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How To Write SEO Articles in Four Easy Steps – DanMatt Media

If you’ve attempted to write SEO articles, you probably know how daunting and confusing it can be.

A study conducted by DemandMetric showed that on average, businesses with blogs generate 67% more leads than companies without one.

But reading through countless blogs and watching dozens of YouTube videos could leave you even more confused than you were before you began your research.

You may ask yourself a number of questions like:

The good news is that you are asking yourself the right questions.

The bad news is it can be difficult to find the correct answer.

This is what’s called information overload.

Too much of anything can be bad for you, including information.

We have seen this leave many business owners frustrated, irritated and discouraged.

This results in content written out of confusion and ultimately leads to your articles being buried in an endless sea of search results.

Need help with an SEO strategy that actually produces results? Talk to our team about your specific needs

Luckily, we’ve come up with a super simple way of writing SEO articles in just four easy steps, so not only can your target customer find you but so you can stop feeling overwhelmed by the task at-hand every time you want to write a new piece of content!

How To Write SEO Friendly Articles – In Just Four Easy Steps

Come Up With Amazing Topic Ideas

It’s not difficult to come up with topic ideas that are spot on with what information your audience wants from you IF you know exactly the type of customer you serve.

This isn’t to say that it still won’t be a bit difficult at times brainstorming different content topic ideas. Maybe you’re having trouble coming up with ideas on your own. This is where content ideation tools come into play and can get you off to a great start.

Let’s talk about two awesome tools you can start using today and how exactly to use them to start planning some great content your audience will drool over.

Buzzsumo is an amazing research tool that allows you to quickly and effectively come up with content ideas that you KNOW has previously gained a lot of interaction in the form of backlinks, comments and social shares.

Start by coming up with a term or seed idea that describes what product or service your company offers.

Next, take a look at the search results and analyze what content has the most engagement around the particular topic you searched.

This can help you come up with a great topic that has been proven to be a social magnet to your target audience.

Ahrefs is another super useful tool that makes it easy to find what topics are being shared and engaged with in your niche.

Begin with selecting the “Content Explorer” tab at the top of the dashboard and typing in a product or service that your company offers, just like what we did with Buzzsumo.

After the search results have populated, take a look through and see which content is being engaged with and aligns with your business the most.

Between these two tools, you should have some initial ideas on what type of content is viral in your industry and potentially what types of articles your potential clients are out there searching for, which leads us into your next step.

Conduct Effective Keyword Research

Now that you have a general idea of what type of articles best resonate with you audience, now it’s time to use that information and find the exact phrases that users are searching for.

3.5 billion searches are made every single day on Google. (Internet Live Stats)

You can bet that your customers are online searching for solutions to their problems.

So you need to make sure that when your potential customer clicks that “search” button, that

you are there, front and center, to answer their questions.

Here are three tools you can use to come up with dozens of keyword ideas that are being searched each and every month by your audience.

SEMRUSH is one of the best content marketing tools available. One of their most popular features is the keyword tool.

Remember those topic ideas you found during step one? Grab one of those phrases and place them into SEMRUSH.

A quick way to find out exactly what specific questions your target customer is asking is by looking at the “questions” section.

Next step is to analyze the competitiveness of each keyword. Our goal (especially if you have a newer blog) is to go after what we call “the low-hanging fruit”. This means targeting keywords that are easy to rank.

A study conducted by Smart Insights showed that Google’s organic results that contain 3-4 words in the title results in a higher CTR than organic results with 1-2 words.

Pro Tip: Focus on keywords that have 4 or more words in them. Usually the longer the phrase, the lower the competition. More specific terms can also result in a higher ROI.

To make sure you are targeting long-tail phrases, choose “advanced filters” and set the “word count” to a minimum of four words and press “apply filters”.

After you have your list of results, take each keyword and conduct a google search. The main metric you want to place your focus would be the DA (Domain Authority). If you are a newer blog, look for websites with a DA under 50.

To get a quick glance at the DA, you can use a free toolbar provided by Ahrefs.

Side Note: The domain authority in the Ahrefs bar is displayed as “DR” (Domain Rating).

After some keyword research, we came up with the keyword “ how web design impacts content marketing” and these were the results.

We have 3 of the top 10 results that fit our criteria of a DR under 50, so this would be a great topic to produce content around. While you may not rank in a week, eventually over the course of a few months you will start to naturally move up the serps and capture highly-targeted organic search traffic.

For keyword research and topic ideas, SEMRUSH is an excellent tool.

Sometimes our most useful tools are hiding in plain sight.

According to NetMarketShare, 80% of all internet users are using Google as their search engine.

While other keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMRUSH have highly accurate data, why not use the search engine that you’re trying to rank in, to get data from?

Google’s data is real-time data from actual humans.

Google also keeps a record of what is most often searched by others, that’s why when you type phrases into the search bar you’ll start to see other search terms appear, based on what others have previously searched, this is called Google Auto Suggest.

When using Google to come up with keyword ideas, it may require a little more brainstorming than using a keyword tool but using these modifiers can help get you off to a good start:

Once you jot down some potential long-tail keywords (keywords containing 3 or more words) now it’s time to do another Google search to see if at least 3 of the top 10 results have a DA under 50.

If so, you know you have a chance to rank for that keyword and you should prepare to write content on that topic.

Honorable Mention: We’ve decided to name Ahrefs as an honorable mention because of how great their keyword tool is. This in-depth keyword research guide written by Ahrefs themselves will get you off to a great start finding search terms for your business.

Begin Outlining Your Content

Okay, you’ve done some keyword research and you’ve got some pretty solid topics to begin producing content around, now it’s time to begin your outline.

You want to start by focusing on what is called your focus keyword.

Your focus keyword is the keyword that you’re going to be producing content around and is

the main topic of your article. This keyword should appear in a few places in your article

and those places are:

Let’s do a deeper dive into each of these points.

META TITLE

A meta title is a title that lets Google know exactly what your page is about and when it comes to SEO, it holds a lot of weight.

Placing your focus keyword here will tell Google this specific web page is about this specific

META DESCRIPTION

A meta description is a brief description summarizing what a specific article is talking about.

When crafting a good meta description, it’s not only good to place the keyword in it but also pique the reader’s interest by asking a question or placing a statistic in the description.

The H1 is the actual title of your page. This is different from the meta title because the H1 is actually a part of your article, where the meta title is not. If we take a look at this site, we can see that the title of their page is wrapped in an H1 html tag.

A permalink is another word for the url of your web page. Make sure to include your keyword in the url. The shorter the url, the better.

INCLUDING THE KEYWORD ONCE OR TWICE IN THE ARTICLE

This is the last step in making sure your web page is optimized. Including your focus keyword in the article just a few times is enough for Google to understand what the page is about.

The keyword should be placed naturally throughout the content and never “forced” into a sentence if it doesn’t make sense. This is what’s known as “keyword stuffing” and can actually have a negative effect on your SEO.

SECONDARY KEYWORDS

Secondary keywords are other keywords related to your focus keyword that helps Google further understand what topic your content is talking about.

Finding these keywords are as easy as just doing a Google search, scrolling to the bottom of the search results and copying the keywords from the “searches related to” section.

Using these keywords throughout the content and in your H2’s, will not only help Google with assessing what your page is about it’ll also help you rank for more keywords, which means more opportunities for your potential customers to find your content.

Publish Your Content

Finally, after all the work you’ve put in with your topic research, keyword research, your on-page SEO and outlining your content, you’re finally at the final step, publishing your content.

Before you hit that “publish” button on your post you want to make sure that you have a way to spread the word about your new piece of content.

Sharing your post on social media is a quick and easy way to get new eyeballs on your content. To make sharing your content easier, you can use a tool like Zapier.

Also, having a content publication schedule can give you great gains in your content marketing.

A 2019 study showed that search traffic made up 65% of total ecommerce sessions and 33% of that was generated through organic search while 32% was generated through paid traffic.

This does mean being consistent with when you publish new content. The more consistent you

Are the better your results will compound over time.

If you have an existing email list, let them know about your new piece of content. This is a great way to jump start the traffic to your article, which will send early signals to Google that people are interested in your content.

How To Move Forward Now That You Know How To Write SEO Articles in Four Easy Steps

There you have it.

You’ve got the basics down and now you’re ready to begin your content marketing strategy.

If you’re not using blogging as a strategy to increase your leads and sales through search engine traffic, you’re potentially losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

Now that you know how to effectively write SEO articles are you going to continue to accept the fact that your business may be losing money? Or are you going to take control of your organic marketing and increase your business’s revenue starting now?

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