Want to learn about how to write for SEO so that your content ranks better? You’re in the right spot. Here, we’ll go over different writing styles and how writing for SEO is different from other types of writing so you’re better equipped to make your writing actually show up in Google search results. Let’s get into it!
Different Types Of Writing
There are 4 main types of writing.
- Expository. This type of writing explains concepts and shares information. It focuses on the facts and uses evidence to expound on them. With this type of writing, you don’t express opinions.
- Persuasive. This type of writing includes opinions, using evidence and justifications in order to convince the reader of something, such as why you should see a chiropractor.
- Descriptive. This type of writing uses imagery in order to engage the audience. Most commonly seen in books, it can be used elsewhere too.
- Narrative. This type of writing shares information within the context of a story (aka, a narrative).
People can sometimes confuse different types of writing, especially expository and persuasive. However, if you’re expressing an opinion, even if everything you’re saying is based on facts, that’s categorized as persuasive, not expository.
What Is The Best Type Of Writing For SEO?
The writing realm is a tricky one. People tend to have a superiority complex and think that their writing style or what they prefer is better. If something doesn’t suit their tastes, they claim that it’s “bad” rather than recognizing that “this isn’t for me”. It’s important to realize that everyone’s preferences are different. What one person hates, another will adore. Just because one person wouldn’t write something a certain way does not mean that it’s bad – it just means that it isn’t to their liking.
Fortunately, there are people who have many different writing styles out there, so there’s something for everyone. What matters is that you are using proper grammar, spelling, and the like. It’s generally advised to follow writing “rules”, such as going for an active tense rather than passive.
However, if you’re an experienced, skilled writer, you can break common rules and still draw your audience in, just like how artists break rules in order to develop their own personal style. This typically applies more to narrative writing than other types of writing, though.
So, in short: there isn’t a “best” type of writing for SEO. You can rank well regardless of whether your writing style is strictly professional, devoid of descriptions or opinions, or whether it’s chatty and engaging. However, there are some things that you need to do with your writing for SEO that may not be obvious.
What Is Writing For SEO?
Regardless of your personal writing style, there are guidelines in writing for SEO in order to help your content rank well in search engines. There are so many wonderfully written blogs and pages out there, but because they weren’t written for SEO, they don’t show up in search results.
Basically, when you’re writing for SEO, you’re optimizing your content in order to be relevant to certain keywords and to answer user intent. The goal is to get your content onto the first page of Google search results – and high up there, too. This ensures that more people see your content, generating more traffic to your site.
Writing for SEO is important if you want your blogs or webpages to be seen, because most people only look at the first page of Google search results. If your site isn’t one of the first ones people see, they might not see it at all, unless they’re willing to click back page after page in order to find it. While advertising can bring traffic, if you don’t run ads, you need your content to be optimized in order to make it work for you.
How Does Writing For SEO Work?
Before we get into this section, it’s important to note that there’s no magic formula for getting your content to rank. There are a lot of factors that impact ranking, such as site authority. For instance, if you’re in the medical field, most of the results on Google’s first page will be from highly reputable sites, like the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Healthline, and the like. Because of this, even if you do everything right, you may not get on the first page.
That said, here are some things to keep in mind when writing for SEO.
- Write for humans. When you want to rank well, it can be tempting to forget about readability and write for the algorithm. However, your writing must be targeted at humans. If it isn’t keeping people on your site, it’s stuffed with keywords, or other such issues, your SEO ranking can drop.
- Match search intent. How many times have you Googled something only to end up adjusting your search in a variety of ways because none of the results match what you’re looking for? Writing to match search intent can help your content rank better, especially if this is a common issue for what you’re writing about.
- Find the right keywords. Keyword research is a must. Having the right keyword and incorporating it naturally into your content can be the difference between content that ranks well and content that no one sees. Be careful not to keyword-stuff, because this negatively impacts your SEO.
- Link to high quality sites. By this, we mean .govs, .edus, and .orgs. If you link to a low-quality, spammy site, people may assume your site is spammy too.
- Optimize. What this means is adding your keyword throughout your page, such as in your social media description, your URL, the title tags and alt tags of images you use, your headings and subheadings, and more. It also means using internal and external links, power words, numbers, and other such tactics to draw traffic to your site.
- Go for longer content. We don’t mean run-on sentences and repeating yourself over and over. We mean go into depth about the topic you’re writing about. While it’s natural to assume that shorter is better in this day and age of short attention spans, Google actually prefers longer content. Optimizing your content can make said longer content less overwhelming to your readers.
These are just a few of the things that you can do when writing for SEO in order to help your content rank. As you can see, writing style doesn’t matter so much as staying on top of algorithm changes, writing for humans, and knowing how SEO works.
Leave The Writing To Our Professionals
If you’re overwhelmed by the idea of trying to get your content to rank well on search engines, you can hire professionals to write for you or edit your writing so it works for SEO instead. Here at Performance Driven Marketing, our content writers and SEO specialists have extensive experience in getting all sorts of different writing styles to rank well in search engines. Contact us today to learn more about our SEO services and how we can help your business succeed.
