Are You Making These SEO Content Writing Mistakes?

We love nothing more than seeing our work published on our clients’ websites. But simply having the content on your website isn’t enough – it needs to be read by your audience. One of the key ways to make this happen is through SEO content writing.

If you’re not familiar with how SEO works, however, it can be easy to make mistakes. With over four years’ experience in SEO content, we’ve come across our fair share of slip-ups. We’ve put them together in this handy post to help you on the way to the top of the search results.

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the term for overusing your intended words and phrases. Say we’re trying to rank for ‘phones for work.’ Starting with ‘There are a variety of different phones for work you can choose from, these phones for work include Cisco phones. Phones for work can really benefit your business.’ not only sounds a bit daft, it also harms your SEO. Search engines actually penalise content that is stuffed with keywords because they see it as spammy.

It’s not just overusing one keyword that can harm your SEO: using a variety of different ones can do so too. Including too many search phrases in your copy tells Google you don’t know what your content is about, and they will push your website down its listings.

Using competitive keywords

There are some keywords which are just not worth attempting to rank for; there’s simply too many websites to compete with. It will be the key players in the industry who sit atop the search results, and sometimes these keywords will not actually be that applicable to your business. There’s no point trying to rank for a global phrase, for instance, when you are providing a local service.

Focus on less competitive and long-tail keywords to boost your chances of being found online. Although they will have fewer searches, your website will be much more likely to be near the top of the page when they are. With users expecting instant solutions to their problems, being on or near the first page for a niche search term is much more beneficial than being on the tenth page for a competitive one.

Forgetting all the elements

Don’t forget to make use of your keywords not just in your main copy, but also in meta descriptions. Although Google don’t take these into account when they’re ranking websites, a compelling preview description can boost your chances of the searcher clicking on yours.

The alt text of your images also makes your website more accessible for blind or visually impaired internet users as it’s readable by screen readers. This is looked favourably on by search engines, so describe what the image shows and add in the keyword if it’s relevant.

But SEO is more than keywords. There are a lot of elements to optimisation, including site speed, as well as quality internal and external links. Online website speed tests can show you where you can improve, and it’s worth reviewing your existing content to ensure it’s pointing to other high-authority websites as well as to your related pages.

SEO content writing has a lot to it – it’s clearly not just simply using a repeated phrase and hoping you magically appear on the first page of Google.

Making You Content are here to help. We can put together an SEO content strategy to improve your ranking results. Contact us on 0161 660 9206 today and we’ll ensure none of these mistakes prevent your content from being found by your audience.