Using SEO in a Blog Post or Article to Attract Organic Traffic

SEO Copywriting

Using SEO in a Blog Post or Article to Attract Organic Traffic

If you have a blog or web page, you want to rank well in search engines and draw more organic search, and you can use SEO copywriting to accomplish that.

Offering quality content to site visitors is one of the best and most foolproof ways to increase organic traffic.In fact, if you want to rank highly in a Google search when writing a blog post, article, or other website pages, great content is essential.

Creating content is more crucial than ever as Google evolves to deliver a better experience to its users. Keywords are still important, though to succeed in SEO copywriting with the current iterations of search engine technology

Attracting Links Through High Quality Content

One of the reasons a web page with great content is important is that it leads to another important facet of SEO: links. Links to your site from other high quality sites enhances your authority in Google’s algorithms, and it will reward you with a better ranking. However, to encourage others to link to online content, you have to offer them something of real value.

Links will bring more visitors to your site, increase organic traffic, and establish your site as an authority in your field. Earning links means creating content that is informative and entertaining. That way other sites will want to link to yours, and visitors who enjoy the post will share it on social media.

It’s obvious how SEO content brings links and boosts search engine rankings, but how does one write content that earns links and social shares? Keep in mind things like:

• Fulfilling expectations. If you make a claim or promise in your post’s title, make sure your content delivers, or people and organizations will not share it on their own sites or social media.
• Providing information people cannot get elsewhere.
• Being entertaining and writing your content in a way that people will enjoy reading it.
• Employing not just SEO, but copywriting principles. Copywriting is an art unto itself, and it uses tips and tricks of its own to capture the attention of your target audience and make them want to read on. Copywriting techniques are beyond the scope of this post, but it’s worth finding an article and learning more about them.
• Most importantly, show confidence in what you write when it’s a subject you know a lot about. Readers can tell when someone knows what they’re talking about, and they’ll take action.

Hint: Take a look at blog posts or pages that appear near the top of a Google search. You should never copy someone’s else’s content, and in fact Google can impose a penalty if you do, but you can certainly study it to see why the post is attracting it’s target audience. Look at the information presented, the images included, and the language. That can give you an idea of what people want to know about your topic.

Update your content to lower bounce rates

When someone visits blog posts or a web page and encounters a piece of content that is out of date and no use to them, they’ll catch on quickly and hit the Back button to search for a post with more relevant content. This is known as bounce, and search engines like Google lower the rank of a web page with a high bounce rate.

What does this have to do with SEO copywriting?

A piece of content that is out of date or irrelevant to what a user is searching for will result in in low-conversion pages (low-conversion because they resulted in higher bounce rates from those search results).

High bounce rates will also show search engines that your web page and content is of poor quality and provides a poor user experience. Because Google wants to provide the best experience to its users, it doesn’t want to suggest a page of post of low quality, which means your rank drops in the search results.

If nothing else, make sure you’re keeping your content landing pages up to date and extremely relevant for your readers.

Satisfying Search Intent

As Google becomes more sophisticated, search engine optimization, particularly in terms of creating content, involves satisfying user intent. People use search engines for a variety of reasons: to seek answers to questions, to find items or services, and to learn how to do things.

The content Google will reward most is content that meets the needs the user brings to the search. If you write a post that answers the original question that brought a user to the search engine in the first place, Google will reward your efforts.

Creating content like this is easier than it sounds. Think of what people might want to know about your field – questions you can answer, things you can explain, things you can teach. Consider what they are searching for and write blog posts or other content that meets their needs. Search engines are increasingly able to detect this, and it will increase organic traffic and help you rank higher on the search results page.

Keywords in SEO Content and SEO Copywriting

Keywords are still important to your SEO efforts, and they are a big part of the way your audience finds your web page. Knowing the keywords searchers are using and concentrating your SEO efforts on them is one of the best SEO tactics, but they days of packing keywords into a blog post and hoping to draw the attention of search engines are over; they have become too sophisticated for that. First and foremost, you want to write content meant to meet the needs of users, and that’s also what Google wants to see.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is important to drawing organic traffic, because before you can include the right keywords in your content, you need to know which keywords people are using to search for you. When Google sees a match between the keyword in a search and a keyword in your content, it will show your blog post or web page to that user.

How many keywords should you work into your content? The range should be between 1 percent and 4 percent. Any lower (or higher) and you’re less likely to get the results you want.

In other words, if you are aiming for 2 percent, you’ll include your keyword phrase twice for every 100 words you write.

A tool like Scribe can be helpful in quickly determining if you’ve overused (or underused) your desired keywords.

Where you position those keywords matters too. Stuffing all of your keywords into the first 200 words of your articles will definitely send up red flags, not only from search engines but from people as well.

It’s not good for readers and it doesn’t work for search engines either. Your first goal should always be to write content that provides value to people, and it is definitely possible to produce that type of content while still including the requisite number of keywords.

Title Tag, Heading, and Other Keyword Strategies

Like keywords, your title tag and heading help search engines match your web page with people who are looking for the information it provides. To get the best results, follow these guidelines when writing.

• Add keywords in H1 tag: The first place to stick your keyword is in H1. By the way, do not include more than one H1 tag on a page.
• Use keywords in your title tag: As always with modern SEO copywriting, do this gracefully in a way that works for readers too.
• Add keywords to H2 and H3 tags: These tags are usually used as sub headlines throughout your content.
• Mention a keyword in the first paragraph: The next place to position your keyword is in the first paragraph of your article. It’s even better if you can mention it in the first sentence.
• Add keyword to images: If you use images in your content, then include your keywords, assuming they match the image you’re using.
• Create anchor text with keywords: Since search engine spiders crawl from website to website and page to page via links, including keywords in your anchor text will help them correctly identify your content. Remember that using a keyword phrase in your title makes it more likely for that phrase to show up in anchor tags when others link to you.

Create compelling content

Attracting links — from real websites with good reputations — is the number one thing you’re going after when it comes to SEO.

This is why you have to create compelling content.

Search engines analyze the links coming into your site, and they look specifically at the pages those links are coming to. Those links coming into your site become votes for the credibility and authority of your site. One link from CNN will be worth more than one hundred links coming into your site from no-name websites.

Search engines like Google also look at the words people use to link to your site. These anchor texts are one way that search engines decide what a page is all about.

Keep in mind that people link to you because they get something out of it — because your content is useful or practical for their audience, or your content is controversial or funny.

No matter what happens with the search engine algorithms, compelling content will continue to drive SEO for a long time. People will always want to share blog posts and web pages that they enjoyed or found useful or informative, and search engines will reward posts that satisfy user intent. All of that leads to social shares, links, search engine rankings, and ultimately, organic traffic.

SEO Copywriting Summary

SEO copywriting isn’t difficult when you create content with the goal of helping, teaching, or entertaining people. Search engine algorithms may change, but quality will never go out of style. Still, you can give your SEO content writing a boost by following some simple techniques:

• Research keywords
• Include keywords in your writing at a rate of 1 – 4 percent
• Put keywords in title tags and headings
• Research user intent and try to satisfy it in your blog post or web page
• Make content people will enjoy reading
• Try to write content that’s unique
• Keep content up to date and relevant
• SEO content should fulfill promises made in title of the blog post or article

If you want to rank well in search engines and draw organic traffic, practice using the SEO copywriting and content strategies. You will find that thinking about content this way will begin to come naturally, and before long, you’ll be rewarded with more followers, more social media shares, and more organic traffic. Always remember that the more you write, the better your work will become, and the same is true of SEO copywriting.

Visit NewSunSEO to learn more about SEO strategies