December 31, 2021

Why SEO-friendly content writing is important?

Cassandra Lee

Cassandra is a Senior Digital Strategist at a Digital Marketing agency. Definitely an overthinker, Cassandra is grateful she has her five cats, Spotify playlists and fitness routine to keep her mind from wandering off too far away.

In the realm of digital marketing, SEO and content do not exist in silos.

In fact, content (blog content, that is) forms the very foundation of any SEO strategy. It’s actually in the very name “Search Engine Optimization” itself. Let’s break this down.

Q: What do search engines do?

A: They show users a list of search results based on their search queries.

Q: What exactly are these search results?

A: They are web pages.

Q: What are web pages?

A: It is a page on a website that has content on it.

The planning, writing, and publishing of quality content on your website is the very first step you need to take when executing an SEO strategy.

But before I delve into the details of why unique and quality content is important for SEO, I’ll briefly touch on why SEO is important in the first place.

The importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

“Why is SEO important”, you ask. Well, the answer is pretty simple.

Why bother investing time, effort and money into doing something if no one is going to see it? 👀👀👀

Imagine spending so much money on domain hosting services, purchasing a nice domain name, and hiring writers to fill up your web pages. Many months later and your site is still ranking for 0 keywords 💸

For the uninitiated, when I say rank, I don’t just mean page 1. Even if your web page is at position 64 on the search engine results page (SERPs), it is still ranking for keywords.

If you’re ranking for no keyword at all, it means that Google does not recognize the content on your web pages to be related to the topics and queries you want to rank for.

All that effort for nothing 😔

Coming up with a good SEO strategy is essential for you to get your content crawled, indexed, and ranked by Google. That way, you can build your online traffic organically as time passes.

Why is quality and unique content important for SEO?

That said, simply stuffing your content with keywords to improve keyword density isn’t enough.

You need to remember one thing. While you are writing content that will be recognized and ranked by Google, you are still ultimately writing for humans.

Good SEO content has to take the readers’ experience into consideration as well. You have to write for both people and search engines.

And here’s why great content is essential to help you with your rankings 🤔

1) Builds thought leadership

Food has a very strong cultural and historical significance.

It’s really not that difficult for people to tell whether or not effort has been put into your writing.

Fluffy writing is more common on web pages of business sites than you think. In discussing the best writing tips, Novocall’s content lead Faye Chong compares a piece of fluffy writing, and one that is more purposeful:

Good quality content writing is important for SEO! — Fluffy writing is bad for SEO!

Based on the two examples, which one do you think comes from a source that knows exactly what they’re talking about? If the writer is not able to clearly and simply explain concepts or even your business’s value proposition, your team’s reputation would most certainly be tarnished.

Well-researched and well-written content that does not include fluff improves the perceived level of professionalism and thought leadership in the eyes of your site visitors.

But how does this affect SEO?

2) Improves user engagement metrics

If your site visitor reads a piece of low-quality content, they are naturally going to click away from the page. And this is bad for SEO 👎🏻

User engagement metrics such as dwell time (time spent on the page) and bounce rate serve as indicators of your content’s quality. If more people are clicking away from your content, it’s telling Google that your content isn’t up to standard.

And then you ask again. How does this affect SEO?

You need to remember that at the end of the day, Google is still a corporate entity. It’s a business and that in and of itself means that it needs to care about improving its customers’ satisfaction. This means that it is most likely to show quality content on the first page of its SERPs.

There’s a very low possibility that sub-par content will rank on the first page.

Improving your content quality helps improve your user engagement metrics and can ultimately lead to you having a better chance at ranking for keywords.

3) Strengthens your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T)

This may sound similar to the first point, but it’s way more than that.

E-A-T is used, as its name suggests, to gauge whether or not your content is written by a trustworthy authority. Remember what I said about Google being a business?

It has to consider your content’s E-A-T when it comes to ranking all the web pages in its index.

Here’s how you can gauge a content’s E-A-T:

Expertise: What are the credentials or job experience of the writer? Does it have anything to do with the content they’re writing?
Authority: Is the writer known for being an expert in the niche they are writing about? Is the site the content is on known to be an authority in the same niche?
Trustworthiness: As Ahrefs puts it, trustworthiness is all about the “legitimacy, transparency, and accuracy of the website and its content”.

Hiring a good SEO content writer who has been writing in about topics in a particular niche for a while will always be a better option than hiring say a student writer.

That said, E-A-T is not a tangible and measurable ranking factor. Google’s Public Search Liaison Danny Sullivan has made that very clear.

4) Helps you build links

Now let’s talk about something else that is a ranking factor. The number of external links linking to your page or site.

The number of sites linking to your own is an indicator that your content is credible and helpful. After all, would anyone link to a trashy piece of content if it doesn’t help answer their search queries 💩

Unlike E-A-T, the number of backlinks your site has is a known ranking factor.

Writing high-quality content increases the probability of someone linking to your page either organically or through your linkbuilding outreach campaign.

What is considered to be quality and unique content for SEO?

1) In-depth content

Generally speaking, more in-depth content comes with more useful information that the searcher needs.

This isn’t what I had in mind when I said in-depth

But that doesn’t mean that you should stuff your page with filler words unil your content becomes too fluffy.

When you are writing in-depth content, make sure you cover as much ground about the topic as possible. You can use the 5W1H framework to help plan your content.

For example, if you were tasked to write about the best bicycle pumps, you can consider including these headers:

What is a bicycle pump?
Why do you need a bicycle pump?
Where do I get the best bicycle pump?
How do I choose the best bicycle pump?

That way, you would actually be providing information that the reader may need instead of just unnecessarily lengthening your article.

2) Content with a unique angle

There are probably already 1001 pages on the internet regarding a particular topic.

The keyword “best bicycle pump” itself has over 63 million results

To help your content stand out, look at the top search results for a particular query and come up with an angle they do not have.

For example, you can include an infographic. You can also mention other points of comparison in your article that competing pages didn’t mention in their page titles. If you do these, your page title would look a little something like this:

[Infographic] The Best Bicycle Pumps Of 2022: Features, Reviews & Prices

Not only did you just indicate that you are offering more value by providing an infographic, but you also explicitly state what you will be covering in your article.

3) Content that provides a great reader experience

These types of content should keep the reader engaged as they read through your text.

Some things that make reading more enjoyable include:

Using simple English and avoid bombastic words
Keeping your sentences short
Including several images to break up the text
Bold certain important words and phrases in the text
Use emojis to add inject some spirit into your writing 😜

The easier you make it for your reader to get to the end of your content, the better your user engagement metrics and the better you may rank for your target keywords.

So, how important is content for SEO you ask?

Now do you see why content optimization is important?

Just as skyscrapers can only be built good materials, so too do well-ranking content require the creation of good-quality content. If the foundation is not done well, one cannot expect great results.

Whether you are writing for the best online marketing magazine or a food blog, always get your basics right.

Thankfully at WritingWildly, us writers are all adept at writing good content for both humans and search engines.

If you need help with writing search-optimised content that will rank for keywords, do reach out to us today!