If you have any interest in producing content that will be found on google for your website then you have more than likely found articles like this one or this one written by our own SEO expert Meng. Tell us if you’ve read some variation of this phrases repeatedly on articles discussing SEO:
• Keyword research
• Keyword Optimisation
• Content Organisation
• Content Promotion
While some guides may expound on these concepts a little more, this is the basic structure of every guide explaining how to write for SEO; Research ➡ Write ➡ Publish ➡ Promote.
When you break it down into much less jargon-y terms it’s no different to creating a graphic asset for an ad campaign or even writing an essay in High School. Your choices need to be informed by data (no gut feelings here), you need to present your content in a way that is palatable for the viewer and then you need to get that content in front of people so they’ll read it (if we’re still using the high school metaphor this would be you handing your assignment in on time).
If you’re a business owner trying to do your SEO yourself and you’re reading this article, you’re most likely in the research phase still, which is great, it’s a good place to be. We don’t want to add to the ever-expanding folder of bookmarks you probably have explaining the process of writing content for SEO. What we’re here to do is give you a few tips and recommend a few products that can help make things easier for you.
SEO TOOLS CAN BE HELPFUL (AND EXPENSIVE)
Handling the SEO for your business means you need to build yourself a toolbox of products and services to help you achieve your goals. Google Analytics is a no brainer, but what about writing content? One that is extremely popular with business is Cora (we know, their website looks bad but we swear it’s legit).
What Cora will do is take care of the research for you. Enter the keywords you want to target, select competitors also going for those keywords and voila! You’ll be presented with a report telling you exactly what keywords to use and how many times they need to be used to rank above the competition! Cora does a lot more than just helping you out with writing content and their reports cover pretty much EVERY aspect of SEO for your website.
Now, as the title of this section states, all of this delicious data does not come cheap! Cora retails for $250 US PER MONTH and while there are always discounts and specials available you still need to consider the cost and whether it’s a good fit for you.
Cora is of course not the only service like this out there; Ahrefs is another popular site crawler used by SEO professionals and SEMrush is great for e-commerce and marketing. Each of these services have varying subscription levels so you can choose what works for you.
RANKING OR READABILITY: WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT?
If you’re producing content with the sole focus of including as many keywords as you can then we’re going to hazard a guess and say your content probably isn’t being read by many people. SEO is a delicate balance between the needs of a search engine and the people that use it to find content. On the one hand, you’re dealing with Google and you’re working within very strict parameters (x number of keywords will increase the ranking by y amount).
On the other hand, we’re all human and if you’re reading something that has strange syntax and grammar then you’re probably going to stop reading it. Sometimes it can be difficult to work “Carpet Cleaner Perth” into a sentence naturally. So, what is a business owner to do? This is one of those situations where you’re going to have to add to your skillset and spend some time learning from the professionals. We always think video courses are a great alternative to reading through long dry course books or PDF’s and a quick search on YouTube will show you plenty of free videos from industry professionals.
If you maybe want to go a little deeper with some online video courses in a more structured way Skillshare is always our go-to place when we need to upskill. Being more similar to do a university course online, the courses offered here include assignments, discussions boards and a more fleshed out education experience.
BE WARY OF AI
This isn’t a warning about the dangers of Skynet (but it can be if you want it to). We’re talking about AI content creators. Artificial Intelligence that will produce content for you based on your desired keywords. We took a look at Article Forge last year and if you want to see our thoughts on it you can read that here. We’ve had a play with a few more and the consensus is… If it looks like a robot and acts like a robot then it also writes like one.
While you may get a piece of written content that will hit every keyword it needs to and rank well when someone starts to read the article they’re probably going to be put off by the odd sentence structure that invariably comes with trying to force keywords into sentences they don’t belong in. If you’re going to have to spend time editing the article so it appears like it’s written by a human and if you have to do that for a service you pay for, you may as well hire a copywriter.
