SEO Content Writing: How to Thrive

Author: Erica Evans
Directory One, Inc.
SEO Content Writer

For the trained journalist, search engine optimization (SEO) content writing is a hard pill to swallow. Through their training, journalists are expected to be informative, imaginative and objective in writing precise prose to appeal to the masses. With SEO writing, you’re writing with one key idea in mind: sell!

Where metaphors and a Graduate Record Examination (GRE) vocabulary are important in one regard, strategic keyword placement and search engine rankings are the priority in the other. By it’s very nature you are hardly objective, and you aren’t necessarily trying to appeal to the masses, but you are targeting a very specific audience – one that has buying power and is willing to follow a call to action.

While they differ greatly, taking certain steps can ensure that you not only succeed in providing quality content, but that you thrive at creating a happy medium that meets the expectations of both styles respectively.

Plan Ahead
As with most things in life, a lack of a plan is a plan to fail. Before you massage the keyboard, take some time to think about the purpose of what you’re writing and any actions you want to come out of the article itself. It is a good idea to check in with clients during this phase, as they can best explain what the motivation of the article is. Having an idea of what they are looking for or any important specifics they believe you should include will save time later.

Do Your Research
You can’t write an article if you don’t know what you’re talking about. While it can be time consuming (and at times boring), research is necessary in order to produce quality content. Browsing the internet for the latest industry news on the given subject will usually yield an abundance of information. Here again, the client can be of great help to you during this phase, as they are most familiar with the subject area.

Keyword Placement
By no stretch of the imagination can an SEO content writer avoid strategic keyword placement- face it, it’s unavoidable.

It should be noted , that if you want to maintain a healthy relationship with the search engines keyword density, or maintaining the ratio of the number of occurrences of a particular keyword or phrase to the total number of words in a page.

While these tips will help you to build a foundation, this is just scratching the surface when it comes to SEO writing. There are many factors to consider, and as always much to learn.