The traffic that visits your website depends on how easy your blog, content or pages are found on a search engine. Sure, you will share your posts through social media and gain some traffic that way, but much of your content should be easily found on Google. This is why keywords and SEO is so important for businesses.
Why Use an SEO Content Writer?
We all know that search engines are designed to pull up the most relevant pages for our search query. When we use Google or Yahoo to find a product or answer a question, we expect the pages that are listed highest in the organic results to make the most sense and answer our need.
Search Engine Optimization has become quite popular in the last few years and companies fight for those top spots. When a Google bot searches through websites at lighting fast speeds to determine the most relevant pages for a query, writers and developers look for ways to make their pages show up on top. Keywords, links, content length, website age – these are all just a few of the ways that Google algorithms determine the best fit for the question posed by the user.
Why do You Need Keyword Phrases?
The title and wording is very important in SEO. The closest match is often very near the top. If you type in the exact title of an article on paper, for example, that article will most likely be at the top of the results – unless multiple articles have that same wording. So, if you typed in, “What trees are best to plant in the spring?” then you would most likely get an article dealing with exactly that (if there is one out there). If you search for “trees spring planting” then you might get a mixed result including sites with trees for sale and articles about getting your home ready to sell.
Now, think about that backwards – if websites are just throwing in keywords (trees spring planting), then they depend on the rest of their website’s merits to push them to the top of the search results. If, however, they word their articles to fit exactly what their audience might search for, then they have a slight advantage over the competition.
Discovering Keyword Phrases
Did you know that frequently searched topics are entered into Google and available for easy SEO keyword research? Type in “How to locate…” or the beginning of a phrase and Google finishes with the most common searches, trying to help you complete your search faster. As I write this article, I typed in “how do” and before I could finish the sentence Google presented me with:
…you demonstrate commitment to others
…you take a screenshot
…I get a passport
…cats purr
…you delete Twitter
All of these questions could determine the title of an article and help your post rise up in the ranking.
Considering the Competition
One more thing to consider for your article subject: how many have already covered it? Not that you can’t write an article that has already been written, but clicking on the option for “how do you take a screenshot” brought up a full page of articles with exactly that in their title. This means that writing an article with the title and subject “how to take a screenshot” might not make it very far and has high competition.
On the other hand “how do you demonstrate commitment to others” was a high result (top of the search suggestions) and only came up with one similarly titled article “The Best Way to Demonstrate Commitment to Others” with all other first page results dealing with job interviews and leadership. This means writing that article might get up higher in the results faster for that query.
It isn’t about tricking the search engine into tossing your articles at the top of the page whether they are relevant or not, it is about providing quality content for your customers. By writing articles based on what people are actually looking for, you provide a valuable service and simultaneously increase traffic with a higher SEO ranking.
Alethea M is a corporate blogging guru and freelance writer for WriterAccess. She often uses interesting facts from her article research to impress friends at dinner parties. Her husband is her biggest fan — though this may be because her writing income allows her to share in bill-paying each month.
