SEO Copywriting: How to Ensure your Content Ranks in Google

SEO copywriting is both a challenge and an essential ingredient in every SEO strategy. It’s the art of creating content that contains selected phrases and keywords that ranks high on Google.

It combines both the techniques of copywriting and SEO to create content that’s great to both the visitors and search engines. However, the most common problem that most website owners deal with is the lack of engagement on their blog posts which makes it difficult for their content to rank on Google.

Google has guidelines for ranking content in search results. Their first concern is the user’s experience. As such, the more you serve your target audience, the more Google will help you. In this post, you’ll learn some tips on how to make sure your content ranks in Google.

Keyword Research

Keywords are a vital element of SEO. With that said, it’s essential to do keyword research before anything else. By doing so, you can get keywords that are essential for your target market, as well as phrases that’ll help you rank high on Google.

There are many tools which you can use to look for essential keywords that have low levels of competition and a good number of searches. SEO Book’s Keyword Tool, Google Keyword Planner, and KeywordTool.io are perfect examples of these tools.

Use these tools and gather a list of feasible keywords that you can target. Opt for long tail keywords or longer phrases (at least three words) that are relevant and related to your business, but aren’t competitive.

Generally, it is much better to select a main topic for your content, instead of picking a variety of phrases and words that’ll help you come up with a topic. The latter could even harm and impede your ranking.

Once you’ve collected and gathered some feasible phrases, search those keywords on Google. Look at the competition. Are they widely-known, big websites? Or small-scale blogs you can outrank? If possible, go with phrases that have a high chance of ranking.

Target Market

Knowing what kind of content your target audience is looking for is crucial. However, it’s quite difficult to understand what your target audience wants since there are millions of search results for about anything on Google.

Take for example SEO copywriting. Even if we assume that only one percent of the search results for this keyword are informative, that’s still at least 18 thousand pages that can possibly meet the necessary search intent. Therefore, these pages have passed the first obstacle as they make their way to rank.

However, only a few of these search results rank on the first page of Google. With this in mind, you now need to figure out why and how these ranking pages got their place. Since there are plenty of ranking factors, you need to consider, understanding these pages is somewhat tricky.

Nevertheless, in all likelihood, search intent is crucial. Keep in mind that Google is not going to rank a webpage that does not meet the customer’s query. As such, you need to search for any similarities in the Search Engine Results Pages.

Aside from that, take a look at the “Searches related to” in Google. It’ll give you additional understanding of the problems and questions most people have when it comes to certain keywords.

Formatting

If you want to create high-quality content, you need to begin with a message, idea, or topic that you wish to impart to your readers. Once cleared, you can determine or decide on the format. According to research, particular content formats are likely to get more social shares and links.

Blog post formats that, according to Moz and BuzzSumo, that are often the most popular are “authoritative, well-researched, and have opinion forming content.” For instance, in-depth blog posts backed up by solid research like “how to” and “why” posts with the correct and reliable references.

Word Count

It’s good to stress that there is no definite, absolute word count. Even short content, say 500 words, can outrank a 1K word blog post. Meaning, any length or word count can work if it’s well-written and well-researched.

Research shows that in-depth and longer blogs tend to rank high in Google. For example, according to blog.bufferapp.com, the ideal word count for blog posts is 1,600. On the other hand, serpIQ’s target length is 1,500 words.

High-quality Links

It’s vital to get quality links to your post to get your content ranking on Google. Though the majority of site owners spend most of their time getting links to their high-value pages, many of them fail to build links to particular posts.

Acquiring these targeted links can be challenging, except if your blogs are unique, useful, or practical. If you have link worthy content, it’s likely that you’ll get natural links from other journalists and bloggers.

There are also other ways to acquire these links. For instance, inserting internal links to your content on your own website. Or linking your blogs when you guest posts on other websites.

Takeaway

Whether you want reliable article writing services or if you want to do it yourself, creating content can be very time-consuming and costly. If you want to ensure your content to rank high in Google, the steps above can help.

Remember that it’s not an easy task to rank in Google. It needs a lot of work. You will need stable and robust traffic month after month. Not only that, a lot of hard work and specifics need to be done to ensure that your content or website ranks high.