We can both agree on this: SEO is a must for webmasters willing to gain more online visibility and attract new visitors and customers to their websites. It’s the #1 instrument for driving traffic, getting higher rankings on SERPs, and achieving higher revenue from online sales.
But for SEO to work, we need… that’s right, content. Webmasters, online marketers, and business owners want to know the latest Google trends and optimize their sales content according to the principles of page ranking.
What are these principles, and how are they going to change in 2021? How to write SEO texts now, and how to analyze their quality for compliance with search engine demands?
In this article, you’ll find the answers.
What is an SEO Text?
An SEO text is that written for both users and search engine robots to allow the latter to find it, understand what it’s about, index, and rank it in SERPs accordingly. Website owners use SEO texts to let Google know their content is excellent and relevant to user search intent, so it’s worth getting top positions for users to find it fast.
For your SEO text to be of high quality, it must follow these criteria:
- Make it unique, readable, and transparent.
- Add relevant and useful information.
- Avoid keyword stuffing; consider the proper amount of keywords, including LSI, in the text itself, in the headings, and meta tags.
- Structure it according to the rules of web writing: use headings, subheadings, lists, short paragraphs, and visual elements (images, graphs, screenshots, videos, GIFs, etc.).
- All visual elements in your SEO texts need descriptions and alt-tags.
- Make sure it’s well-written, with no grammar, style, and other errors.
- Consider the length. SEO texts are about 2,000 characters on average, but their length depends on content type, topic, and publishing platform too. It stands to reason that a blog post about writing for marketing and a description of a pencil in the online store can’t be equally long.
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Top 5 Content Trends to Watch Out for in 2021:
And before diving into the details of SEO text writing, let’s see what content will be in trend next year so that we could craft our content strategies accordingly.
In 2021, do your best to focus on the following:
1) Result-oriented content
Tons of content go online every second today, and you need to stand out with yours so that both users and search engines would notice it. Users are busy; they don’t have time to spend hours reading, and their attention span is short. So why not help them get faster results?
Consider filterable list posts, like this:
Readers click the most relevant query, and it leads them to a corresponding passage. Instead of reading the whole post, they will have a chance to focus on getting their desired result faster.
2) Topic-focused content
As we know, Google’s algorithms get smarter and smarter: They don’t look at the quality of a single page now but consider the context of this page within the entire website. Google’s crawlers check the connection of a single page to other content pieces to estimate its topical authority.
To convince them of your content’s E-A-T (Expertness, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), create topic clusters. Publish a long-form pillar content covering more basic terms of your topic, and then link it to supplementary content pieces where you’ll get more specific.
Covering every topical area like this, you’ll build trust and authority, both influencing Google rankings by far.
3) Content tailored for voice search
More and more users consider virtual assistants and voice search to find answers to their questions on Google. For search engines to link them to your website, you need to optimize your texts accordingly.
When it comes to voice search, users don’t tap common keywords into Google. They use natural speech to ask questions, so make sure you incorporate long-tail keywords and common questions (entire phrases) to your content’s titles.
It would also come in handy to schema markup your content so that it would be easier for voice assistants to read.
4) Content that’s been optimized for snippets
Considering search intent, Google often presents further information within its first results page in widgets. Known as Position Zero, these widgets provide the key points of your content so that users wouldn’t have to click over to a website.
To win this position, webmasters have learned to optimize their content accordingly:
- Focus on answering long-tail keyword questions.
- Craft concise yet highly-descriptive headlines.
- Structure your content to provide users with short, clear, and step-by-step information answering their burning questions.
5) Dynamic content
Also known as adaptive content, it will gain a second wind in 2021. Dynamic content is that changes to fit a user’s search behavior, preferences, and buying habits.
For example, in marketing emails, the text and visuals will vary according to customer segmentation.
Dynamic content offers direct recommendations based on the data you have about your target audience. It perfectly matches their search intent and desires, pushing them closer to clicking and purchasing.
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How to Write SEO Texts in 2021?
No matter how stellar your writing skills are, SEO text writing always starts with a search for topics that suit your website’s semantic core. You do keyword research, choose them according to all the actual requests, and then cluster them for further use on certain pages.
Choosing keyword types:
In 2021, two things matter: 1) search intent, 2) semantic search; so your keyword types should go beyond product-defining and short-term ones. You know the importance of long-tail and common-question keywords already, but please do your best to consider alternative keyword types too:
- LSI keywords. They are words and word expressions related to your target keyword. Google needs LSI keywords to understand the topic of your content better. For example, if you plan to rank for “cold brew coffee,” make sure to include words such as “beans,” “temperature,” “cold water,” “filter,” “drinks,” etc. to your content. Tools like LSIGraph and LSIKeywords will help to identify these terms. Also, Google’s “Searches related to…” section is great for identifying relevant LSI keywords in your particular case.
- User-generated keywords. These are the words and phrases your viewers use to find what they need, and they can vary from the keywords from your search engine optimization tool. To find them, go to topical forums and Q&A websites.
- Vertical keywords. These keywords are terms from other niches, which are still closely related to yours and clearly connected to your audience. For example, if you write content for a scuba diving company, keywords like “surfing,” “underwater photo,” or “water sports” can be your vertical keywords to consider.
- Exclusive keywords. These are brand names and lexical items helping Google associate your content with the niche. Let’s take the “smart blogger” keyword by way of example: It’s clear that it’s about Jon Morrow with his like-named website. Or, it’s Brian Dean with his website Backlinko who comes to mind when you see the “skyscraper technique” expression.
Considering content types:
Your SEO text will differ depending on your keyword’s intent (to compare, to teach, to inform, to buy, etc.) and content type you’re going to create. So, if you write an SEO text for different types of content, the following points can guide you.
1) Online store landing pages
Aim at describing what product is there and use all volume keywords. Split the content into several structural blocks, use relevant subtitles for each, add lists or tables if appropriate, and add a few images.
Even if a user doesn’t read the whole text on such pages, you need it for search bots to determine what keywords to rank them for. Therefore, the wise use of relevant keywords will significantly increase the chances of ranking high and getting ahead of competitors.
2) Service website landing pages
Aim at describing an offered service, specifying its benefits for users. An SEO text at such pages serves as a complementary element influencing conversion. We call these texts sales content, and they require special attention and work.
If you prepare a standard informative text or canvas with keywords for a service website, it will turn into a so-called “blind spot” for readers. They won’t pay attention to this content, scrolling the page in the hope of finding what they need, and leave it disappointingly.
Prevent this by structuring an SEO text right:
- Grab attention with a headline.
- Add an informative subheading.
- Choose a hero image that would demonstrate to visitors that they’ll benefit from your service.
- Make an offer, addressing the audience’s pain points.
- Provide an added value.
- Tell them how to contact you.
- Add a clear call to action.
3) Informative resources
Aim at in-depth communicating a particular event or news to the audience. Keywords are important here too, but the value of the text itself is what matters most. If the content brings nothing but keywords stuffing, users will hardly enjoy reading it and share it on social media.
Search engines measure how users interact with the content too. So, the more prolonged interaction and the more viral your content goes, the more relevant and engaging it seems to Google.
4) Blog posts
Aim at covering your topic inside out. Ensure to generate in-depth content assets, relevant, and up-to-date. Include research, case studies, visuals, related insights, and expert feedback to your blog posts to cover the topic. And structure SEO texts for better readability and usability to engage users and please search engine algorithms.
Optimizing your text for SEO:
Craft short URLs, with a keyword for every single page. (As we know, short URLs get better rankings because they are concise and clear, getting more clicks.)
Use target keywords in title, description, at least one subtitle, and your content’s first 100 words. Add tag modifiers to your SEO titles for readers to understand what’s in the text. (Just look at the title of this article: The modifiers here are “2021” and “SEO.”)
Add links to other relevant pages of your website and mention several outbound links to your niche websites.
Remember about alt-tags for your visual content; add keywords there too.
Structure your SEO texts with content usability in mind:
- Use hooks in intros.
- Avoid blunders.
- Write with short sentences and paragraphs.
- Add H2 and H3 subheads.
- Consider numbered and bullet lists.
- Add a call to action to the conclusion.
Use concept visuals: your brand images, original infographics, tables, statistics — they are easy to embed into content, so readers will use and share them on their websites, with a backlink to you.
Make sure your text is unique. Always use SEO duplicate content checkers to avoid duplications and plagiarism in your content. Otherwise, you’ll risk getting banned by Google.
Update old texts regularly. Please focus on content assets that are still relevant to your strategy, and improve it to get more traffic as well as higher ranks wherever possible.
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Takeaways
SEO texts in 2021 will be topic- and result-focused, meeting search- and user intent, and optimized for both people and search engines to find them. But no matter what, keywords will remain the primary factor for efficient SEO as they help Google understand your content topics and rank you accordingly.
In 2021, focus on a semantic search together with search intent. Write your texts for humans, but still enter the meta-tags and structure your content so that Google crawlers could index it. Don’t limit yourself to one keyword type and avoid keyword stuffing.
And keep your texts updated as they need to contain relevant information for search engines to rank them higher. If required, consult the specialists of SEO and content services so they would help to find and overcome the critical issues for a positive effect on your site’s performance.
This article is written by Lesley Vos. Lesley is a professional copywriter and guest contributor, currently blogging at Bid4Papers. Specializing in data research, web text writing, and content promotion, she is in love with words, non-fiction literature, and jazz. Follow her: Twitter | LinkedIn.
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
