For one, you need a deep understanding of the user’s search intention and what they should expect to find once they land on your website.

In this guide, our search marketing experts are going to answer how to write content that is optimized for search and that users love.

What does it mean to “write with SEO intent”?

Creating content with SEO in mind is all about crafting compelling content with the goal of having that content rank on the first page of search engines such as Google.

In order to accomplish this, focus on these three things:

1. Know the search intent of searchers
2. Provide the best answer for the query
3. Present the answer in an easy to understand format

While there are other on-page SEO elements you should know about, we’ll first start off with why you should even care about writing content with SEO intent.

Why Is SEO Writing Important?

As an added bonus, once you are at the top of search engines, your website will be receiving free, high quality traffic on a recurring basis.

With the ever increasing costs of advertising and the decreasing engagement on social media, having a well-optimized website that does well on organic search results becomes more important to do well in the digital landscape.

Google’s Bert & Why It’s Good For You

When Google’s BERT algorithm update was announced, our SEO content writers were nonetheless ecstatic. 

This update strengthened the importance of search intent, user experience, and the context of keyword usage.

What does this mean?

The update on the algorithm meant that there was less reliance needed on exact match keyword usage and more emphasis on high-quality content that was more suited to what searchers wanted to find on a particular query. 

Researching Search Engines for Your Keywords

A great way to understand the intent of searches by your audience is by simply going to a search engine, typing in your keyword, and seeing what pops up. Here you’d want to:

1. Know what keywords are being used by your audience
2. Figure out how to use these keywords naturally in your content

Consider Search Intent & Goals

By utilizing this strategy, you’ll be able to appropriately include contextual cues that provide value without the need of stuffing the content with primary keywords.

To illustrate this message, think about searching for the term “vanilla cake”. More often than not, the search engine results will show where to buy “vanilla cake” rather than showing you “recipes for making vanilla cake”.

With the goal of the query in mind you can then optimize your website content focused more on purchase decisions rather than writing a blog about how to make vanilla cake.

If you optimize your content with the goal of the queries better than your competitors, you can expect to outperform them in the SERPs.

Hopefully by now you see the importance of writing relevant, contextual content for your primary keywords. With our SEO content writing team, you can rest assured we analyze the intent of your keyword queries and craft content that users and search engines love.

Analyze Your Competitors

As stated before, a great way to know the intent of your users is to look up the keywords you want to rank for and see what your competitors are doing.

Google is already ranking pages based on search relevance. If for example most of the pages are about recipes, it is a safe bet that searchers are expecting to see results on recipes rather than a transactional result.

Evaluate the content and try to ask yourself:

• What value does this content provide?
• What is the content helping the readers accomplish?
• Can I provide more value than this?

Most likely you will find that the top pages utilize their target keywords in a natural way while also optimizing other SEO elements. Ultimately, this helps Google and other search engines tie the relevance of the content to the searcher’s needs.

Create An Article Outline

Important SEO details, such as finding the questions that are being asked by users, are performed in this outlining process.

Another key part is developing the headings, goals, and the approach your article is going to have.

Writing Your Draft

Why?

A draft enables us to refine our ideas and to get the adequate amount of research done. Furthermore, it also allows you to revise as you please without the headache of changing countless things if you publish without drafting first.

Our SEO writing team always writes out their drafts on Google Docs. This is a great tool for everyone on the team. From the designers to the editors, Google Docs allows us to communicate and make improvements synchronously.

The draft is a great way to flush out all of your ideas onto paper without worrying about the proper formatting or making the words flow perfectly. The goal is just to get the content onto the page.

Revising Your Draft

If you have the chance to have a team member or an employee read over your draft, take their suggestions into consideration.

Implement Your SEO Elements

As I mentioned before, optimizing on-page SEO elements is a key benefactor. Some elements include:

• Title tag
• Meta description
• URL slug
• Page or post categorization
• Image alt text
• And more

Every page on your website needs to have these elements optimized when creating content with SEO intent. Personally, I utilize WordPress and optimize many of these things on the free Yoast SEO plugin.

Publishing & Internally Linking

After publishing your post, revise it and internally link from other pages on your site to the new article in order for search engines to crawl and index it.

A great way to find out where there are internal link opportunities is to go to Google and type “site:yoursitehere.com ( related keyword)”.

Find the pages that are the most relevant and find places where you can link to your new article.

As long as you are writing your content with user intent and have search engines on the back of your mind, you should be able to write content with SEO intent that is rewarded by search engines.