An SEO Content Writing Checklist for High-ranking Articles.
An SEO Content Writing Checklist for High-ranking Articles.
What it Takes to Outrank Your Competitors' Content.
Hello Readers!
Welcome to the weekly Factwise newsletter, where we bring you the latest in Writing, Web Design and SEO. Get in touch for a free website audit or a quick consultation with our experts. Subscribe and follow our page for more updates on the same.
No doubt writing is fun. More exciting is writing that reaches a wider audience. You must have a clear plan to ensure your work reaches as many readers as possible. The surest way to ensure you write SEO-optimized content is to create a checklist.
A checklist helps you establish all the important components of your content. It helps you track everything that makes the content useful for your readers.
Here is our SEO content writing checklist for articles that rank.
Keyword and Keyword use. Check if you have the keyword in the article. It should be in the Meta title and also the first 100 words. The keyword should appear several other times in the text, but not too many. Secondary keywords should be present in the H2s and the text.
Word count. Ensure you write everything within a reasonable word count. It should not be too little or more than enough. Ensure that you are within your competitorās word count range. Sometimes content with less word count rank if they meet search intent and offer unique content.
Meta tags: Use meta tags, like schema markup for your content. Let search engines know what your content is all about. It is the fastest way to ensure crawlability.
Content quality. Content must be quality at all times. Ensure the content meets the E-E-A-T guidelines by Google. It should be easy to read, concise, and well-structured. It should also address the reader. Refer to our previous posts on content quality. Cover the topic thoroughly and explain each bit to make sense to the readers.
Headings and sub-headings. Headers help you segment your work into subtopics. It also makes your work navigational. Headers represent an aspect of the topic. Incorporate relevant secondary keywords to help in ranking your content.
Internal links are vital to keep your content relevant. Ensure that you have many internal links to your work. They should be relevant to the content too. You can place as many as ten links on one piece of content.
External links. Go for quality links to your work. Find quality content that matches your topic and add a link as a resource. Avoid linking to your competitor. Use a link to credit statistics you have quoted in your text. Also, ensure that you link to a high authority website.
Images. Add images to your work. When content is a dull bloc of text, readers will snooze and leave the page. Use alluring images that will hook your reader. It may be a simple image on the topic or an illustration of the same. Using unique images makes your content stand out. Use many illustration images in compressed versions to ensure your page loads well. Readers are more likely to understand visuals than words.
URL. Your URL structure should be sufficient. It should not be too long. Aim for words only on your URL. Also, avoid special characters that search engines may not understand. Ensure that your URL has the main keyword in it.
Alt text for images should be relevant. Include the primary keyword in the Alt text. That way, your images will help improve your chances of ranking on the web.
Meta descriptions. Your article should have a meta description. A meta description is the text Google places under your link on SERPs. The meta description should have less than 300 characters, and it should have the main keyword. Your reader will rely on it to click your link.
Add a FAQ section. FAQs are questions that a reader would be looking to answer when reading your content. The section targets common questions a reader may have without reading too much text.
Writing content is easy when you have an SEO content writing checklist. It guides you to create fully optimized content for the reader and search engines. Cover every base with each article, and soon you will be doubling or tripling your traffic.
Reach out to us if you need help with content writing. We have the best writing services that place you ahead of your competitors.