Avoid these 6 SEO writing mistakes if you want to grow your website traffic. Easy guide for beginners below.
Why should I learn SEO Writing?
SEO content is just like any other content, right? Nope.
Writing Search-Engine-Optimized (SEO) content is more focused on data, choosing the right keywords and formats so your artciles can attract more trffic from Google or Bing search engines.
So why do you need to write SEO-optimized content?
Reason #1: You can attract more people to your business with SEO content
SEO Writing is known to have many benefits for brands who want to use an inbound marketing strategy. Blog post are usually considered top-funnel pieces of content that together with social media posts can ATTRACT new visitors and increase organic traffic to a website. This means that if you’re investing in SEO writing your brand can get more eyes your website and have your offer seen by many more people.
Reason #2: SEO content helps customers find you on Google
But that’s not all. People who spend time to research keywords and optimize their blog posts, can appear on Page #1 in Google search – which is the best place for any business to be in order to attract customers who are looking for a solution.
But if you’ve tried writing SEO blog posts, you’ll know that it’s usually not an instant success. In fact, for most people it takes about 6 months to get their optimized articles on Google page 1 and enjoy the maximum exposure.
Now let’s talk about some mistakes you may be making when writing blog posts. Hopefully, once you’re aware you will be able to avoid them.
Top 6 SEO Writing Mistakes That Are Stopping You From Growing
As someone who’s written SEO articles for B2B and SaaS brands for over 5 years, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes. But, eventually, I’ve learned some tricks that can help you write articles that are optimized for ranking on Google.
So, in this post, I want to share with you 6 common blog writing mistakes that can be stopping you from growing your traffic. Let’s get started!
Mistake #1: Not doing proper keyword research
I have done this mistake many times. And believe me when I say, even the best writers need to do research before writing a blog post. You can’t just plug topics from the air and expect them to just bring you traffic.
For example: “I wrote 100s of articles on Instagram marketing, so I could say I’m somewhat an expert in this topic, right?” Wrong! 😑 With so much content being published every single day online, you need to research your keywords properly to make sure they’re:
- Trending – aka, people are showing interest in this topic
- Relevant to your business – we want to write articles that are helpful to our readers and related to our products, location or industry
- Have enough search volume – Not too much (too broad to target) and not too little (or close to zero where nobody will find it). For most new websites a good spot is: 1,000 – 10,000 searches
- Easy to compete – we want to choose keywords that are not too competitive, difficult to rank or oversaturated with content from big brands
Tip: A good keyword research tool can help you identify keywords. Suggestions: Try Ubersuggest or SEMrush.
Mistake #2: Targeting the wrong keywords
Proper keyword research can help you identify a list of keywordsand topics to write about. But that doesn’t guarantee success. If you’ve been writing content for a few months and don’t seem to improve traffic you may be choosing the wrong keywords. Usually that means you’re going after keywords that are too large, broad or competitive.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say I want to write a blog post about “content marketing”. If I choose this keyword as the main target I will find it difficult to compete because the term is already difficult to rank.
Instead, look at long-tail related keywords. Terms like “content marketing examples” is a better keyword with better chances to rank.
Mistake #3: Not posting enough NEW content
Your website is not an evergreen source of traffic. As such, you need to post new content regularly to attract more traffic. How much content to post on your blog? and how often? Here’s what I found from writing blog posts for my B2B clients:
How often to post new content on your blog:
- Minimum: 2 blog posts/month
- Better: 3-4 blog posts/month
- Best: 5 – 8 blog posts/month
*based on my Client case studies for the last 6 mo.
Mistake #4: Not repurposing your old content to social media
Besides sharing new content, you should also maximize your old posts and re-share them on social media to increase views. This is a strategy for growing blog traffic that marketing experts including Neil Patel and Gary Vaynerchuk recommend. If you follow their social media accounts you’ll see that they recycle their top-performing blog content (every 6 months) and share it on social media.
How to repurpose your old blog posts for more traffic:
- share the links on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
- create graphics for Instagram, Pinterest
- extract quotes and share them on Twitter
- update your old content with new information after 6 month
- use a plug-in that re-posts/re-shares your blog posts
Mistake #5: Not writing content that is helpful, and solves problems
When you write blog posts, do you think of the readers? 👩🏫 Who are they? What problems can they solve by reading your blog? Google loves recommending content that is helpful and answers a problem. So before you start writing, do some research to identify a few problems that people have and try to give tips and solutions to your articles.
Tip: Look at Google’s recommendations (People also search/ask) to find ideas for blog posts that are helpful to people.
Mistake #6: Not following an SEO-friendly format
SEO content is written to help your website attract more search engine traffic. Here are a few rules to follow if you want to make your blog posts more SEO-friendly:
- Organize your ideas & topics before you start writing
- Use headlines (H2, H3) to break main sections
- Use numbered lists and bullet points to make your text easier to read
- Have a logical flow from start to finish to ensure more readers finish reading your blog post
- I like to organize my blog posts into 3 sections: Introduction, Body (main points) and Conclusion
- Answer the reader’s questions in your content
- Keep your content relevant to your chosen keyword
- Link to other content (internal, external)
- Use images and other visual
Check out this post and get my FREE template for writing SEO blog posts.
Conclusion
Everybody makes mistakes when writing for SEO. But writing quality content will definitely give you good results. Sometimes you just need to practice writing more blog posts and stay up to date with the latest algorithm changes.
You have all you need to start growing your blog traffic! If you’d like to get help from a professional SEO writer, get in touch with me here.
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