SEO Writing 2024: How to Craft Content That Ranks High

First, a confession: I’ve been in SEO content services for 10+ years.

I’m that dinosaur remembering days when writing for SEO was about nothing but placing a target keyword throughout a text. The number of backlinks was more critical than their relevancy and quality to rank high.

I wrote 500-800 words long mediocre texts, following the particular instructions:

1. Use a target keyword in titles and descriptions.
2. Mention it in the first sentence.
3. Write it in H2 and H3.
4. Place it three times in the text.
5. Mention a target keyword in the last sentence.

Voila! Your text is in SERPs! Context, LSI, search intent, E-E-A-T, content usability, original writings — we didn’t know (or didn’t care) about such details when doing our SEO writing jobs. Gone are those days. Finally!

Today, SEO writing is about crafting top-notch content. Yes, it’s still keyword-optimized; but the approach to choosing and placing keywords has changed, and content writers go far beyond keywords to design assets.

In this article, I’ll reveal the behind-the-scenes of writing for search engines in 2024. You’ll get practical tips on structuring and optimizing content for better visibility and higher rankings in search engines.

(Tip: It’s a long read, so why not take a cup of coffee, tea, or wine — whatever’s your favorite?)

Table of Contents:

1. What is SEO writing?
2. Why SEO writing is crucial today
3. How to structure and optimize content right
   1. Consider search intent
   2. Target the right keywords
   3. Always add LSI keywords
   4. Craft emotional titles
   5. Optimize meta title and description
   6. Pay attention to content structure
   7. Use short URLs
   8. Remember about image SEO
   9. Update old content regularly
4. Takeaways

What is SEO Writing?

SEO writing is the practice of creating well-optimized content Google will understand and searchers will want to read, link to, and share.

The goal is to craft a text that will be relevant to search queries and provide comprehensive info for Google to see if it’s worth ranking higher.

Search Engine Optimization writing includes research, writing ideas generation, content planning, drafting, and optimizing content to make it more visible online, drive traffic, engage the target audience, and convince them to take the desired action.

When done right, such content turns your website into a powerful business asset:

• You’ll increase visibility on the web.
• You’ll become a helpful resource for visitors and potential customers.
• You’ll build authority, trust, and influence in your niche.

Stellar SEO writing is about targeting a specific audience, so it can also prevent “lazy surfers” (those not interested in your offers) from visiting your website. Behavioral factors that influence your overall rankings won’t suffer:

You get engaged and motivated visitors interested in your expertise and ready to follow you.

Why SEO Writing is Crucial Today

• Better visibility:

Numbers speak volumes: More than half of all clicks come from the top three positions in SERPs. So the higher your page ranks, the more people will see and visit it, becoming your loyal subscribers and, in the long term, customers.

For Google to place your page high, content quality matters but is not enough: Its optimization needs to be legit, and that’s what SEO writers arrange.

• More backlinks:

High-quality SEO writing is about high dwell time, lower bounce rate, and lots of comments and social shares. It satisfies users’ search intent, thus providing social validation and motivating the audience to backlink to it.

In 2024, backlinks are still critical for your website’s position in SERPs. But now, they are more about quality than numbers: 

Comprehensive content with stellar optimization can flourish backlinks from authoritative websites in your niche. It will signal to Google that your page is relevant and trustworthy.

• Higher rankings:

SEO writing is about the strategic use of keywords to meet the STA (Search Task Accomplishment) factor:

Searcher task accomplishment is the idea that search results should be determined by the objectives of the user performing the search, and the satisfaction the user experiences when they receive those results.

— Oneupweb

In other words, SEO writers (or, let’s call them SEO content services) optimize your content so it would have a purpose and solve a searcher’s specific problem for Google to see it as the most relevant one to rank high.

How to Structure and Optimize Content Right

And now, to practice:

When building texts for better visibility and search engine rankings, an SEO blog content writer does the following:

Consider Search Intent

With hundreds of factors and algorithms Google uses to estimate your page, it’s impossible to predict what can help you rank for particular keywords. But Google gives clear guidelines on what it will see as high-quality content:

It’s E-A-T.

Not a traditional ranking factor, it still guides the best SEO writers on content optimization to influence page quality:

• Content needs to come from expert sources
• Optimization for semantic search
• It’s valuable for users

In 2023-2024, E-A-T turns into E-E-A-T, with the second “E” meaning “experience.” In plain English, now Google praises the content by authors with experience in what they write about.

Based on how users interact with your page, Google decides if it wants to award high rankings to your content. For users to interact with your page positively, your content should match their search intent.

Search intent is the reason behind a user’s query.

What do they expect to see in SERPs after typing a particular search term? Are they looking for general research (informational intent) or comparison (navigational intent)? Or, maybe they want to purchase or get support after purchasing (transactional and commercial intents)?

How does Google see if your page meets search intent?

Dwell time and bounce rate! 

If a user clicks and spends a few minutes on your page, algorithms will see it as a match, valuable enough, and worth ranking higher. So, all an SEO article writing service needs to do is optimize content for users to find what they are looking for.

How to find a search intent behind particular keywords?

• Consider indicators for search intent types. For example, “what is” and “how to” signal informational intent, while “sign up,” “buy,” or “register” are about transactional intent.
• Check your keyword in SERPs to see what content types prevail there and structure your SEO text accordingly.
• Go to the “People Also Ask” section: Key phrases there will help you get the intent.

Target the Right Keywords

SEO wouldn’t survive without keywords: They are hooks for search engines to understand your content and rank it accordingly.

Another thing is that the approach to choosing and placing keywords in content has drastically changed in the last couple of years.

In 2011, I used product-defining and short-term keywords to place in content or use as anchors for backlinks. They were enough for Google to place such assets high.

In 2024, engines implement semantic search factors to understand a query and the intent behind it: user context, natural language processing, query stream context, and entity recognition. So besides the core keyword that you plan your page to rank for, include the following types of keywords in your text:

• User-generated: Long tail keywords matching the queries users type when looking for answers to their questions. Sometimes they differ from those you see in keyword research tools, so it’s better to check Q&A websites or topical forums to identify them.
• Vertical: These are keywords coming from niches closely related to yours. They can help you attract a broader audience. Sean Si nails it and describes vertical keywords’ nature best.
• Niche: LSI keywords, those conceptually related to your target keyword. They allow search engines to understand the context of your page better. (More on them below.)

Always Add LSI Keywords

Google is AI-powered today, so it doesn’t care about the number of specific keywords you place in a text. Its close attention is to LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) now:

LSI keywords are synonyms and closely related terms you add to texts for search engines to understand the context and topic.

For example, you write SEO content about cars. How will Google understand whether you speak about a vehicle, a band, or a movie? LSI keywords like “movie,” “Pixar,” “film,” and other related terms will help get the context and provide searchers with a relevant result to their query.

Specific tools like LSI Graph can help you find related keywords for your content piece. Or, you can go to Google’s “Searches related to” section and consider terms from there: They come straight from the search engine, so they’ll be a perfect fit.

Craft Emotional Titles

SEO content writing services for beginners or free SEO writing companies would provide you with the only rule for crafting titles: Include a target keyword. Yes, it’s perfect for search engines to see your content, but what about searchers?

A title (headline) is the first thing people see in search results. Like it or not, it determines whether they click and read your SEO copy. Even if your article is super cool and fully optimized, a poor headline will destroy its chances for success.

Remember David Ogilvy? This advertising guru nailed it long ago:

Only two out of ten people will read your SEO text; the other eight will stop at the headline. Plus, people tend to absorb the first three words and the last three words of a headline, so do your best to build them accordingly.

Write emotional headlines, hooking readers and motivating them to click. Kevan Lee from Buffer explained the psychology behind clickable headlines best, providing 30+ formulas for SEO writing companies to use. Here are some of my favorites:

• The Ultimate Headline Formula

It’s the most common one that works for SEO: Numbers + Adjective + Target Keyword + Rationale + Promise.

The formula has all the components for a headline’s success, and you can customize it with psychological elements to trigger the audience.

• The Ultimate List/Guide to _________

This type of headline promises a comprehensive and actionable piece of content for users willing to know everything about a topic. Plus, they may refer to such content many times, thus giving you more clicks, traffic, and conversions.

• Headline + Little Extra

Highlighting a little extra in your headline works as an added value for searchers, increasing curiosity and motivating them to click and check what’s inside.

Examples:

• SEO Writing: How to Craft Content Google and Searchers Will Love
• How to Write a Killer Blog Post (+ Little Tricks Most Authors Ignore)
• 5 Alternative Ways to Build an Instagram Following (We Try #4 Today)

Remember to Optimize Meta Title and Description

This one is short yet clear for all SEO writers: 

Meta tags are still critical for search engines to see your content right. Do your best to include a target keyword in a <title> and write descriptive, informative texts in <description>.

Google itself says that well-written descriptions can bring more clicks: They “sell” content to searchers, explaining what they get and helping them understand if that’s what they are looking for.

Write a meta description for every page on your website, and ensure you make it an informative sentence rather than a bunch of related keywords separated by commas.

Pay Attention to Content Structure

I’ve nailed it in my guest article for Woorank already:

While technical SEO writing with all that tag and keyword stuff matters, it’s also critical to take content to the next level if we want it to rank higher than competitors.

Proper structure and formatting are your surefire way to hook users and hold their attention. The longer they stay on your page, the better behavioral factors (dwell time, bounce rate, etc.) search engines see to indicate your content as high-quality and worth ranking higher.

Here’s what you can do to achieve more visibility, readability, and engagement from users:

• Follow the rules of web writing. Given that online reading is 25% slower, and users read only 20-28% of your content, consider its usability for a more comfortable interaction: write short paragraphs, left-align texts, use simple text structure, utilize correct color combinations between the text and page background, etc.
• Write short introductions. Have a catchy hook to get attention, and ensure it relates to the topic. Use transitional words throughout the text to hold attention and motivate users to keep reading.
• Remember about visual content. Break down long text sheets with images, videos, infographics, and other relevant visuals.

Here are some extra tips for a content structure that will increase your chances for higher rankings:

• Optimize it for featured snippets. The benefits when your content gets featured in Google’s Position 0 include more visibility, increased traffic, and your website’s credibility boost.
• Try topic clusters. A cluster is a group of interlinked pages on your website. One page is a pillar content piece targeting a high-search-volume keyword, and others are related content pieces, each targeting a more specific keyword of a smaller search volume. When organizing SEO writing in clusters, you win more traffic and conversions from the organic search.
• Optimize content for common questions. Find those related to your content, decide which ones need answering, and optimize your text accordingly.

Use Short URLs

According to the study by Brian Dean, short URLs rank higher in Google, and URLs with a keyword get more clicks.

Why not craft your pages’ URLs accordingly? As you see, the URL of this page is /seo-writing: short and keyword-rich. 

More tips for SEO-friendly URL slugs:

• Avoid dynamically generated slugs
• Don’t put dates and numbers there (if you use a number, spell it out)
• Separate words with hyphens
• Remove stop words (the, and, or, of, a, an, to, for, etc.) from URLs
• Don’t use the same URL for several pages
• Avoid keyword stuffing; use a meaningful keyword only
• Use lowercase letters

Note: If your published URLs are already long, don’t hurry to change them, as it can cause technical SEO issues. Just ensure to apply the above tips to your future pages.

Remember About Image SEO

My guest article for SurferSEO says it all: Images can boost your SEO results, and proper image optimization is your weapon to influence a load time, bring traffic, and generate ranking opportunities like crazy.

In short:

Image SEO is a set of techniques to get your visuals crawled, indexed, and ranked high on Google Images results for driving significant traffic to your website.

Below are some practical tips on what SEO friendly content writing services can do with images for better results:

1. Create custom images.
2. Use proper names for image files.
3. Resize and compress images before publishing if necessary.
4. Use the proper formats: JPG and PNG are the most popular ones but feel free to consider WebP (for animations), GIF, and SVG (for logos and icons) as well.
5. Consider SEO-friendly alt-texts.
6. Place images near the most relevant passage in your text.
7. Create an image sitemap on your website.
8. Add structured data for search engines to understand your website better.

Update Old SEO Content Regularly

Not only does it help you build website trust and loyalty, but it can get you more backlinks:

Other websites are ready to share relevant and up-to-date assets with their audience. By updating your old SEO content, you can save time on new content creation but continue to benefit from what already worked well.

What content to update?

The one still generating some organic traffic and relevant to your content strategy:

• Pages with high traffic and low conversions.
• Pages with low traffic and high-quality backlinks.
• Pages that are no longer popular, have high-quality backlinks, and declining search rankings.

How to update old SEO writings?

1. Recheck your target keyword. Is its search volume still relevant? Optimize accordingly and include any new, closely related keywords.
2. Update the title: Do your best to make it more clickable.
3. Check all the data, visuals, and backlinks: Are they still relevant? Update if necessary.
4. Add some internal links if you’ve got any.
5. Update meta tags and alt texts as needed.
6. Improve the content: check the formatting, rewrite the introduction for better engagement, update your call to action, add new information and expert quotes, etc.
7. Update the publishing date to improve its CTR. (Users are more likely to click on recently published articles.)

Do You Have Anything to Add Here?

So, here goes a recap! For stellar SEO writing that pleases search engines and attracts users, the following strategies come:

• Consider search intent
• Target the right keywords
• Always add LSI keywords
• Craft emotional titles
• Optimize meta title and description
• Pay attention to content structure
• Use short URLs
• Remember about image SEO
• Update old content regularly

If I’ve missed something or you disagree with any of the above, please don’t hesitate to share your insights in the comments. Or, ask me for SEO blog writing services to be your assistant in content creation. 🙂