7 SEO Content Writing Tips For Beginners!

SEO Writing Tips For Beginners!

If you’re relying on your content to direct free, organic traffic to your website, you’ll need to get really efficient at putting out content on a regular basis.

At first, it can be really difficult to be motivated enough to write your posts, or find inspiration and ideas for what to even write about.

But writing frequently is a lot like flexing a muscle – over time, your ability gets better, you become a stronger writer and writing a lot becomes easier to do.

To become visible in the search engines, it’s not just quality, but quantity that is also important.

As your website or blog grows in size, it also does in authority and your posts will rank higher in the search engines… that is, if you’ve also done all the correct SEO work!

Today, I’ve selected 7 SEO content writing tips that you should keep in mind as a beginner starting out.

You may also like….

• This awesome SEO Tutorial on Linkio!
• Keywords in SEO explained.
• 10 tips to improve search engine rankings.

1/ Make your content EASY to read.

This is such a vital issue, yet I see even experienced writers online make the same mistake.

Notice how I use a lot of space between text?  Well, it’s not because I hate long paragraphs.

People online these days will not take the energy to read through a huge block of solid text – if you space out your sentences, people are far more likely to read it.

Also, there are no awards handed out here for the most elaborate vocabulary – keep your writing simple enough that a majority of your audience will understand what you mean.

 2/  Write For Your Audience, Not For Google.

Once you start learning about Keyword research and various SEO techniques, you may suddenly be tempted to try and rank for as many keywords as possible.

Don’t do that!

Keyword stuffing can not only read really badly, it can also get you a penalty from Google.

At the same time, don’t overly worry about using it when it makes sense to do so.

Try and write for the audience you’re catering for, don’t be too formal, try and let your personality shine through in your writing.

People reading want to feel that there is a real person behind the text, so don’t be afraid to be yourself.

For more information about how to use Keywords in your post, check this post.

3/ No Duplicate Content!

Whatever you do, don’t think it’s going to be a much easier road to just copy and paste other peoples posts on to your own site or blog!

Google will not rank duplicate content highly and Google knows which post is the original.

By all means, you can gather plenty of inspiration from other posts, but make sure your posts are all your own work, in your own words.

There are so many very similar posts out there, when it comes to pretty much any topic, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t make your post unique and original!

Add your own personal spin on a topic, do your research and add your own unique insights and opinions into your posts.

4/ Word Count – It Matters!

It wasn’t long ago that you could rank a short article 300 word article on the front page of Google.

While that does still, (rarely) happen, a majority of those posts will either be from sites with a very high authority, or for topics/keywords with next to no competition.

In fact, one study revealed that the average word count for posts on the first page of google was 1890 words.

Now, I have plenty of keywords ranking in the top pages of Google for less than that, but a majority of all my posts are over 1000 words + and a bunch are 2000 words or more.

While you definitely don’t want to ramble on and talk about something irrelevant, you do need to be aware that posts that are in depth and have a larger word count, do rank higher in the search engines.

I recently read a post about shorter content now being better for conversions, because people’s attention span is so short online these days.  They recommended 700 words…!

The problem is, you’re going to have a hard time ranking a short article on the first page of Google, unless you have a very large amount of authority.

5/ Create An Attention Grabbing Title!

I went for a long time merely using the core keyword I was using as the title and not much else besides, that was a mistake!

What you put in your title and your meta title, (the title that appears in the search engines) is really important, as it’s your first chance to make an impression.

While meta descriptions are also important to consider, (the description you’ll see below the title in the search) you cannot always rely on them being visible, because google can choose to ignore them.

However, experimenting with your main title and meta title, can be a decent way of upping your CTR, (click through rate).

As a way of figuring out what title to go with, you could use a free tool, such as title experiments – which is a WordPress plugin.

If you’re using WordPress, then using a plugin such as the SEO all in one plugin or YOAST, will make adding meta titles & descriptions straight forward.

6/ Editing – Don’t Forget It!

If you’re writing your own content, you will inevitably make mistakes.

But if there are tonnes of grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and nonsensical sentences, it’s not going to look professional.

Make sure you read over your work a few times, but it could also be wise to give it to someone else to check over.

We often have blind spots when it comes to spotting errors on our own.

Another useful tool is grammarly, it will fix over 250 types of errors and it’s free to use.  There is also a free chrome extension you can download to your toolbar.

7/ Make Sure Your Post Delivers What It Promises To!

If someone is seeking out how to make the best pumpkin pie known to man and they discover your post: “the best pumpkin pie known to man…”

They’re going to be wanting a really good recipe that works – but what if your post contains a recipe with incorrect measurements?

What if it isn’t even a recipe post?

What if it wasn’t even about pumpkin pie!?

Well, in any case, many people would probably click away from there disappointed that they didn’t get what they’d been searching for.

So, whatever you decide to put in your title, make sure to look back once you’ve completed your post and consider whether you’ve really delivered what you set out to in the beginning.

Will the reader be satisfied?  Will they have received the information they were looking for, or is there something missing?

If you give your reader what they’ve been hoping for, they’re going to be far more likely to return to your site in future.

So, that concludes my 7 SEO content writing tips for beginners!

If you’re going to be spending so much time producing quality content, you want to make sure you give it the best chance of ranking well!

What is the main aspect of content creation that you struggle with?  Leave me a comment below!

All the best…