want a balance between high search volume (indicating popularity) and low competition (easier to rank for), with a keen focus on relevancy to your business.
The research phase generally starts with you brainstorming a list of relevant topics to your business, just to give you a guiding hand when you use actual keyword tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google Keyword Planner. Look for long-tail keywords – longer and more specific phrases – as they often have less competition and a higher conversion rate. Consider the search intent behind each keyword: are users looking to buy, to learn, or simply to find a website? Your content strategy should be tailored to match this intent.
Of course, you will need to stay up to date with the latest keyword trends. For instance, when Apple came out with their new product, the iVision Pro, earlier this year, searches for the term “Apple iVision Pro + other keyword” skyrocketed. Some savvy businesses stayed on top of the trend and began to rank for related keywords right away. And the inverse is true, you should note declining trends as well so that you know which keywords and topics to stay away from.
Competitor Analysis
You likely already know some of your competitors, but knowing what they are for your specific keywords is important too. Competitor analysis entails examining the content and strategies of your competitors to identify both their strengths and gaps you can capitalize on. More than just emulating what others are doing; it’s also about finding opportunities they’ve missed and understanding what works in your industry.
Once you identify your main competitors for your keyword topics, you can start to analyze their websites and content strategies: What keywords are they targeting? What kind of content are they producing? How do they structure their website for SEO? Tools like Moz’s Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs can provide insights into their backlink profiles and the keywords they rank for.
Also, pay attention to their on-page SEO tactics, such as title tags, meta descriptions, and content layout. Look for patterns in the type of content (like blogs, videos, infographics) that is gaining traction. This analysis can guide your own content strategy, helping you focus on areas that might give you a competitive edge.
Content Planning
Once you have a sense of what kind of content you want to create, and keywords you want to target, you can begin hammering out the details. This will take the form of a content plan. The plan determines what content to create, how to create it, and when to publish it, all while aligning with your SEO goals. Effective content planning is about delivering the right message, to the right audience, at the right time.
You might want a range of different content, from blog posts and news articles to infographics and videos, this can help make your content more engaging.
When creating your content plan, the ultimate aim is to fill a content calendar. It helps you organize the publishing schedule, ensuring consistent content delivery, which is crucial for SEO and audience retention. Each piece of content should have a clear goal, whether it’s driving traffic, generating leads, or increasing brand awareness.
Content Creation
Of course, this is the part you’ve been waiting for. There is a lot that goes into content creation before the actual content is created. Those prior processes are about ensuring that your content is relevant. Having completed the previous steps, you or your dedicated SEO content writer are ready to begin putting together the articles for your website.
We’ve stressed the importance of engaging content over and over again in this article. So, what exactly makes content engaging to your visitors? Your potential buyers want content that speaks to them, that means knowing your buyer inside out and trying to use ideas and analogies that appeal to them in your writing.
On your end, you want to ensure that you craft each piece of content with a specific goal in mind. If your article targets a keyword, what type of buyer would search for that keyword? Write your content to target them. Finally, make sure that you have a specific action or path that you want your visitors to take after reading your article. That can go a long way to helping you convert them into customers.
Additionally, most people prefer variety. Reading a wall of text isn’t any fun. Don’t underestimate the importance of elements like images, videos, and infographics in helping make your brand more appealing.
On-Page Optimization
Let’s drill down on one of the critical aspects of content production, namely, on-page optimization. It’s one of the key factors in successfully reaching your target audience with the keywords that you select.
To make your website search engine-friendly, you should optimize your titles and meta descriptions to include target keywords and be compelling enough to encourage clicks from search engine results pages. Header tags (H1, H2, etc.) should be used effectively to structure your content, making it easier for search engines to understand the hierarchy and relevance of your information.
It’s also crucial to ensure that your URLs are clean and keyword-rich, images are optimized with descriptive file names and alt tags, and internal linking is used judiciously to strengthen the overall structure of your site. Additionally, enhancing the readability of your content, ensuring mobile-friendliness, and improving page loading speed are all critical components of on-page SEO.
Regular audits are essential to identify and rectify any on-page issues, thereby ensuring that your website remains compliant with the latest SEO standards and practices.
Content Revision & Updates
You might have already tried SEO and are looking to step your game up. Fortunately, there is a way for you to reuse some of the content you already have on your website. Search engines favor fresh, updated content, and regularly revising your existing content can boost your site’s ranking and user engagement.
A good SEO will review your content to identify what’s outdated and most importantly, your pages that are underperforming. That’s why having a full suite of analytics tools is so critical.
Content revision could be a complete rewrite of a page. Alternatively, you could add extra content, and not just written content, it could be visual too.
Off-Page Strategies
Aside from directly creating and improving upon the pages that you’re trying to rank on, there are a whole raft of things you can do outside of that to help those pages rank.
Backlink Acquisition
Backlinks are links from other websites and webpages to your site, utilized by search engines to assess your website’s credibility and maintain its ranking.
To acquire quality backlinks, start by creating high-quality, link-worthy content. Useful, informative, and unique SEO content naturally attracts backlinks. Guest posting on reputable sites in your industry is another effective strategy. This involves writing articles for other websites and including a link back to your site.
Networking and building relationships with influencers, bloggers, and other website owners in your niche can also lead to backlink opportunities. Be wary of black-hat SEO tactics, like buying links, as these can lead to penalties from search engines.
Regularly monitor your backlink profile to ensure the links are still relevant and beneficial. Tools like Ahrefs or Moz can help track your backlinks and assess their quality.
Technical Optimization
Technical optimization sounds a lot more technical than it is. For the most part, as long as you fill in a few checkboxes on your website, you’ll do well in this aspect of Google’s search algorithm. Critical technical tasks include optimizing site architecture, improving site speed, ensuring secure connections (HTTPS), and making the site easy for search engine crawlers to navigate.
One of the easy but important things you can do to improve your website is to create a sitemap and a robot.txt file, which guide search engines through your site, indicating which pages to crawl. Fixing broken links and errors like 404 pages is also crucial, as they negatively impact user experience and SEO. You should also use structured data (Schema markup) to help search engines understand the content of your pages and provide rich snippets in search results, which can improve click-through rates.
Site speed is a significant ranking factor. You should optimize images, leverage browser caching, and minimize the use of heavy scripts and plugins to enhance load times. This is no replacement for creative SEO optimized content writing, however. Technical SEO is the type of thing you can do to get a percentage increase in visitors, but it won’t increase your readership drastically unless your website was previously extremely challenging to crawl.
Mobile Optimization
Just more than half of all searches come from mobile phones and not desktops. As a result, mobile users expect to see website content presented in a digestible way for them when they’re using your website. Designing for quick answers can help you keep the attention of mobile users.
You should have a responsive design that automatically adjusts the layout based on the device’s screen size. This includes readable text without requiring zoom, adequate space for tap targets, and avoiding horizontal scrolling.
Page loading speed is especially important for mobile users. Optimize images, use mobile-specific features like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and minimize code to increase mobile loading speed.
All features available on the desktop version of your site should also be available on mobile. This includes content, navigation menus, and other interactive elements. Regularly test your website on various mobile devices to ensure compatibility and a smooth user experience.
What A Good Content Writing Agency Does Differently
Engaging Writing, Quality Content
The quality of writing from a content writing agency that dedicates itself to your project is vastly superior to delegating the writing to someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. We spoke on this earlier, and to add to what we said, the key to engaging writing is customer research. The better your writers know your customers, the better they can convince them to use your services.
On the flipside, they don’t abuse keyword research to the point that they use tactics like keyword stuffing or other blackhat SEO tactics. These tactics haven’t worked in a long time, and whenever your agency or writer proposes a strategy that seems a bit too good to be true, it usually is.
Using A Range Of SEO Tools
Common SEO tools include Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner. But what about analyzing backlinks? What about analyzing your sitemap? There is a wide range of tools that an SEO should use, and they need to be open-minded. Examples of more advanced tools that aren’t as user-friendly include Screaming Frog. Your SEO should know how to use advanced tools in their work, even if it looks complicated to the layperson.
Measuring Success
And of course, one of the main uses for these tools is to measure the performance of your content marketing campaigns. Web content creation, even though the fruits can last a long time, requires a steady and constant guiding hand. The reason why it takes a few months to begin seeing results from an SEO campaign is that it requires a lot of fine-tuning in the beginning, which you can accomplish with the right tools and SEO know-how.
Using Long-Tail Keywords
For the most part, 2 or 3-word keywords will be oversaturated. SEO isn’t a brand-new concept, and in English-speaking markets, everyone is in heavy competition against one another for popular keywords. Creating short articles that target really specific topics, dictated by 5 or 6-word keywords could easily net you more customers than targeting a keyword with 1,000 monthly searches. This goes back to building your brand and developing an intimate relationship with your audience.
Hire An SEO Content Writing Service Today
With SEO, as with anything, the devil is in the details. What works for one business might not work for others, and making your SEO strategy work is a matter of dreaming and testing.
You should be aware that as part of the business hiring SEO services, you are a critical component to making the content strategy work. From describing your target audience, as well as how you want to reflect your brand, all the way to defining the objectives of your SEO campaign, your input will help shape all the work the SEO does.
If you’re curious to learn more about what your SEO content strategy could look like, contact us at New Digital. We’ll begin putting the puzzle pieces into place over a call or video meeting.
