You order content for your blog to your content writers but you receive something not optimized for SEO. SEO content writers are the people you need to boost the organic traffic on your webpages.
You are confused about keywords, titles, meta descriptions. You should give your content writers specific information about how to make a good article that respects some important SEO requirements.
Today we are here to explain how to do that, how to hire a content writer and give the right information in order to not waste money and get only top SEO articles.
Let’s nail it together.
How do we sort it out? First of all, we divided the topic of SEO content writers into 4 areas.
FOCUS AREA 1
- Yoast SEO
- Images Optimisation
- SEO Title
- Meta Description
- Headings (H1, H2, H3)
FOCUS AREA 2
- Anchor Text for Internal Linking
FOCUS AREA 3
- Purpose of a Blog for SEO/Marketing
- Customer Journey
- CRO and Engagement
- Anatomy of the SERP
FOCUS AREA 4
- Keywords Research
- Content Optimization (density/prominence/proximity)
- Paragraphs Length
- Sharing Content on Facebook
We are going to analyze step by step every part of this flow. Having a clear plan on how to get traffic to your blog post is really important. You don’t want to have good content with anyone reading it. With the following information, you will not have any problem with your SEO content writer.
Blogging for SEO/Marketing
Why are you writing a blog? It looks a simple question, but sometimes the answer can be a challenge. Maybe you need to drive traffic to your service/product website, where the content cannot be updated often. Basically, a blog helps with a number of things that are important ranking factors on search engines.
These are the main reasons why:
- Keeps website fresh and current
- Keep users on the site longer
- Helps target long-tail keywords
- Gives the opportunity for internal linking and information offered within the same site
- Gives other sites more reasons to link back you the site
- Helps connects with your audience
- Engages with your audience and encourages sharing on Social Channels
Your blog readers find your blog articles typing some keywords on Google. Nobody is doing the opposite, this is should be clear. Landing on your website where you sell items or services and going to the blog and drive visitors to your articles os like bringing them away from a purchase.
That’s not your goal. It’s the opposite. You want to keep your customers, or potential customers, staying on your money pages, maybe your eCommerce website, and not driving them away to our blog.
website -> blog WRONG
That’s why the customer journey starts on a blog article, from it, using CTA and your internal links strategy, you will be able to drive users to buy and purchase an item/product/service on your money pages.
blog -> website CORRECT
SEO Content Writers: User Experience
User Experience is a ranking factor. Your content needs to be interesting, fresh, and natural. Consider that when a reader lands on your blog article and bounce the post immediately, going back to the Google Search Engine to check other results you give a negative signal to the algorithm.
Your SEO ranking is going to be affected. To improve user experience make sure that your article adds value to the web and to the reader, in order to improve the time spent on your article and improve the bounce rate.
With internal links, you are able to give your users some alternatives, some connection between the article, other interesting articles, and your main web pages.
Anatomy of the SERP and Yoast
Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) are the pages that appear as a snippet in search results. You type a keyword and you receive back a list of results, form position 0 to position 10 on the Google first page (if you did not set a different configuration).
One of the most important plugins for content writers that are in charge of uploading content on WordPress sites is Yoast SEO. A plugin is a feature, an “add on”, to help webmasters with no coding skill knowledge to manage the back-end and the front-end of a website.
Yoast SEO is a plugin that allows webmasters to optimize content following the best SEO practices, to make your blog as search-engine-friendly as possible. The main characteristic of Yoast is reporting issues/improvement by a dop with a specific color.
4 types of dot that indicate how Yoast SEO rates the article:
- Gray dot -> Yoast SEO doesn’t have any information available
- Green dot -> article is good
- Red dot -> some important problems
- Yellow/orange dot -> room for improvement
Which articles need attention? When it comes to optimizing content already published you can sort posts based on the column that you have on post WordPress dashboard.
There are 3 tabs in Yoast: SEO, Readability, Social. In the first tab you can set the page’s title (SEO Title) and meta description, specifying the focus keyword, the keyword that identifies the main topic of the article. Setting the focus keyword is mandatory to activate the plugin action, in order to receive Yoast SEO feedback with tips to improve the quality of the content in terms of SEO.
Getting as many green dots as possible is our goal using Yoast SEO. Having some yellow is not necessarily bad. Make sure to don’t have red dots and try to get Yoast tips as pieces of advice, not as a statement.
SEO Title, Meta Description, Headings (H1, H2, H3)
As we already saw talking about Yoast SEO, there are some important steps to follow in order to make the best SEO Title and Meta Description.
It’s important to respect the length requirement to allow Google to display the snippet preview of our blog posts properly in the search results.
The SEO Title needs to contain a keyword that identifies the blog article content and a Call To Action in order to improve the Click-Through rate. Meta Description, even if it’s not a ranking factor might improve the Click-Through rate if we include some keywords.
H1’s is always at the top of your article and it’s what visitors see first.
Best practices for some seohackers boost:
- Use only one H1
- H1 should describe the topic of the page (H1 should describe what the content is about
- Often H1 will be similar to the title (to not confuse with SEO Title)
- Normally, the H1 tag gives the reader a strong sense of what he or she is going to read
- Usually, H1 will be the title of the blog post or article
- H1 20/70 characters
- H1 needs to stand out
Use a focus long-tail keyword
- Don’t force it
- Make it natural
- Don’t stuff
Answer user intent with H1! Last tip: what does the user want when they open my article? What’s their intent?
H2 and H3: the best practice is to follow a flow that breaks down the content and explains H1 and why our offering is a good choice (Intent)
Images Optimization for SEO
Why do you need to upload a picture with the right size maintaining a good quality? Your SEO content writers, if they are uploading content on WordPress, should know that. Uploading optimized images in your blog articles will positively affect your site performance in terms of speed loading.
A fast website ranks better in Google because that’s a ranking factor. Images are playing a key role in performance. Try to upload pictures up to 50kb and not more than that size, in order to allow the server to handle the performance of our blog.
After that, upload the picture on WordPress being sure to name the picture with a keyword and include the Alt Text. What is an Alt Text? It’s a description of the picture, that might be useful for browsers that cannot display the image properly.
How to make the perfect Alt Text? Try to describe the picture to a blind person. When it’s possible, try to include keywords in the Alt Text as well.
Uploading a picture with the right size will positively affect your site:
- Performance in terms of speed loading
- A fast website ranks better in Google
- Upload pictures up to 50kb and not more than that size
ILS for SEO Content Writers
To make in place the internal linking strategy you need to add a hyperlink into our article to drive users from the article to your money page, the pages that allow our audience to close a deal.
The hyperlink is a keyword, a sentence, that links to another page: we call it Anchor Text in the SEO world. How can you pick the anchor text? Make a list of Anchor Text to deliver to your SEO content writers.
It’s important to have a balance of Anchor Text, not using always the same, but variations. That’s why it’s important to track the number of times we use a specific Anchor, in order to not over-optimize the internal linking strategy.
Keywords research: This Is a Big One
What is a keyword strategy? Basically, it is the plan you make to find the words “keywords” that your audience is searching for in Google.
You should find topics that readers want to read about, otherwise, you are going to post something that nobody cares about in the online world.
Today search intents are anything. Try to answer questions, doubts, yo give solutions to problems. This is how you will get traffic. You will get a chance to be shared on social media, or be featured at the top in Google Search results because your answer is clear and unique.
Create a list of keywords and deliver them to your SEO content writers. Make sure the search volume per keyword is good enough to target your niche, and that the keyword to target is not a challenge in your market.
Density, Prominence, Proximity
Your article needs to focus on specific keywords you want to rank for. If the keyword is included in the content you have more chances to rank. Make sure it is at least 5/6 times in the content to respect Density requirements (the ratio of the number of times the keyword appears vs the number of words).
For example, if the article has 500 words and the keyword appears 5 times the density is 1%. There is no right number of times but try to stay around 1% of keyword density and never less than that.
Be sure that everything looks natural: it’s always the best choice
Make sure to include the keyword in the H1 and H2 headings for keyword prominence (how prominent the keyword is within key elements of the body page), and 1 time “above the fold” and in the first paragraph.
The most important keyword must be placed at the very beginning of the title. In the first and the last sentences of the article as well.
What about keyword proximity? You know that a keyword can be a sentence, comprised of a combination of keywords. The distance between the search term’s individual keywords is really important. For example, the keyword “how to study marketing” in the sentence “ how to study with your friends some topics like marketing ”. The search term proximity between “how to study” and “marketing” is not perfect because there are 6 words between them. Avoid it.
Content/Paragraph Length
What about content/paragraph length? According to study cases, longer content rank better. Make sure to create articles comprised of at least 500 words and, when it’s possible try to test quality content comprised by at least 800 words. Remember to make paragraphs easy to read, 3 per chapter, comprised of 3/4 sentences.
Conclusions – Your Content Team
Done! You sorted out. Make sure to teach your content writers to create a clickable post on Facebook, to drive more clicks to your blog post. From now on you will have the perfect content for your blog, getting the chance to rank higher on Google. Everything will be organic, without using any paid growth strategy.
