7 Content Writing Tips Every Writer Needs To Know

You have a lot of responsibility as a content writer for brands that you write for. You have to accurately reflect the brand's voice, personality, and value proposition through the content that you create. Content is what engages audiences during the buyer journey. You are responsible for helping them connect with potential customers.

These content writing tips can be used in any industry or niche and for any company. These tips will help you to gain:

• Google result pages have higher visibility and ranking.
• Improved engagement with readers
• Optimized writing processes to simplify your work

Let's get started!

Quick Take-Aways

• SEO is key to making content searchable on search engines and generating organic web traffic.

• Headlines should grab attention and create urgency for readers to read your content. They also need to promise value that your content will deliver.

• Clear, concise content is the best. It doesn't contain any fluff.

• Writers need to take the time to learn about their niche through reading both their clients' content and those of their competitors.

• Visual content is more popular than text-only content.

• Always write content for people first. To recognize human value, search engine crawlers use AI.

7 Content writing tips that every writer should know

Your SEO needs

Without search engine optimization, your content will not perform. SEO is the way you get organic web traffic via search engines. If you want your content seen by the target audience, SEO is essential. 93% of internet users won't go beyond the first page of Google search results.

Source: Image Source

What is SEO?

It is actually a combination or a series of techniques that attract the attention of search engines to help them find, crawl and rank your content.

These are some of the most common SEO strategies:

• Keywords are the words and phrases that describe what your content is all about.
• Link building – Earned links from other websites that are highly regarded back to your site
• Metadata – HTML elements such as titles, tags and alt-text that tell search engines about your content.
• Image optimization – Aligning image properties (size, alt-text etc.) with SEO standards
• Long-form content is a longer form of content (typically 1500 to 2000+ words) which establishes authority in search engines.
• Mobile optimization – Optimizing content for mobile viewing
• Featured Ssnippets – Create content to be featured at the top of Google SERPs

SEO is essential to content marketing success. Smart companies have created a comprehensive SEO strategy to optimize their strategies and maximize their content marketing ROI. It's a smart idea for writers to learn about each client's SEO strategy in order to ensure that your content matches it.

Make sure you nail your headlines

Did you know that your impression is only 10 seconds. Your headline should draw your readers in (AKA get them clicking) and show the value that they will get from your content. Otherwise, they are likely to move on to other sites.

Think about the value of your headlines when you are writing them. Which problem does it solve for your readers? What is its topic? What must-have information is it covering? You might find it helpful to finish your headlines after writing your content to get a better understanding of these questions.

Google displays only 60 characters of your headline. Limit them to 6-10 words and place your most important words at the start.

To make sure that your headlines tick all the important boxes, you can also use the cheat sheet below:

• To evoke emotion and grab attention, use trigger words
• People will feel compelled to read your content if you convey urgency.
• Promise what you will deliver with your content (and then follow up).

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Image Source

Be concise

Although it can be tempting to boast about your vocabulary skills as a writer, the truth is that fancy words or extra fluff can have a negative effect on content performance. Nielson's well-cited research found that web users only read 20% of any webpage's text.

Yikes!

There is a clear solution to this problem. It's to always get straight to the point.

A user clicking on your content is usually to solve a problem, or answer a question. They are only interested in the core ideas and don't want anything beyond that. You don't have to write in your own voice or style. However, you must make sure your content adds value.

Learn about your niches

A long-standing debate in content marketing centers on whether writers must have a niche to succeed. It's somewhere in the middle, I think. While you don't necessarily need to be a specialist in one niche, you should not make too many connections so that you aren't lacking knowledge about the industries and topics you write about.

It is easy to get up-to-speed in any niche these days. It is a good idea to begin with the existing content of your client, then compare it with their competitors. Once you have an idea of the key topics and keywords within your niche, search Google to find the top-ranking articles.

After you have a solid foundation, you need to keep up-to-date. You can:

• Sign up for newsletters and email communications from top brands
• Find out the latest industry news and events
• Register for webinars and online events on important topics

Visuals can help you support your text

Visuals can give your content a major boost in performance. Visuals are becoming more important if your content is to be competitive. Cisco research shows that video content will make up 82% of web traffic by the year's end. Blog articles with images are 94% more popular than those without.

Not to mention the fact that people retain 80% of what is seen, whereas they remember 10% of what it hears and 20% of what it reads.

Source: Image Source

Your content can be visualized in a few key ways:

• Highlight key data points and takeaways
• Visually present complex information for easier understanding (infographics are an excellent example).
• Make long-form content or heavy text easier to digest

The common misconception about visual content is that professional designers are required to create it. This is true in certain cases, such as a branded infographic. However, there are many other options to source images from trusted sources (as we did in this article), or create them yourself using user-friendly apps such Canva.

First, write for people

Every content writer should maintain a certain balance. They need to optimize for search engines, but also write for people first.

This is right: Write for people first, not search engines and algorithms.

Search engines are smarter than ever and won't look for content that uses keyword stuffing or other SEO shortcuts. They'll actually penalize you for using them.

The search engines use AI to determine which content is truly valuable for their human readers. This content earns them the highest rankings. The best strategy for a writer is to first focus on authenticity and relevancy, then consider supporting SEO tactics.

Find inspiration

You don't have to stop reading just because you are a writer. To find inspiration for your content, you should read! You will have more ideas to create great content if you give your content engine more. Keep up with the latest news and blogs on your topic, as well as social media accounts.

Great writers can help you power your content

Marketing Insider Group's SEO writers and SEO experts can provide optimized content that you can publish every week for a year or more. ).

To learn more, visit our SEO Blog Writing Service or to schedule a quick 15-minute consultation with me.