6 Article Writing Tips to Make Your Traffic Soar

SEO and content writing are two sides of the same coin.

Without SEO, your content will be lurking somewhere on the 50th page of search results; and without content writing, search engines will have no reason to rank your page. This is why getting more traffic to your website requires a decent content writing strategy that takes into account user intention, trendy keywords, and common user pain points.

Here is our breakdown of 6 article writing tips that will boost your traffic.

1. Prioritize Audience First

Most marketers focus on SEO first, audience second. 

This is the wrong approach because it misses the entire point of SEO in the first place – helping users find solutions to their problems. If your bog doesn’t focus on users, it most likely won’t answer user questions. This will result in your blog being shoved to the 50th page, which is exactly what you want to avoid.

Instead, your article should appeal to the interests of your target audience and answer their most pressing questions. As a business, you’re in a unique position to provide informative blogs that are SEO-friendly and interesting. After all, this is the winning formula to do better than your competition.

2. Write Headlines That Are Creative

Headlines give you very little wiggle room to work with, but they’re your best shot at making a big impression. Think of Buzzfeed – their blogs became super popular because they weren’t afraid of experimenting with bold headlines (borderline clickbait stuff). The same also applies to your meta title because it will show up in the search results. 

Here are a few tips to write catchy headlines

• Use numbers to indicate how long a blog is
• Use what, why, how, or when to indicate that you’re answering pressing questions
• Make promises

3. Write Long-Form Content

The best articles are usually over 2000 words long. They also do reasonably well in terms of SEO and garner a lot of attention from users. These blogs often contain a treasure trove of information for people actively trying to solve a problem. 

In fact, according toSEMrush’s analysis of over 700,000 articles, it found that articles with 3,000+ words or more generated 3 times as much traffic and 3.5 times more backlinks (which is extremely important for SEO) than articles that only around 1000 words.

Another reason why long-form content ranks so high in search engines is because you’re able to target long-tail keywords for each blog.

Don’t have time to write long-form content? You can hire article writing services to get the job done instead. These services will do all of the legwork for you – from brainstorming new ideas to keyword research to actual content writing – so you can focus on the core areas of your business. 

4. Focus on Readability

Readability plays an important role on user engagement, an important metric that Google takes into account when ranking web pages. Moz concluded that the reading level served as a fairly important (mid-tier) ranking signal for search engines. The bottom line is, Google and Bing are focusing more on user experiencethan everbefore.

Here are a few tips to make improvements on readability:

• Make the content is ‘skim friendly’ by using H2 and H3 headers
• Use shorter sentences
• Break up longer paragraphs
• Show offthe most important areas of your content by using bold texts, whitespaces, and subheadings
• Use active voice and transition words to make reading easier

If you’re using WordPress and want to improve readability, install Yoast SEO. This plugin can help you improve your content’s SEO and readability scores on Google (and most search engines in general). 

5. Understand Your Audience

In marketing, half the battle is learning what the audience wants. If you’re been in business for a long enough time, you should have this informationat your fingertips already. But don’t worry if you don’t. You can figure out what your audiencewants by looking up trends and keywordsusing tools like SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner. 

Once you have a more informed idea about what your audience wants, you can create their specific ‘user journey’. The user journey dictates where your audiences are in the sales funnel.

Each user journey will help you curate content that will appeal to a very particular segment of your audience.

You can learn more about user journeyshere.

6. Write for Google Featured Snippets

The coveted ‘zero rank’ on Google (also known as Featured Snippets) is a short text at the top of the search results. This text provides answers to a searcher’s query on the search results page instead of having to visit the website. 

Google does this by pulling in content directly on featured snippets from web pages. You’ll find various forms of Featured Snippets, including tables, steps, definitions, and listicles. Again, the goal is to provide instant answers to a searcher’s query. 

It may seem counterintuitive to target Featured Snippets since the whole idea is to provide answers on the results page itself. However, Featured Snippets will improve SEO and convince interested people to click through to your page. 

Pro tip: You can make a subheading in your blog with a question and write a concise answer that addresses the problem. Try to make your response better than other featured snippets in all respects. 

Wrapping Up 

These are the 6 tried and tested content writing tips that will improve your position on search engines. Do keep in mind that this process is paved with a lot of trial and error. Try to measure your results and improve your techniques for content writing.

Guest article written by: Dave Brown. Dave leads a team of article writers at Content Development Pros. His team serves as the content wing of some of the most influential companies in the world, from Fortune 500 businesses to mom-and-pop stores. You can learn more about Dave by visiting the CDP website.