How do you write effective content for SEO? We make it easy!
When it comes to website writing, good search engine optimization (SEO) content can often make or break how much business you ultimately do.
With online marketing being a completely different animal than traditional marketing avenues (television, print and so forth), many companies have become more and more reliant on outsourcing of their marketing content to SEO firms in order to direct traffic to their websites.
There’s a certain method behind writing for SEO that has been proven time and again in its ability to increase traffic on websites that were previously seeing little to none.
It’s because of that ability that SEO writers have to carefully craft any copy that they write with several objectives in mind.
Not only does the content have to be picked up by search engines in a way that it will reach the top of the search listings, but good SEO content, like any good writing, also has to appeal to its target audience without the inner SEO workings being terribly obvious to the reader.
Reaching the Top of Search Engines
People in general tend to follow patterns when searching for things using popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing and the content written by SEO writers takes advantage of those patterns that people follow in order to bring their attention to client websites.
With that in mind, content created for a website and specially tailored so that a search engine will find it and elevate it in the rankings has to contain meaningful substance, because many search engines have gotten wise to unethical tactics employed by SEO firms in the past.
Tactics used often involved pairing key words and phrases that people would look for with meaningless text did nothing but waste the time of browsers who had been brought to the site.
Search engines responded by creating algorithms that overlooked, or even blacklisted, sites with aimless SEO content.
As a result, pages that were engineered to actually hold some value for the person searching for something become more prominent and easier to find.
With that in mind, however, it’s important to remember that a good piece of writing for a website should contain several other important traits besides being optimized for internet searches.
Knowing Your Audience Is Important
Knowing your audience when writing copy is just as important as being familiar with your demographic when it comes to developing a product or service, so it goes without saying that SEO content writers have to be well versed in knowing how to make their copy as appealing as possible to both clients and the people that those clients will eventually be serving.
With the many different factors that demographics often bring with them, it can often be daunting to know just how to generate a piece of content.
You have to consider things like gender, age and social class among others.
Knowing how to successfully appeal to people of different backgrounds is where the strength of good writing and advertising lay, however.
A good SEO copywriter should be appeal to people looking at trade schools, government contractors, business to business services, and people looking to perform their own DIY project; just to show a few examples of who typical SEO advertising reaches.
Frankly, anyone with a computer and the need to find a product or service could find themselves targeted by smart SEO.
Beyond that, good SEO content should also play on the classic modes of persuasion: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.
- Ethos, or the appeal to the writer’s authority on the subject, should come through clearly in any piece of written content. Ultimately, you want the audience reading your material to both believe and respect you. You want them to be able to trust in the writing that you’ve put in front of them.
- Pathos, the emotional appeal, plays on what makes the audience experience whatever emotion is appropriate for the piece of SEO content that you’re writing. If you’re writing about a food service, for instance, happiness and comfort might be the target emotions that you structure your language around while writing for something like insurance might play on the audience’s concern for safety and peace of mind.
- Logos, the appeal to logic, is perhaps the most important of the three. The reason for this is because logos uses reasoning to reiterate the points established through ethos and pathos, ultimately calling your audience to action.
Pairing these modes of persuasion with a piece of well written SEO content (carefully designed to show up in search engine results) will not just grab your audience, but convert them into using the services that are highlighted throughout the writing.
Want To Learn More About Writing SEO Content?
If you’re a business owner in Maryland looking for SEO services, whether they be copywriting, social media marketing or anything else that will help you establish a foothold in search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing, then contact us today.
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