How To Strike a Balance Between Optimized and Quality Content for SEO

Keyword stuffing is a thing of the past for search engine optimization (SEO), and it is there to stay. It won’t be like fashion trends that make their comeback now and then. As natural language processing continues to prevail, writing for SEO is becoming more and more about producing quality content that satisfies a user’s search intent.

The number of searches that are being processed by Google per day is 8.5 billion (Internet Live Stats, 2022). Within that astounding number of daily searches are hundreds, if not thousands, of people searching for keywords relevant to your business. So naturally, it will be a waste if they don’t find you online. But the question is: How can businesses like yours show up on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPS)?

Before anything else, let’s first define SEO writing and what makes quality content.

What Is Writing for SEO?

It’s the process of writing content in a way that makes it highly readable for search engines. This type of content marketing strategy involves keyword research and content optimization to help your content marketing solutions.

What Is Quality Content?

Informative and resolves conflict; content that adds value to the reader. You do this by keeping your audience’s needs at the forefront of your mind. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to check content quality:

• Does this answer a question?
• What problem is this solving?
• Is this clear enough?

Your audience’s journey should start with attracting them, then engaging and then delighting them. To produce high converting content, you must learn copywriting for SEO while keeping both humans and search engines in mind. As Rand Fishkin, co-founder of Moz said,

There’s no such thing as “writing for people vs. search engines.”
There’s only “writing for people who also use search engines.”

Any content marketing strategist who’s an expert at writing for SEO will fully agree with this. However, writing for people who use search engines is easier said than done. Google’s algorithm has not only changed dramatically but is also continuously changing.

Today, most businesses have their own website, and the digital space is more crowded and competitive than ever before. So here are some tips to help you show at the top of the search page results to ace that content quality and reach your content marketing goals.

#1: Every Winning SEO Content Marketing Strategy Begins With Keyword Research

Some people get overwhelmed with the idea of “research,” but conducting keyword research isn’t as complicated as often believed. Start by listing down words related to what your business is offering, whether a product or service and then use tools like Google Trends to expand your research. Let’s take a content writing agency like Thrive as an example and run one of our services on Google Trends.

Here, you can see the interest over the past 90 days in the United States.

Here, you can see the interest by subregion. You can take these locations to add to your existing keywords. To further take Thrive agency as an example:

content marketing + services + New York = content marketing services in New York.

Here, you can see other related topics you can look into and queries like SEO content writing services.

You can also use something more familiar to all of us, Google Search. Run a search on one of your keywords and pay attention to sections “People also ask” and “Related Searches” seen at the middle and bottom of the SERPs. All the information you get from your research is valuable for your web content writing.

If your business has highly competitive keywords, it will be hard but not impossible to top the competition. However, there are agencies offering effective content marketing solutions to help you.

#2: Understanding Your Audience Search Intent Should Be One of Your Content Marketing Goals

The four types of search intent are: informational, navigational, transactional and commercial. If you want to speak to your audience, you need to make them listen to you by offering what they need, therefore fulfilling their search intent.

Transactional: The user is prepared to avail a product or service. Often has words such as hire, buy and download.
Informational: The user needs an answer to specific questions. Often has the words such as how, what, when and who.
Navigational: The user is looking for a particular web page. Often has a brand’s name.
Commercial: The user is investigating and almost ready to purchase. Often has words such as near me, reviews, best or versus (vs).

You can have all the right keywords together, but if you don’t know what questions your audience is asking, you won’t be able to connect with them personally. Knowing what questions they have may give you a topic to write about, but understanding their search intent is vital to help guide you on how to go about it.

Writing effective copy for a buyer who is ready to purchase your product will differ from writing for a user who wants to compare products.

#3: Start Writing Compelling Copy Like a Content Marketing Strategist

Having performed keyword research and understood user intent, you didn’t just learn copywriting for SEO but are now ready to go. As you go, remember these three copywriting tips to help you:

• Address conflicts your audience has – offer solutions.
• Directly speak to your audience – use an active voice.
• And last but not least – start writing!

However, we understand that some people just can’t start writing. Most of them are business owners who don’t have the time and are smart enough to delegate tedious essential tasks. In this case, partnering with agencies offering SEO content writing services is a great move to help you and your business. Doing so allows you to learn from experts firsthand, and you might just find yourself giving copywriting tips sooner than later.

Do I Need Other Content Marketing Solutions?

Before you decide, here are three points to remember for writing balanced and optimized content for SEO:

• Writing for search engines doesn’t mean neglecting your users – it’s the exact opposite.
• Combining your efforts on keyword research and understanding search intent is key to connecting with your audience and helping them convert.
• Compelling content needs to answer questions and solve problems.

Now, it’s completely understandable if you aren’t able to do all this work in-house. Whether your business is relatively new or well-established, you will find that working with experts offering SEO content writing services is highly beneficial. If you decide to hire an agency, ensuring it’s credible and trustworthy helps you achieve your content marketing goals without wasting time and money. At Thrive, we have an expert team of SEO writers ready to produce high-converting content for your business.

One of the sets of principles we follow at Thrive is Google’s content quality checker, E-A-T.

E – Expertise
A – Authoritativeness
T – Trustworthiness

This checker appeared in Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines, given to Google’s team of experts who manually review high-ranking websites on certain keywords. It’s how they tell what valuable content should look like, making it a fundamental checklist for every writer and content marketing strategist to use.

Other than writing effective copy, we also offer additional content marketing services. Having been in business since 2015, we know how to help your business attract customers through professional web design, engage them through social media marketing and delight them with lead nurturing email. If you’re interested to know more about how else we can help you, get in touch with us now.