What is SEO Content Writing? How to Write SEO-Friendly Content?

In digital marketing, content writing is the process of writing and editing content for web pages, blog posts, videos, social media, podcasts, etc.

Content writing works as the foundation for every digital thing today. Be it email newsletters, white papers, landing pages, product descriptions, YouTube video descriptions, and more. 

Writing the content in a way that fulfills the search queries well and helps search engines to understand the subject of the matter, is called SEO-friendly content writing. 

Here are some practices to follow for writing SEO-friendly content:

1. Keyword research

Do some keyword research related to the topic, as mentioned earlier. Decide the primary keyword and additional keywords, keeping in mind the queries searched by users to find your content. 

Include these keywords in your content in a natural way.

2. Effective title

An effective title is going to bring your content a lot of traffic. The meta title appears in the SERP. Catchy titles are more likely to drive user attention and clicks.

Include your primary keyword in the title. The length of the title shouldn't be longer than 65 words.

Start the title with words like ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘where’, etc. to answer the queries of the users.

In the title, the numbers play a good role by driving more traffic. You can use “top 10’, 10 best’, 5 things’, etc. 

3. Readability

Nobody likes poorly structured and cluttered content. Structure your content properly to improve readability and attract users.

• Write small sentences and short paragraphs. 

• Keep the content in-depth if it fulfills the user’s requirements.

• Use headings and subheadings (H1 to H6) for proper framing of content. 

4. Visual content

The use of visual content, like images and GIFs, can make the content appealing for users. Even if it's long-form content, the user won’t get bored.

5. Bullet points

To further improve the readability, use bullet points and number lists among the content. 

6. Meta description

Catchy content in the meta description will impress the user and bring in more traffic. That’s why, optimize the meta description by including the primary keywords, targeting an emotion, and adding relevant call-to-actions (CTAs).

7. Table of contents

A table of contents is a great thing to add to the articles, especially if it’s a lengthy article. The table helps users to reach the point in the article they are looking for. 

8. Linking

Relevant internal and external links in the content further improve your SEO. 

Internal linking can be done by hyperlinking the text that talks about your services or any other article that might be useful for the user. On web pages, you can link to the other services that the user might be interested in.

For external links, you can hyperlink to the original source of stats, reports, or images (included in the content) and show credibility. 

9. Updating content

Google likes fresh and updated content. 

An article written in 2018 might not be the right fit for users today. That’s why, keep on updating the old content to stop losing potential traffic. 

In this SEO content writing tutorial for beginners, you will learn the basics of how content helps in ranking any website or blog rank higher on the search engines. For ranking the article or content on the first page, you need to do keyword research. It can be done from various sources and sites—for example, UberSuggest, Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs Keyword Generator. You can use the free version of these SEO tools for content writing purposes.