As search engine algorithms get more and more sophisticated in how they evaluate web content, the important of sincerely good content rises with them. With big players like Google now developing smarter AI systems and more advanced voice search capabilities, the semantic quality of your content is paramount for effective SEO.
While you might think that you can write pretty well, you’d be surprised by how poorly many people express things in writing. Copywriting at a commercial level for SEO purposes is a skill that can’t be learnt overnight, which explains why many businesses outsource their SEO and content creation to 3rd party agencies.
Let’s take a look at what it takes to write high quality content for SEO.
Expand your vocabulary, use a variety of synonyms
Search engines like content that is of a nice variety and uses the full width and breadth of the English language. The more succinctly you can express information with language, the more unique your content is against the millions of other pieces of writing on the internet.
This is not just for the sake of the search engines, as human readers need to be engaged with for the content to be effective. The higher the linguistic quality of your writing, the better long-term engagement you will see.
Provide authoritative information with authoritative language
An important aspect of content writing for SEO is that the information needs to actually express an opinion or at least share in-depth insight into a topic. This means using authoritative language like “is” and “will” rather than “can” and “might”
Content that is too fluid and fails to come down anywhere on an issue is not going to be considered highly by search engines or users. You need to make sure your web presence is always delivering authoritative answers regarding the topics your business is relevant to.
This is why many businesses will run a blog on their website where they can make authoritative comments about their industry that helps to drive SEO outcomes.
Use images, links and formatting
The next big part of creating high quality content is how you package it. A large block of authoritative writing with no paragraphing, subheadings or references won’t perform as well as a competitor who has spruced up their content.
Using images to bookend certain topics creates visual stimuli for readers to engage with while paragraphing and numbered lists makes the content easier for people to skim through. Content also benefits from the presence of sincere hyperlinks to supporting information that would be of interest to the reader.
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