SEO Content Writing for Beginners

SEO Content is becoming a buzzword, but it’s also one of the original digital marketing strategies and is at the core of organic marketing. SEO content is content that’s optimized for the search engines so that it gets more organic traffic. But it can also seem a bit confusing - what is it, and what does it entail? Let's dig into SEO content writing for beginners today, and I'll help you understand what it is, if it's necessary for your business, and how to get started with SEO content writing today. 

Want to learn more about SEO right now? Take my free SEO class, too. It's here to help you learn how to create an SEO-friendly website or blog.

SEO Content Writing for Beginners - what is SEO content anyway? 

When I teach my students (who are beginners when it comes to SEO content writing) how to write SEO content, I teach them to start with their SEO keyword research as the base for their content writing. You want to ensure you’re writing content that will have an audience when it’s ready. If people aren’t interested in what you’re writing about, they will not search for it, find your content, or visit your website, and you will have wasted your time and effort. We'll talk more about it in a minute, but choosing the right SEO keyword for your content is important. You want to make sure you're targeting keywords your website or blog has a good chance of ranking for. More on that in a minute. 

You also want to make sure you're creating content that's high quality, provides value, and addresses your Ideal Customer's needs and wants. Thin content (pages that don't tell much or offer value) doesn't do well with Google today. Google wants to ensure the content it's sending traffic to will help them, provide value, and give them the necessary answers. Google's latest ranking algorithm is called "Helpful Content". Google wants your SEO content to be helpful to your ideal customer more than optimized for Google. 

Your SEO content should also be a mix of content targeting keywords to drive traffic to your site, along with content designed to nurture your new audience, and a small percentage of it should be designed to sell. Too much promotional or sales content will push people away from your website. Always remember to answer: What's in it for me for your Ideal Customer? They don't care about you; they care about how you can help them. Google also wants relevant content showcasing your experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. They want to know that the websites they're ranking high are good, trustworthy websites that will provide value and be helpful to their searchers. Remember, the searcher is Google's customer, not yours, and if Google wants to maintain its competitive advantage, it needs to make sure they're giving searchers the best information and showing them the best search results they can, or people will switch to competing search engines. 

 Listen to the podcast here. 

How to do SEO Content Writing for Beginners (step-by-step)

The first step to an SEO content strategy is determining the content topic area and the keyword you will use in your optimization. You want to select a keyword closely tied to your content topic with a good ranking potential. There’s no point in creating content you can’t rank for because you won’t get traffic from that piece if you don't rank well. If you're not sure how to determine if you can rank for a keyword, go to Google, open an incognito browser window, and search for that keyword. Look at the results and see who's ranking on Page 1 of Google for the keyword and determine how similar to you they are. If they're a lot like you, this keyword is likely a good one for you, but if the websites are all really big ones, then this keyword is probably too competitive, and you won't be as likely to rank high in Google search. 

Take my free SEO class to learn more about choosing the right keyword and where to use it in your SEO content writing. It's a beginner-friendly free training class. 

You want to think about your Ideal Customer; what questions do they have? What information do they need to decide if your solution is right for them? 

When creating your SEO Content strategy, think of the following items

• Who are you helping?
• What information do they want? 
• What information do they need?

Staying focused on your Ideal Customer and providing value for them will benefit you in the long run. 

Your SEO Content is designed to do several things to help your business grow. It's designed to bring in traffic and also nurture those visitors. 

SEO brings targeted, relevant traffic to your website (it's the know factor in Like, Know, Trust). Content marketing builds your Like and Trust factor by being a resource they can trust and having the content they need. 

SEO brings you the lead; content nurtures the lead.

Getting Started with SEO Content Writing 

Once you’ve searched for an idea that your Ideal Customer is interested in and verified, there’s a keyword that your website can rank high for you it's time to get started.

You will want to create a blog post or website page that’s helpful to your Ideal Customer. At this point, don’t worry about keyword density, word count, or anything like that. It’s more important that you create great content that anticipates your readers’ questions and provides value for them. 

If you're unsure what to include in your content piece, start with an outline and include 3 to 5 bullet points to expand upon. Most times, you'll find a valuable piece of content has more depth and provides more information.

I personally find my highest-ranking content pieces are over 1,000 words. While I don't teach my students or clients to write to a word count, I believe it's important to anticipate the questions your audience will have and answer them, and that's why creating an outline with 3-5 sub-sections can help. 

Optimizing your SEO Content

The last step of SEO content writing is to optimize your content for the search engine so you can hopefully rank higher and get more organic traffic. You must use the original keyword you selected during the foundation step and follow SEO best practices for your optimization.

How do you optimize your content?

• Write a Title Tag that’s less than 60 characters and includes the keyword.
• Write a Meta Description that’s less than 160 characters and uses the same keyword.
• Use the keyword in the title of your page or blog post.
• Include the keyword in the first paragraph of your copy.
• Use the keyword in your image file names.
• Use the keyword in your header tags (the big pink tags in this blog post).

Google looks at your SEO elements to understand your content piece and then at your content to determine if it's helpful to a reader. Your content needs to be written for your reader and optimized for the search engine.

Download my SEO Content Quick Start Guide to find out how to do this. It will walk you through getting started with SEO content writing. 

Get a copy of my free SEO Content Quick Start Guide to learn more about how to do this.

Don’t worry about how many words you’re writing or how many times you’ve used your keyword. Write for your audience, provide value, and then ensure you optimize for the search engine to get traffic to your SEO Content piece. After you've written your content piece, reread it and see if it feels natural. If you've used your keyword too many times, it will feel awkward when you try to read it, so you'll need to edit it to make it flow better. 

Final Thoughts on SEO Content Writing

Don't create content with the thought of doing SEO on it later. When you create content that's not optimized, it doesn't rank well, and you don't get traffic. It's a waste of time to create content that's not optimized. It's also a risk because you might choose a topic that your website or blog can't rank for because of the competitiveness of the keyword. Save yourself time and get better results by doing keyword research before you start writing. 

If you've been blogging for a while and don't get much traffic, it's probably because you need to add SEO to your content. Take the time to learn how the two work together, create SEO Content and watch your business grow. It will make a big difference. I teach my students how to do this in Simple SEO Content, even how to determine what to prioritize if they've got loads of blog posts that need to be updated because I know that can feel overwhelming. 

If you're interested in learning more about SEO Content, get started with my free SEO today. Then, join me in SimpleSEO Content, my signature course, which will teach you how to use this to grow your business. 

SEO Friendly Content Podcast Transcript

Hi there, welcome back to the Simple SEO Content Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Lindteigen, and I'm so glad to have you with me today. Today, we're going to talk about something super important: how do we create a content strategy that makes money for our business? So if you've been creating content but you're not yet making money from it or you're not yet getting traffic to it, then make sure you stay tuned, because that's exactly what we're going to talk about in today's episode. 

Creating SEO-Friendly Content Each Week

So, starting out, we're just going to go ahead and assume that we're all creating content on a weekly basis, and I know, I know. I know what happens when we assume. Well, we're just going to assume it. Okay, guys. So, if you're not yet creating weekly content, I want you to commit to doing so in order to get results, and the results that we're looking to get will be to rank higher on Google so that you get found by the right people when they're searching for information related to your business, to generate traffic, to get people coming to your website, to build more leads, to have people finding you, coming to your website and, hopefully, showing interest in your business, and then, ultimately, to sell more products or book more services through your website thanks to that nice increase in traffic that's coming from your content. 

What we're trying to achieve is to really drive this business based on organic traffic, SEO, and content working together. So how do we do this? We should make sure that the content that we're creating is going to help us make money. 

Start with your Ideal Customer when Creating Content

So, first thing first, I want you to think about your ideal customer. If you do not yet have your ideal customer truly nailed down, you cannot yet describe them as vividly as you would describe your best friend then that's the first thing I want you to do is to hone in on who is my ideal customer and how I help them and what differentiates me from the competition. If you're not sure how to do this, I want you to listen to the Business Owners podcast. It's here on Simple SEO Content, the business owner's special version, that is all about your ideal customer, and I'll make sure that we link that because that will help you understand who they are. 

So, first things first. You're going to focus on your ideal customer. All content that you create is created for your ideal customer. It is not created for Google or the search engine. All content provides value for your ideal customer. All content is helpful so that Google wants to show it to other people. 

Google's Helpful Content Algorithm

Google's algorithm, the current algorithm, is referred to as the helpful content algorithm, which means Google is looking for content that provides value, is helpful, answers questions, and gives your reader insight and information. So, you need to think about when you are laying out your content plan. You need to think about your ideal customer and how you can help them. 

Creating SEO-Friendly Content

What I teach my students to do is to choose four pillars or four topic areas they want to talk about regularly on their blog. So, if your business has products and services, you, my friend, are going to have pillars that tie to your products or services. So, let's go through a couple of examples. Let's say you're a realtor working with buyers and sellers. You love to work with first-time home buyers. They light you up, and they're what makes you happy; even though it's maybe not the biggest sale, it's maybe a little more complicated, or maybe there's more hand-holding because this is their first time going through the process, but that's who you love working with, and then maybe you have a farm community, or maybe you want to focus on a specific neighborhood, so your content pillars might be general buyers and sellers, but then you might also have first time home buyers as one of your content pillars, and then your neighborhood or your community, your farm area, as your fourth pillar, if you were. 

Let's return to the chocolate chip cookie recipe blog post we've recently discussed in different episodes. So, let's pretend for a minute that you are a bakeware company. You make really niche, really cool bakeware, and so to sell your products, let's say that you sell cookbooks, recipes, products, and maybe you have cooking classes or baking classes, maybe they're online. So your topics and your pillars might be recipes, and it might be the free recipes that bring them into your world. It might be about your products so you can sell them. It might be about classes, it might be tips or techniques, and then it might be ingredients. If you sell ingredients, you have other things like that. 

So that's what I want you to think about is how you can break your business up into different categories that help your ideal customer because the best way to create a content strategy that's going to make money for your business is to ensure that all of the content that you create ties back to your business in one way or another. So, if you offer products for sale, you want content that helps support someone interested in potentially purchasing those products. If you offer services, it's going to be the same type of thing. What can you do? How can you help them?

 So, let's go back to the realtor example for a minute and just go into the first-time home buyer. So, the first-time home buyer content pillar. We might want blogs on how you qualify for your first home loan. What do you look for? How much mortgage payment can you afford? What is involved in buying a home, how do you qualify for a home mortgage, and how long does it take for a closing? All these things that your first-time home buyer might be asking, trying to figure out, and trying to understand would be tied to buying a home.

The Benefit of Creating SEO-Friendly Content

By creating content that's helpful to them. First off, you're making Google happy because your content is helpful. It gives them information, it guides them, it brings them through the process. If you optimize that content for Google, meaning you choose a keyword where you can rank, you do your SEO the right way. If you use the keyword in all the places that Google is going to look for, you have a better chance of ranking higher in Google search results, which will mean you have a better chance of being found by that potential first-time home buyer when they're starting to search for things like how do I qualify for a home, how much down payment do I need on my first home, how long does it take to close, how do I fix my credit so I'm ready to buy a house, all of those things. 

They're more likely to see you if you've done the SEO on your content because your content is geared toward them; they're going to find it, they're going to read it, and they're going to feel that connection because they know who you are, thanks to your SEO. Then your content, if it's helpful and it provides value and it feels like there's a connection, they're going to like you, and they're going to begin to trust you because you are an expert. They can tell that you know what you're talking about. They feel confident that you can help them. This is how you start to make money from the content that you're creating because you have created that content with your ideal customer in mind. This is so important, you guys. I don't want you to just create a piece of content for the sake of creating a piece of content. I want you to make sure that every time you create content, you can answer the question: does my ideal customer care about this? If your ideal customer doesn't care about it, don't spend the time creating it because creating content that nobody's searching for, interested in, or needs isn't helping you grow your business. It's not gonna help you make money. 

So, focus on your ideal customer. First things first. Always, always, always. Focus on your ideal customer. Think about their questions; think about the questions you're asked all the time. Do some keyword research. Go to Google and use Google's suggested search and see what people are searching. Go to Quora. Go to answer the public. Go, research, understand, and find out what people are asking about the pillars within your business. So you've got your ideal customer. You're breaking your business up into four pillars and four focus areas. From there, you're creating one piece of content each month for each of those pillars, and that's why I suggest you do four pillars, just because it makes life easier If you have four pillars. We generally have four weeks in a month. That's one piece of content per pillar per month, allowing you to continually provide value to your ideal customers, staying top of mind, driving more traffic to your website, and ultimately making more money.

 So now you're creating content for your ideal customer. That's step number one. You're thinking about them. You're breaking your content into four pillar areas. You're creating one post each month for each of your pillar areas, so you've got four posts each month. You're optimizing. This is critical—you guys. You're optimizing those blog posts and content for Google. Do not continue to write blog posts and not optimize them. Not do your keyword research, not write your title tag, your meta descriptions, and all the things that I talk about, because 90% of all web pages don't get any search traffic, and the reason they don't get search traffic is they not optimized or they're not optimized the right way. Do not waste your time creating content if you're not gonna optimize it. You won't optimize it the right way because nobody will find it. It's not gonna help you make money. This is why I'm so passionate about this—you guys. You have to do both. So, create great content and optimize it for Google. If you're not sure what your ideal customer wants you to write about or how to optimize it, or you don't know how to choose the right keyword, join me in simple SEO content. I promise this is what I teach. I'll walk you through it. We'll make sure you're on the right track. You'll have everything you need to know. We'll ensure you get the results you're looking for from your content.

If you do what I teach you, you'll be found by the right people on Google because your website will show up higher. You're gonna have content that provides value, that brings them into your sales funnel, that brings them into your world, and your content is going to make you money because your content pieces are tied to your products and services. They highlight them and showcase how you can help, and that, my friend, is how you create a content strategy that makes money for your business. And that's what I want for you. I want you to succeed, I want you to make money, and I want you to be able to have the life that you dream of right now if you wanna work part-time and you wanna earn full-time living. This is one of the keys that can get you there. So get started today. If you're not sure how to choose the right keywords, watch my free class. That's gonna get you started. Download the SEO content quick start guide. Both are available on the Freebies tab, etchedmarketing.com/freebies. Join me in Simple SEO Content. I'll walk you through how to do all of this to make sure that you get the results from it. Thank you for being here, and I will see you next week.