By Dany Ortiz, on 3 February 2020
Anyone who’s ever baked knows that creating the perfect cake requires a precise combination of ingredients. Too much sugar makes your cake overly sweet. Too much flour makes it dry, and then suddenly your dessert is the one getting ignored at the dinner party. But, if you manage to add just the right amount of each ingredient, then you’ll have a perfectly delicious and irresistible cake.
The same can be applied to SEO copywriting. While it's crucial to include keywords in your SEO content, if you overstuff them or use them unnaturally then your content won’t position well and no one will enjoy reading it.
To help you with all this, we're sharing tips on how to use keywords for SEO content and SEO writing tips.
How to Use Keywords in SEO Articles
If you’ve been in the SEO world for a long time, you might remember an era when SEO writing tips basically consisted of trying to include your keyword and it’s synonyms into your content as many times as possible. But those days have been over for a while now.
Google wants to ensure that the pages that position well contain high-quality content and thoroughly answer their users’ searches.
This means that ranking isn't based on the number of times you a mention a certain keyword or search query in your content. In fact, when you just try to fit keywords into any possible spot, it shows and Google will penalize you for this.
Instead, good SEO content writing techniques include optimizing for your keywords, while ensuring that your article or blog post fully answers the searcher’s query.
Both your page ranking and your content will suffer if you do not use SEO keywords in a natural way. However, when you use your keywords in a way that fully answers a reader’s question while also making it easy to find your content, then you’ll be in Google's good graces and well on your way to the coveted first page of search results.
How To Write Good SEO Content Naturally: 5 Tips
1. Write Without Paying Attention to Keywords
It may seem a little counter-intuitive, but the first step to writing good SEO content naturally is to forget about your keywords (a bit). This doesn’t mean throwing caution to the winds and writing without factoring in keywords at all. Instead, just reversing your process.
Try putting aside the keyword research excel sheets and search queries lists, and focus on writing the best piece of content you can for your main keyword topic. After you finish writing, go back and see how you can optimize sentences and phrases to better include the keywords you want to rank for. You’ll find that once the content is already written, it’s a lot easier to figure out how to naturally use keywords in the article.
But remember, if it sounds clunky, it probably is. Do not force a keyword into a sentence just to increase the number of times it appears. Only include it if it fits with the content.
2. Pay Attention to Grammar and Diction
Speaking of clunky writing, go through your content like a well-seasoned editor and ensure you’re using correct grammar and are following good writing practices.
Poor writing does not rank well with Google because the search engine isn’t sure if the information you’re sharing is a clear, effective explanation of the topic. Additionally, bad writing can come off as keyword stuffing.
On the other hand, content that uses active voice, natural word choices, an informational tone, easy transitions, and is well written ranks better because it is more trustworthy and professional.
As an added bonus, ensuring your content is well written is also an important factor in ranking well for voice searches. When choosing where to source answers for voice queries, search engines pull content that sounds natural when read out loud while also thoroughly answering a question. This adds an extra layer of importance to ensuring you are using proper SEO content writing techniques.
3. Quantity Matters
When writing your SEO content, quantity matters and not just when it comes to your keywords.
While this certainly isn’t a concrete rule, in general, longer content tends to rank better than shorter content. It has been found that longer content that contains around 2,000 words ranks best.
This extra space gives SEO content writers a little extra wiggle room to fully answer a question without having to overfill a short amount of space with the same keyword. This gives you more room to use many different long-tail keywords and search queries in your article in a more natural and less condensed way.
However, as always, don’t force it. If you can thoroughly explain a topic using less than 2,000 words then do not keep repeating yourself just to reach a word count.
4. Google Search Console Is Your Friend
Speaking of long-tail keywords, utilize Google Search Console to examine the ways people naturally search for the topic you’re writing about. This is one of the best to figure out how to use keywords in SEO articles because it mimics a searcher's natural word choice.
The long-form keywords and search queries people use reflect the way they naturally speak and think about a topic. Take a look at these longer forms and incorporate them into your SEO content if they naturally fit.
5. Forget All The Rules
We're not saying go crazy and completely ignore any keyword research and SEO content writing techniques. But, if you’re an SEO writer or content writer, then you likely have an overall interest in writing and are probably pretty decent at it. The best way to make your writing seem natural is to write naturally!
If you go into your writing worried about making sure you satisfy every tiny requirement then your writing will suffer, and ultimately your content will be lacking. Try to include your keywords enough so that whoever has a question about what you’re writing about feels satisfied when they're done reading. Remember to keep your personality and personal writing style alive. Ultimately, that is what will make your content stand out over time.
