Beautiful, articulate copy that’s easy to read is hard to write. It needs to communicate ideas, passion and trust – but it also needs to be engaging, fun and ‘on brand’. Then start to add in SEO needs, keyword density and it becomes far trickier.
Clive Morley, at SEO agency I.AM.Strategist, has put together this guide for writing the perfect webpage content.
Rule #1 – Write with YOUR customers in mind
Ultimately, the goal of your webpage is will be to perform some function other than just rank well. Whether that’s communicate news, sell products or build awareness – it’s not just to rank well. Ranking well offers higher visibility but the content should be written with the purpose in mind. There are enough SEO tricks that should make it easy to do both; rank well and be fit for purpose.
Rule #2 – Be comprehensive
Type your target keyword into Google and read the top 20 pages. Write down each of the content areas and the ones that appear the most are probably going to be the most important topics to cover. That said, be comprehensive. Whilst following rule #1, try to include as much info on one page as possible. Google loves comprehensiveness. Make it easy to read and digest and allow easy access to the most important topics with subheadings (h2, h3 etc).
Rule #3 – Keywords
“Use your exact keyword target in the URL, page title, h1 and 1st paragraph but don’t over do it” explains Brendan from BLD Communication, an SEO content writer. “Google needs to know what your content is about but it can be sensitive to spam. Try not to use your keyword more than once per 100 words”
Rule #4 – Length
It’s not true what they say, size matters. At I.AM.Stratgeist, we conducted a huge survey of thousands of domains, plotting the SERPS of a given keyword vs the DA/PA of that domain. In 80% of cases where we found anomalous results (ie. rank was higher than expected based on DA/PA) the content had more than 1000 words on the page. Conclusion: Longer content appears to rank better.
Rule #5 – Structure
Plan the webpage before diving in. It can be easier to write out the headings first and leave the content blank. Then, once you know what to say, you can write each section out. I find it easier to make notes under each heading first then swap the notes for actual copy. It helps me say what I mean.