Why it is important to write for your customers, not for SEO

Search engine ranking depends on two main elements – optimization and content quality. Unfortunately, most marketers neglect the latter and pay attention only to the keyword density. This makes their posts too boring and technical, which eventually deteriorates webpage ranking.

If you want to win over new customers and grow business in the long run, you need to focus on high-quality content creation. In this article, we will show you 9 reasons why it is important to write for your customers and not for SEO.

9 SEO Mistakes to Avoid in Content Writing

There are many positive effects of SEO writing but there are also a lot of negative sides of the optimization-only approach. That’s why we are going to explain to you 9 techniques to stop thinking exclusively about optimization and start writing for your consumers.

• Know your audience
  

  Appealing content always focuses on real people and their problems or needs. This is exactly where SEO writers usually fall behind – they put too much emphasis on keywords and headline tags, thus forgetting to create text that fits the interest of target audiences. Therefore, you need to analyze and understand an average customer before you even begin with content creation.

• Take your time
  

  SEO writers are always under pressure as they need to deliver a lot of articles in a limited amount of time. Of course, it reduces content quality and chases away followers after a while. Try to avoid this mistake by writing fewer high-quality blog posts. Excellent writing will only boost your digital reputation and improve search engine ranking, consequently.

• Write longer posts
  

  When you concentrate on SEO instead of creativity, you start writing mechanically and do it only to reach the certain word count. On average, contemporary blog posts can go anywhere between 500 and 1,500 words. But if you really want to influence customers, you should sometimes go beyond that and write longer and more thorough articles. A study proved that more than 60% of followers completed their purchases after reading recommendations on a blog. It clearly suggests that you should focus more on quality and make outstanding content to convince buyers that your products or services are relevant.

• Mind the style
  

  With SEO on your mind, you can hardly ever build your own style of writing. You must disperse keywords and targeted phrases throughout the post which makes the sentences look artificial. For instance, let’s say that you want to write a 1,500-word post and the main keyword is ‘psychological trigger’. Keeping the keyword density below 2% would still give you some 20 to 25 mentions of ‘psychological trigger’ in your article, which is extremely awkward. The point is that SEO usually stops authors from writing freely and concisely, so you might start thinking about your style more than keywords.

• Stay unique
  

  According to content specialists at the best paper writing services, SEO has been ruining digital creativity in the last few years. Today, almost all blog posts look the same and it’s hard to find a single author who really stands out from his/her competitors. In such circumstances, your only chance to make an impact is to stay unique and find a new angle while writing about old themes.

  For instance, a lot of bloggers write about their reasons to start writing. What you could do in this case is to change the perspective and say: “10 reasons why I did NOT start writing a blog”. Users will know that your topic is pretty much the same as others but they will also understand that your writing is more interesting.

• Reveal your personality
  

  Content consumers don’t want to read boring data-driven posts, which is often the case with SEO writing. Instead, they want you to expose your human side and reveal your personality. It’s alright to present a few statistical information to support your main idea but doesn’t burden customers with it too much. Just show them who you really are.

• Solve their problems
  

  You can be the best writer ever but you can’t deserve high search ranking in case nobody cares about your topics. Optimization is nice but it won’t help you if you don’t answer users’ questions and don’t solve their problems in your posts. Therefore, you should not write about email marketing in general – you should write about 5 ways to increase email open rate by 24%.

• Write consistently
  

  We already mentioned that you should focus on quality, not quantity. But you still need to establish your own routine and get customers used to reading your posts periodically. Almost 40% of marketers publish content at least once a week, which is something that you should do as well. One week is more than enough to prepare and create content that satisfies both the demands of optimization and quality.

• Use synonyms
  

  Our last advice is to avoid using your main keyword too many times. If you really have to focus more on SEO, then you should also consider all other keywords and synonyms which could be relevant to your post. This way, you will respect the rules of SEO but you will also create a more versatile article.

Conclusion

Content marketing doesn’t target some sort of generic mass. The goal of content creation is to address real people, meaning that you should focus both on SEO and the quality of posts. In this article, we explained to you what’s wrong with optimization-only writing and showed you techniques to avoid these problems. Make sure to follow our tips when writing and let us know in comments if you need additional explanations about this topic.

Author: Julie Petersen is a content writer and an editor. She writes her own blog AskPetersen where she shares her ideas about content writing.