Web writing is one of the pillars of organic SEO
To appear in the top search results without paying for advertising, a website must implement a natural referencing strategy. It relies on three pillars:
- Technical SEO: optimizing the site’s infrastructure to make it easier for Google’s robots to analyze.
- Link building: increasing your site’s credibility with hyperlinks from websites in the same industry and obtaining backlinks (more challenging) to boost your popularity.
- Site content: writing web content that is optimized for quality and relevance while addressing your audience’s questions and needs.
The last point is crucial for improving your website’s online visibility and, consequently, increasing organic traffic from search engine results. Creating content gives you the opportunity to convert visitors into customers.
The triptych for defining a winning editorial strategy
A good web content strategy is based on three main objectives:
- Cognitive objective: raising awareness of your brand or product and increasing its visibility.
- Affective objective: making your brand or product likable, highlighting its advantages, values, and qualities.
- Conative objective: prompting your target audience to take action, facilitating conversion, encouraging purchases, and driving active behavior.
These objectives are levers to:
- Define your editorial guidelines and find relevant topics for your audience.
- Produce valuable content for your audience.
- Create web pages where your visitors do what you desire.
You will create a virtuous circle that serves your natural referencing. Google rewards web pages that provide a positive experience for users.
How to successfully apply SEO principles to web writing
To optimize SEO with web writing, follow these five steps:
- Find the keywords used by your target audience: SEO web writing is based on the principle of “one content = one keyword.” To do this, you must know your target audience and have built your personas before your content strategy. The better you understand your audience, the better you can predict their queries and produce content to address them.
- Optimize existing content based on long-tail keywords: It’s often thought that new content must always be created. However, revising and updating existing content is very positive for search engines. This is an opportunity to enrich them with information and integrate secondary keywords to improve their ranking.
- Create high-quality and relevant content for your audience: In the era of ChatGPT, some may be tempted to produce mass-generated AI content. However, these tools can harm your site’s SEO. Google highlights sites that publish informative, useful, and engaging content. Focus on creating pages and articles that meet the needs and expectations of your target audience.
- Optimize the structure of your content and HTML tags: User experience is an essential lever to improve SEO. Therefore, structure your texts using hn tags to emphasize the titles and subheadings. Additionally, define the meta description content and ALT tags for your images.
- Monitor and analyze the SEO performance of your web writing: Monitoring your website’s performance allows you to identify areas for improvement and adjust your strategy. An editorial strategy is not set in stone; it adapts to your target audience’s reactions to better meet their expectations.
How to know if your editorial strategy serves SEO?
As mentioned earlier, monitoring and analyzing performance are key to the success of an editorial strategy. If SEO content writing contributes to the good positioning of a website, you must also measure the results of your efforts and adapt them. For this, you can monitor three indicators:
- The ranking of your content in search engines: A web analytics tool like Google Search Console allows you to track the position of your content in search results and identify the keywords used by your audience. This control also helps identify pages with strong potential for further optimization.
- Increased organic traffic (from search engines): Tools like Google Analytics 4 or Matomo allow you to monitor your traffic sources. You can track the evolution of your organic traffic: if it increases, it means your content is relevant and engaging for your audience. You can also identify which pages receive the most visits, which is valuable information about what truly interests users.
- User engagement on your site: Analyzing your audience’s behavior on your site helps determine if your content is relevant and engaging. Reviewing your web analytics tool allows you to know the time spent on pages, bounce rate, and the number of page views.
Whether you have an e-commerce or showcase website, web writing is an important lever to improve your visibility. You can also seek the assistance of a web content writer to develop a content strategy tailored to your development objectives.
