5 Engagement Marketing Tips for SEO Writers in 2020
Being a good SEO writer is not just about inserting the right keywords in the article (Although, it doesn’t hurt). The writing process is a delicate balance of careful planning and understanding how to give the right answer to the person who is looking for it.
Even before you begin writing you should have a good idea of who you are writing for. This means, knowing your audience, understanding user intent and setting a clear goal for the content to fulfill in mind:
Answering the following questions about your goals and the intended audience will help you attract more suitable visitors to your article:
1. User Intent
- What do you want to achieve with your article?
- What action the reader should follow after reading your post?
- What type of article is it? informational (provides information and educates), navigational (directs you towards a website you should visit next) or transactional (nudges you to buy a certain product)?
2. Know Your Audience
- Who is your audience? (age, gender, location, education, economic situation, etc)
- What kind of information they are seeking to find?
- Why do they need that information?
- What is their Buyer’s journey stage? (awareness, consideration, decision)
3. Keyword Research
Investing in keyword research is crucial if you want your article to rank in Google. There are many tools (Like Mangool’s KWfinder) that can help you find what users are looking for.
Try to focus on these parameters when doing your keyword research:
- Main and secondary keywords — Start with the main keyword and add supporting keywords throughout the text.
- Title and meta description — make sure to include your selected keywords in the title of the article and the meta description. Use a SERP simulator to see a preview of how your article title and meta description will appear in a Google snippet.
- Monthly search volume — Learn how many people search for a query each month. Any number above 1000 searches is great!
- Keyword difficulty — Understand how hard it’s going to be to rank for a certain keyword. The lower the keyword difficulty number is, the better are your chances of ranking on the first page.
- Amount of keyword usage in content — Try to use your main keyword and secondary keywords naturally in the body of the article and in the title and sub-titles.
4. Invest in a Good Title
Generate a Title
Coming up with an amazing title for your article is not always easy. Luckily, there are many tools around the web that can help you generate titles according to topics, like the title generator, SEMrush’s title generator, and SEOpressor’s title generator. Enter your topic into the search field and get dozens of ideas for click-worthy titles.
Use Powerful Words
Good titles evoke emotion: Awesome. Powerful. Proven. They are memorable, they make you feel, and click! Sometimes, using a negative title (for example, including the words “The Worst” or “Mistakes”) instead of a positive one, pushes the reader to click through even faster! Try checking these powerful and effective words to see if you can include them in your title.
Analyze Your Title’s Engagement
Once your title is ready, you are not done yet. Not before checking your headline score with the COschedule headline analyzer and measuring how engaging is your title with the sharethrough headline tool. Try twitching your title until you get a satisfactory engagement score.
5. Don’t Forget About Other SEO Parameters
Now that you have completed a major part of the writing process, make sure to include other SEO friendly parameters, like alt tags, anchor texts and more in your article. Check out the article on writing SEO friendly blog posts for beginners.
This post originally appeared in the SERPWolf Blog.
