How To Ensure Your Content Is Well-Written And SEO Friendly

Nicely written content and good SEO value – sounds like a dream, right? Surely these two unattainable goals can’t be achieved at the same time?!

Lemme tell ya, they most definitely can and today I’m going to tell you how you can do it!

My role as a Content Executive at Embryo is all about making sure our fantastic clients get sent copy that is well-written, engaging for their respective audiences and created in a way that will appeal to Google and get them on page one.

Below are a few things that I’ve picked up in my time as a content creator, feel free to pass these off as your own the next time you’re chatting content, you’ll look super clever.

Focus On The SEO First

Getting those keywords into the copy from the beginning will make your life so much easier, trust me! You don’t want to be in a position where you’ve written War & Peace but forgot to include relevant keywords. You end up crowbarring keywords into the copy which always looks obvious and clunky. In my experience, once you’ve got the keywords in you can go back and refine it to improve flow, grammar and tone.

Embed Links Within Sentences

If our director James had a pound for every time he said this to the content team he’d be a millionaire! Embedded inbound and outbound links in the middle of sentences not only improves the copy from an SEO standpoint but it’s also much more natural to read and really does enhance your copy. Folk are much more likely to click on a link as they’re reading the content. So, if you can get a link in there that is relevant to what you’re writing then double thumbs up to you!

Avoid Just Listing Locations

When writing about locations try and avoid just listing them. Google rewards hard work so if you can provide a small amount of context for each location that you mention in a call to action or in the wider copy then you’ll find this gets far more traction than just listing them. And, from a writer’s POV having 3, 4 or 5 locations listed just looks lazy and a bit bland.

Use Frase Whenever Possible

This isn’t #sponcon or a #ad (we’re not quite at influencer level!) but I just want to shout out this amazing piece of kit that myself and the rest of the content whizzes use every day. From pulling relevant keywords together to finding all the questions that are asked about literally any topic you can think of – Frase does it all. We rely on it so much here at Embryo and is one of many reasons why we’re able to create such great content for our clients because the keywords are being baked into the copy and sentence structure. For more on Frase, why not check out James’ blog? He wrote about how brilliant Frase is and it’s a really great read (just don’t tell him I said that!).

Optimise Those Images!

An open goal when it comes to SEO and keyword ranking. Behind each photo is ALT text, titles, captions and filenames. Users won’t see the ALT text but search engines use this info to further understand the subject matter of the image. Creating useful ALT text that is relevant to your content and keyword friendly is a sneaky way to boost your content’s SEO effectiveness.

Go Big Or Go Home

Gone are the days of teeny tiny blog posts. You’re looking at a minimum of 2k for a blog post if you want to have a good chance of ranking. This is because there is just so much content posted on Google every single day that to have any chance of getting on page one you need content that is long enough and packed with enough keywords to bypass your competitors.

So, there you go! A few tidbits from your friendly neighbourhood content writer here at Embryo, based in the heart of Manchester. For more on how we make content for clients be sure to check out our SEO page on the site or visit our blog page which is packed with information about all things marketing!