What’s the best way to create content that ranks well enough to generate traffic? Everybody who creates content wants the answer to that question.
After all, great content helps you to achieve better search engine rankings. That means that just pouring any old content onto your website isn’t going to cut it.
Poor content turns readers off from your site. It also sends warning signs to search engines. They’ll see that people aren’t getting what they need from your content.
Your search engine rankings will reflect that fact.
Figure 1 – https://www.digivate.com/blog/seo/google-new-thin-content-penalty-has-arrived/
That’s probably scared a lot of new website owners out there.
Now, you’re wondering how to start content writing without falling foul of the search engines.
Thankfully, there are a few content writing steps that you can follow to ensure you create content that users love and search engines rank.
7 content writing tips every marketer needs
1. Find Out About Industry Influencers on Buzz Sumo
Buzz Sumo is an exceptionally useful platform for anybody who’s searching for topics for content writing.
The platform allows you to enter either a topic or a website address into its search engine.
It then delivers a set of results that are not only relevant to the term you used, but also ranked based on how well they’ve engaged visitors.
Figure 2 – http://buzzsumo.com/
The key here is that all of the results that you see are among the best pieces of content related to the niche that you searched for.
You can use this information to get content ideas. But you can also check the results to see what your competitors did to create such engaging content in the first place.
This may give you a useful set of content writing tips that you can apply to your own writing.
Use Buzz Sumo to provide inspiration for your own content writing efforts.
You’ll find content that’s already achieved what you’re hoping to achieve, which means you’re learning from the best content creators in your niche.
But that’s not all. Buzz Sumo also has a useful Content Analysis feature. This helps you drill down to find the types of content that work best for your niche.
With this, you’ll discover if you’re best served creating a video, infographic, article, or some other form of content.
2. Discover the Best Keywords Using Google AdWords
Once you’ve come up with a few topics for content writing and you understand how best to deliver your content, it’s time to look at some keywords.
Google AdWords provides one of the most effective tools for your keyword research.
It’s simple to use too.
First, just enter a search term that’s relevant to your niche into the planner. It then delivers an array of related terms that you can target in your content.
Figure 3 – http://timfelmingham.com/free-keyword-research-tools-2018/
But it doesn’t stop there. The tool also provides you with a graph for each keyword that charts how many people have searched for it per month.
You can use this information to spot keyword trends that your content can take advantage of.
For example, you may find that users search for more festive terms during Christmas. Content that uses these terms will prove particularly effective during December.
But it won’t be anywhere near as effective during other times of the year.
Using the tool is one of the most important content writing steps for ensuring that you target your content towards the right audience.
3.Use Answer the Public to Discover the Burning Questions
The AdWords Keyword Planner gives you some idea about the keywords that you should target.
But you can use other tools to take that research further and come up with even more topics for content writing. Answer the Public is an excellent tool for this.
Take the keywords that you pulled from the AdWords Keyword Planner and plug them into Answer the Public.
What you’ll get is a bunch of the most commonly asked questions on search engines that relate to that keyword.
Figure 4 – https://answerthepublic.com/reports/f7591da4-d511-4281-baa3-671a011c4656
Search engines value content that answers common user questions.
Ask The Public provides you with a host of questions that can inspire your blog content. Use it to create content writing strategies for every keyword that you intend to target.
4.Get More Data from SEM Rush
You’re not quite finished with your research just yet.
The previous steps will have provided you with some keywords and topics for content writing.
With SEM Rush, you can check out the data behind the keywords that you hope to target.
Figure 5 – https://www.semrush.com/info/flowers+(keyword)
You’ll get a lot of similar data here that you get from the other tools. But SEM Rush takes it a step further.
It offers detailed information about trends related to your search term. Plus, it provides useful information about paid search related to your search term.
That’s particularly useful if you intend to use paid online ads to drive traffic to your content. You can even find out stats for different countries.SEM Rush gives you some final data before you start creating your content.
But you’re not quite done with your research yet.
5.Speak to Your Customers
All of these tools provide useful insight into what people want from your content. But we’ve missed one of the most important content writing steps – talking to your customers.
If you’re looking for topics to write about, go straight to the people who already use your service. Ask them if there’s anything that they want more information about.
Perhaps you could write a guide for a popular product. Or there’s a pain point that’s affecting a lot of your customers. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know.
This serves another purpose too. Creating content that satisfies your existing customers’ needs ensures you generate repeat business.
Figure 6 – https://www.groovehq.com/support/customer-service-statistics
You want your content to attract new customers. But all of the research suggests that your existing customers are your primary source of revenue.
When you create content based on what they need, you’re securing your base. You can then build on this with other content that’s focused towards potential new customers.
6.Create the Right Structure for Your Content
The first five content writing steps cover all of the research that you should undertake. But you still need to create a quality piece of content based on the data that you have.
And that means structuring your content so that it’s readable and useful to your audience. If you just start writing with no structure, your content tends to meander off in different directions.
You’ll lose track of your thread and create a disjointed piece of content. The problem is that many think keywords are the key to good content structure.
But that’s not the case:
Figure 7 – https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-writing-blog-posts-that-rank-in-googles-top-10/
Not the importance of the user experience and depth of the content. The keyword research steps above should help you to get your primary and related keywords.
Here are some useful tips for structuring your content:
- Start with a question that encourages discussion.
- Make sure your Title and Meta Data tell the searcher what your content will deliver.
- Use stats to capture attention (did you know that most people will only read about 18% of this article)
- Answer the question that your introduction poses.
Get all of that right and your content has a structure that makes it more likely to rank.
7.Update and Repurpose Your Existing Content
So you’ve done all of this work to get a brand new piece of content up onto your website.
It reads well, it answers the right questions, and it’s driving traffic to your website.
Now, it’s time to repeat all of these content writing steps for every piece of content that’s on your website. Having one good article isn’t enough to get good rankings in the modern search environment.
Offering content of a consistent quality is the key, which means that old content you’ve created that doesn’t quite hit all of the right notes needs some adjusting.
Firstly, take stock of every piece of content on your website.
The odds are that none of those pieces match the quality of the single piece that you’ve just created. Run an in-depth analysis and carry out the above six steps on all of the content you already have.
This won’t be a quick process and it’s one that you should complete alongside creating new content.
Finally, you’ll have a website full of targeted content that’s useful to your readers. That’s when you start repurposing.
Your existing content provides the platform for new content.
You could repurpose an article into an infographic, or put the most important takeaways from your piece onto Facebook. Maybe you have a set of related articles that you can repurpose into an eBook to encourage people to register with your website.
The key is that you’re presenting your content in different ways.
Through repurposing, you can capture the attention of people who prefer visual content over written content, or vice versa. And here’s the best part.
That repurposed content could end up ranking alongside your original piece:
Figure 9 – https://neilpatel.com/blog/does-repurposing-content-work-heres-a-data-driven-answer/
Brian Dean’s work also offers another useful repurposing method that helps you to generate traffic. He tends to create a piece that goes onto his website. This is the piece that ranks on search engines.
From there, he repurposes the piece for an email campaign. And he extracts the most important points for use as social media content.
The end result?
A recent use of this strategy saw him boost organic traffic to one of his posts by over 110%.
Repurpose, refresh, and reinvigorate.
Follow those three R’s for all of your existing content. Then, take advantage of all of the online platforms available.
You’ll see a big boost in traffic.
The Final Word
With that, you have all of the content writing steps that you need to create content that gets great rankings and engages your audience.
So much of your strategy revolves around your research.
Find out what your audience wants and consider the niches that you can cover.
Use the tools mentioned in this article to create a range of topics for content writing.
If you follow these steps, you’ll create content that people can actually use. And that’s how you earn top rankings and a great reputation.
Of course, content writing is just one part of a comprehensive SEO strategy.
There’s so much more to consider and you need to build it all into your digital marketing efforts. From links through to website optimisation, you need to slot in all of the pieces of the puzzle to get the best results.
That’s where Online Marketing Gurus can help.
Got Questions?
Pushing traffic towards a website is an extremely important part of any SEO and content strategy. But it’s the quality of that traffic that’s the true deciding factor.
Even poor SEO can boost the traffic numbers. But it won’t provide a business with the quality that it needs to generate a return.
With all of this evidence, along with the many statistics shared in this article, you can now see just how vital SEO is for the modern business.