A guide for Content Writers: how to get your SEO Content Strategy right?
A Career as a Content Writer can be lucrative and exciting, however, the usage of the title ‘content writer’ is a deliberate attempt by the industries and recruiters from digital marketing agencies to downplay the importance of the job role and to reduce the cost to the companies on an average for the content writers.
Let me explain this a little before we get into the details of SEO Content Marketing strategies that every content writer should be aware of, to keep climbing up in the career graph, and possibly become the head of brand communications in no time.
Usage of the term ‘Content Writer’ is outdated and fails to aptly describe the job role of a content person in Digital Marketing. Ten years back when ranking on Google was easy, all it took for SERP was people with a skill who can rewrite a popular topic with a high density of Keywords. But it is no longer the case, Google algorithms and in-general landscapes on Internet have changed drastically to give unprecedented importance to Original Content that matters.
Content writers job role in Digital marketing requires key skills like knowledge in Search Engines, Keywords research, Content research, Ideation of Creatives, Collaborating with Designers for AD Copies & Social Media Creatives, Writing Newsletters and Whitepapers, Longform Articles, eBooks, Paid Campaigns, Email Campaigns, Competitors Research, and many other core marketing activities.
SEO and Content Writing - A Zero Budget Content Marketing Strategy
Why Content Writers with SEO Knowledge are Game Changers?
There is no higher authority than Google itself when it comes to advising on the best SEO and Content guidelines. Google’s John Mueller has reiterated the importance of Content creators for SEO success on multiple occasions while talking to experts and marketing professionals.
In a recent update of Search Console, Google has introduced Search Insights for Content creators. It is a really sorry state of affairs for a lot of Digital Marketing agencies, who, for some reason never give access for Content writers to these key tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Marketing agencies are not to be blamed entirely for this, some of it has to do with Content writers’ lack of knowledge in SEO tools and defined boundaries in job roles of medium and big enterprises. At least with Google’s proactive steps to ensure the recognition of original content creators on their platform, let us hope these marketing agencies will change the way they use their SEO content writers and content creators.
SERP and Organic Search Traffic- Growth with every click.
If you are a Content writer working for a digital marketing company in India, you might be possibly handling 2-3 clients and writing becomes a very mechanical process. On the other hand, if you are a content writer working for a startup or medium-sized company with verticals in multiple products, you have a great opportunity to bring unbelievable results by learning small things like how to use Google search console and Google Analytics, Google Keywords planner, etc.
Millions of blog articles are being submitted every day on topics of various interests and quarries across industries. Most of them are created to generate revenue either directly or indirectly but very few of them actually end up giving results. We are in a very highly competitive phase of content creation with more and more new media platforms emerging with innovative ways of mass communication.
Ideally, your blog article has to rank in the top 3 search results on Google for you to get a decent share of traffic for the focused keywords in the article. While page one rankings are good too, the top 3 search results along with search ads receive more than 90% of the traffic on Google.
Take any keyword for a topic of your choice and type it on Google Search, you will see a list of articles from websites with high DA covering various aspects of the keyword and the topic. So with all this competition, how do you write content that ranks on the first page of search results to get decent traffic for your blog post?
Google Keywords Planner available on Google Ads platform is a free to use tool that lets you see historic search data and search volumes of keywords with a forecast for the given period of the year. Learning to use this tool should take less than a day but will help you become a professional SEO content writer for a great career in Digital Marketing.
Google Search Console is the most powerful tool when it comes to SEO and Content. This simple interface has all the data on how your content has performed over the given period of time. You can check which keywords are performing for you and identify the prospective keywords and future blog topics based on the search performance data.
Google Analytics is a comprehensive tool to study the website traffic and audience behavior on various parameters. This is broader tool that helps you understand every minute details of SEO if used properly. Don’t let anyone tell you that Google Analytics is for AD campaigns and paid promotions, it is one of the key tools that every Content writer should learn to use.
There are a lot of websites offering both free and paid SEO tools. For Content writers looking to gain insights on keywords free SEO tools from popular SEO websites like Uber Suggest, SEMrush, Ahrefs should be good enough. Don’t worry about the backlink tools or other technical SEO tools on these platforms, leave that part for some other time.
Be Smart with Long Tail Keywords and Google Trends
One might of the opinion that a Content Writing job is all about maintaining creativity and high standards of language. Yes, creativity is part of everything we do, but being creative is not enough. Neither the complexity nor standards of language for that matter. If traffic is what you are after, it all comes down to keyword research and identifying the right topic.
Long Tail Keywords: There is always hope, that is why we keep fighting in everything we do for everything we believe in. Longtail keywords are the hope that keeps the content game still alive for startups and independent bloggers. Your content might not be able to compete with popular keywords but you sure can rank number one for Longtail keywords that your competitors failed to use.
A lot of people are discovering the internet for the first time, yes it is true. In many countries across the globe, the Internet is the latest phenomenon. In poor countries like India, where we have our people leading the big tech companies on one side, we also have millions of people below poverty live who doesn’t own a smart yet on the other side.
People type different keywords online, some are in general keywords while some are very detailed in nature. If you can identify such detailed searches and FAQs online where there is not much content available from the competitors, that would be the first step of success in driving traffic through Google organic search.
These Longtail keywords will also help the search algorithms to identify the core topics you are writing about as you gain SERP for these keywords. This in turn will help you rank for more popular keywords, over time, with quality backlinks.
Google Trends for SEO Content Writing
Google Trends is one of the most underrated tools when it comes to writing for Search Engines. There is nothing to learn, you just need to start using the tool. The Google Trends tool allows content writers to keep track of the trending topics on Google search in real-time. Stay ahead of the competitors by regularly checking Google trends to identify topics of great importance with huge search volumes. If you can get one article at the right time, it could end up bringing potentially 50% of all the traffic for that trending topic.
Learn the Terminology of Developers and Designers
As a Content Writer, you will be at the crux of all the digital marketing plans. From the ideation of a landing page to talking to developers on how you envisaged it, you will be the point of contact for a lot of activities. This is more true if you are working for a typical digital marketing agency.
Learning basic terminology like the different sections of a website, different kinds of meta tags in HTML, and many other key terminologies that you might see in an SEO audit report. This would make your job a little easy and increases overall productivity.