A Practical Guide on How to Write SEO Articles

Get smart with your blog content and attract your audience by offering them high quality and relevant information. SEO must play a crucial factor in your digital marketing strategy. A well-written SEO article will help your website rank better in search engines. You need to understand the rules of a successful SEO strategy and apply the best practices for an effective marketing campaign. 

This article will offer you valuable tips and tricks for SEO article writing that will help you take your business to the next level.

What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization, shortly SEO, is a process that makes a website more visible on the results page of a search engine. A well put together SEO strategy will put your company’s website in the first results on Google search, increasing the probability of website visits. Search engines aim to provide the most relevant results for a person that runs a search.       

How Do Search Engines Work?

Search engines check the entire content on the Internet to find the text that best meets your search criteria. The text that a person types in the search bar is known as a keyword and reflects the most important theme of the product, company, or website. Search engines rank a website by including titles, headings, and links of a website page. These are significant factors to take into consideration for your SEO article.

Copywriting 

Firstly, it is crucial to understand what copywriting is and how to take advantage of this art in order to be on top of the competition. 

What Is Copywriting?

Copywriting is the art of creating content that makes your business, product, or service attractive enough to users. Its purpose is to make the reader or user access your website and perform a particular action such as buying a product, subscribing to a newsletter, taking a quiz, etc.

The Difference Between Copywriting and SEO Copywriting

A copywriter is a proficient specialist who writes the texts for customer engagement, advertisements, promotions, brand awareness, etc. An SEO copywriter is writing these texts tailored for online.  

One of the most important qualities of a copywriter is understanding people, knowing the audience’s preferences, and choosing the exact words that appeal to them. The titles, body of content, meta titles, and meta descriptions have to convince the reader to take a specific action. A copywriter specialized in SEO writing also understands the way that Google works and feels about specific words, phrases, and long-tail keywords.

When building your thriving online business in the ever-changing world of SEO, strive to create engaging, persuasive, and very well optimized content for search engines.

What is SEO Copywriting? 

The first thing to keep in mind when it comes to an SEO article is that Google is changing its ranking algorithm very often, and the content must be optimized every time a change is taking place. 

An SEO article is about being creative and putting out content that persuades and targets keywords that significantly impact the reader and search engines. You will achieve great SEO results with well-done SEO copywriting that increases your website’s authority, while content relevance will improve Google’s ranking for the selected keywords.

SEO Article Writing – Step by Step

When writing an SEO article, it is vital to keep in mind that you write for both your audience and search engines. Your article must make your audience eager to read it and Google to index it.

Below are our recommendations and best practices for SEO writing. Follow the recommendations below on how to write great SEO articles: 

Step 1 – Article Sketch and Research

Before starting writing, we like to ask some specific questions to give more meaning to the article:

• Identify a subject that is of importance for your audience and reflects your business, products, or services. 
• Have a clear goal in mind  – what do you want to achieve with your article.
• Know your readers: what are they attracted to, what do they prefer, what is their online behaviour etc.
• Provide a reason for your users to read the article – why would they spend a couple of minutes reading it?

After you are happy with your answers, start sketching and researching:

• Think about some attractive articles: a good title will reflect the entire article’s contents with just a few words. Choose powerful and dynamic words that will determine your audience to read the article and capture their attention. You can use the Blog Title Idea Generator for some inspiration. 
• Start researching the topic you want to write about: by getting information and reading other articles on the topic will give you some inspiration for your article. 
• After completing all the steps above, outline your article before starting writing the content: put on paper the most important sections – introduction, body and conclusion and give your article structure by using headings and subheadings. 

Step 2 – Keyword Research

We consider this a crucial step in SEO article writing! Research keywords and phrases related to your subject and choose them very carefully as this will influence your article’s performance. Do your research before starting the content creation process to generate traffic through search.

For your keyword research process, you can use: Keyword Shitter, Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, conduct a search on Google to find related keywords, use variations, synonyms and do not use keywords that the reader does not recognize, at least not in the first phrases of your article. 

Step 3 – Content Writing 

Any content written to attract search engine traffic is considered SEO content. Start creating your article by keeping in mind the following factors:

• Keywords: make sure you are using keywords in your title, in the first and final paragraph of your article. Don’t be excessive with them – the proper keyword density is between 1 and 3% (use WriteWords to count each word’s frequency usage in your text). Don’t compile too many keywords in a single sentence or phrase. The search engine will penalize it.
• Structure: always respect the order of an article: introduction, body, and conclusion.
• Grammar: respect the writing and punctuation rules. Make sure it’s grammatically correct with no spelling mistakes (you can verify and polish your content with Reverso Spell Checker, Polishmywriting or Grammarly).
• Headings: include the most important keywords and key phrases in titles and subheadings – H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6.
• Length: break it up into short paragraphs with subheadings (the ideal size of a paragraph is 300 words). Stay away from long unreadable phrases – a phrase must contain at most 20 words. The recommended length of a good article that is more likely to be fast indexed by Google is over 600 characters.
• Links: include hyperlinks to web pages relevant for your topic: pages that would likely interest the reader, with related or complementary content. Also, include internal links, which are other pages or articles within your website.

Important: We strongly advise not to copy other texts related to your theme, be original! Use your own words to write your SEO article. Before publishing it, please review it and make sure that everything is written on point.

Step 4 – Images

A human brain can retain 10% of what it reads, 20% of what it hears, 30% of what it sees, and 50% of what it simultaneously hears and sees.
To make sure that your reader will retain more information from your article, use pictures. Each article should have at least one.
Before adding pictures, take into consideration these factors:

• Use or design pictures that relate to your topic.
• Resize the pictures: if the images are very large, page speed will be affected.
• Use meaningful image file names instead of numbers or unrelated characters. Also, give your pictures original and unique titles.
• Alt Attribute (alternative text): must contain a targeted keyword. This element will help Google understand and read the pictures.

Step 5 – META Elements

Create the meta title and meta description of your article before publication to help guide search engines to understand your content better. These two elements should be exciting and attractive enough to make the audience click and read the article.

• Title Tag: should be concise and an accurate description of your web page. Its ideal length is between 50 and 60 characters. Keep it short, simple and unique. The most important keywords need to appear in your title tag.
• Meta Description: must include the most important keywords inside the description. Make sure that your description reads like a standard, human-written sentence. A meta description should be between 50 and 160 characters, and most importantly, do not use the same description for other articles. Do not include double quotation marks. 

Types of SEO Articles

There are many SEO content types. Do no limit yourself only to the list below: 

• Product Pages – These are specific to e-commerce websites. If written well, they can serve as an SEO content and it can be used as a landing page for paid campaigns.  
• Blog Posts – A blog is the most common and easiest way to create regular and constant SEO content. The blog articles are engaging and more likely to attract traffic. This is a great way to build authority for your website.
• Articles – These are specific for newspaper and magazine-style websites. Articles refer to pieces of content about news, interviews, and featured pieces.
• Lists – A list is an article that frames itself as a list, for example: “10 Ways to Increase Website Traffic”. They are easier to read, and these types of titles are more appealing and clickable in search results.
• Guides – A guide is a longer article that explains with more details how to perform an action. Guides are usually an excellent way to generate leads.
• Videos – Creating a video instead of writing an article can help you rank on the first page of Google Results for a competitive keyword. This is a great way to attract and reach your audience. The most appreciated videos are the tutorials on how to use your product/services or to exemplify a process related to your business. To improve your SEO, choose to include a transcript of your video.
• Infographics – Infographics are large-format images that include data in the form of graphs or charts on a particular subject. Infographics attract page views and links. Because of its format, most of the content is embedded in the image and cannot be read as text by search engines. Here you have to pay very much attention to the page’s content and make sure it’s well optimized. 
• Slideshows – Slideshows display a sequence of complementary images. To optimize it properly for search engines, make sure you include your keywords in your title, captions and image file names.

Publishing & Monitoring

Before publishing your article, we make sure that: 

• The title and subject of the article are relevant to the audience.

• We have a keyword in the title tag, meta description, page URL, and Alt text. 

• Include interlinks by using good anchor texts.

• Post permalinks (remove stop words from permalinks).

• Use keywords in the heading tags.

• Check the grammar and make sure we have clean, readable, and typo-free content.

For blogs and websites that are built on the WordPress Platform, the process of checking the SEO article is straightforward. We think it’s best to install the Yoast SEO Plugin. 

The Yoast SEO Plugin allows you to:

• formulate a meta description;

• analyze the text you write – it will show you your article’s readability;

• verify if you used your keyword in 5 important locations;

• check the links in your article;

• check the presence of images;

• calculates the number of words and the density of usage of the focus keywords.

All these aspects will be marked with a bullet. To have the overall score “good”, you must have all the bullets coloured in green. If those aren’t green, you must rethink your article’s aspects.

Monitoring the performance of your article is definitely worth your effort. Use Google Analytics to track page views, the bounce rate, the average time spent on the page, and the website. You will get an idea of how the users interact with your site. Looking at these metrics will give you an overview of which pieces of content are more attractive to your audience. Therefore, you have a starting point on how to increase website traffic and engagement by replicating the most appealing type of content.

Our Expertise 

We like to make sure that our clients get the best of our knowledge. Keeping this in mind, we divided our activity into two services: consulting and strategic SEO solutions. The way we address consulting services is to ensure that our clients will grow their business, and we give the best advice. Firstly, we recommend creating a blog posting calendar and constantly post new content. We offer topics and main keywords based on the optimizations we did in the previous month. If you opt-in for our strategic SEO solutions, we will create the calendar, we will check the topics and keywords with you, and we will produce and post the articles for you. Furthermore, we will also analyze and improve the content based on its performance. 

One of our clients has had one of the most conclusive examples that demonstrate the importance of blog posting. During the pandemic and lock-down, the house cleaning business had to stop its activity. This affected the overall business, but we managed to maintain the traffic on the website by publishing DIY (Do It Yourself) articles with cleaning tips and tricks. This helped with awareness and also with attracting new clients after the lock-down norm was lifted.

Conclusions

SEO articles are a great way to drive traffic to your website, help or entertain your audience. Keep in mind that your content is written both for your readers and search engines.  

SEO and content writing are vital pieces in your business’s success. We understand both concepts, and we can help you with your strategy, implementation and digital marketing. Feel free to contact us and bring your business to new heights!

Frequently Asked Questions