24 SEO Content Writing Tips for Spicing Bland Blog Content

4. Have a Writing Plan

Writing random blog posts with no idea of the end goal is not good enough. Creating a simple plan makes the writing process seamless.

There should be at least 2 essential items in your writing plan:

• An outline of your content
• A list of your focus keywords

While creating your content writing plan, these are a few questions you need to answer:

• What problems will this content solve?
• What makes me different or better than the crowd?
• How many content formats will I produce from this blog post?
• What formats will they be? – Blog posts, Videos, Infographics, etc
• Where will I promote the content (Blog, Social media, Forums)
• How will I manage the content creation process?
  
  

WRITING PROCESS

5. Use a Clever Headline

Have you ever searched Google for information and skipped the first 3 blog posts?

If you did, likely, those headlines weren’t good enough.

According to David Ogilvy, the headline is a crucial element of every written content.

Even if your content is information-rich, a bland headline ensures many persons won’t read it.

Here are a few tips for writing great headlines:

• Write headlines containing numbers
• Ask thought-provoking questions
• Be direct
• State the biggest benefit
• Write headlines that spark an emotional reaction (negative or positive)
• Include a CTA, where necessary
• Be honest and authentic. Don’t use misleading clickbait. Your random visitors will not return if they feel duped.
  
  

6. Instill Curiosity from the Start

Writing a great introduction is hard work.

A clever headline might earn a click to your blog page, but an excellent introduction causes the reader to stay glued to the conclusion.

Instead of keeping the best part last, take it up the fold. Start your blog post by highlighting the main point, benefit, or fact.

Your website isn’t a literary work. You can’t keep your audience by being slow about sharing the main points.

Your readers want you to solve their problems instantly. They don’t care about reading long proses.

So, in a few words, tell them:

• Why your article is essential
• Why they should care
• How you plan to teach them

Do all of these at the beginning of your blog post.

7. Hire an Editor or Use Grammarly

You can’t be a judge in your case. But that’s what happens when you write and edit content yourself.

Having another set of eyes to edit your work is excellent if you can afford a professional editor.

If you can’t, you can use recommended editing software like Grammarly to dot your I’s and cross your T’s.

8. Avoid Passive Voice

Passive voice takes the focus away from your readers. They are also wordy and make you sound less brilliant.

If you want to create excellent content, stick to active voice.

Which of these sentences sounds better:

• This SEO case study is a detailed and illustrative 3,000-word monster.
• This SEO case study is a 3,000 words monster with details and pictures.

The first one works for me.

Active voice makes it easy to simplify your sentences. It also provides opportunities to use generous amounts of exciting and robust action verbs.

If you are not an editor, you should consider using Grammarly Premium to turn those passive words into active voices.

9. Never Plagiarize

Plagiarism does nothing good for any website.

First, users will feel duped because they have seen the same thing elsewhere. Secondly, search engines know better.

There is no way to cut corners by using article spinning software and the likes.

It’s always helpful to check your content for plagiarism with Copyscape before publishing.

This prevents you from:

• Wasting your time in publishing content that attracts a Google penalty
• Losing leads who believe you aren’t original

If someone plagiarizes your entire website, Google might also penalize you. If this happens, ensure you respond quickly to anyone stealing your web content.

10. Use Assertive Calls-to-Action (CTA)

For every content you create, there should be at least 1 CTA. It is your duty as your website’s owner to show your readers what to click.

Phrases like “Click Here, “Shop Now,” or “Sign Up” are the basics.

You can apply many more CTAs depending on what you want to achieve.

You can use an indirect CTA like “Related Posts” to encourage your readers to read the following article.

When your readers take such action, it increases their dwell time on your website. This signals to search engines that you provide valuable content; hence, your readers remain on your website to read other excellent blog posts.

CTAs are not just phrases. They can be sentences. For instance, you can get readers to comment and share their thoughts by writing, “Comment below to share your thoughts on this blog post.”

You could also ask a specific question tailored to the topic. This will keep up the engagement of your content.

11. Stick with One Brand Style

Asides from a consistent design, your brand needs a consistent writing style and language, including tone and voice.

For instance, some organizations prefer to be gender-neutral and often use “they.” Others stick with “she.”

This also extends to how you use words having two spellings. An excellent example is email.

Brands as old as the internet typically use “e-mail’. In contrast, Hubspot takes the current path and uses email without the hyphen.

Older brands can equally choose “e-book,” while others select “Ebook.” The right choice depends on what you want. This is why you need to have your writing style guide. Your style guide ensures consistency in all marketing materials.

12. Keyword Stuffing

Won’t you be disappointed to land on a web page and see a particular term that is repeated like it’s forced? For search engines, disappointment isn’t enough.

When Google crawls your web page and finds you guilty of keyword stuffing, the web page gets a Google penalty.

Keyword stuffing is an ugly SEO tactic that:

• Tanks your rankings
• Could get your page removed from search results
• Can cause loss of leads

Keyword stuffing occurs when a target term is used repeatedly on a web page or blog post with the hope of manipulating the search engines to rank higher for the target term.

Today, search engines are more intelligent. Cramming keywords into blog posts does not the content to the first page. Instead, properly place the keywords:

• In the title,
• First 100 words,
• In the H2 tag
• Site URL

Variations like LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) also help avoid keyword stuffing. LSI keywords are terms related to your primary keyword. For instance, if your focus keyword is “small business,” LSI keywords may include:

Marketing	Money	Services
Market	Employees	Brand Invoice
Management	Social	Credit

13. Write for Your Audience Before Search Engines

One SEO writing best practice is to put your audience first.

Writing for Google’s algorithms alone can result in lost rankings when Google does an update.

The SEO contents that rank on the first three spots of Google’s real estate have tons of tweets, shares, and likes.

All of that comes from real users, deeply moved by the content, and will likely return in the future.

Returning visitors can become customers and even your raving fans who will spread the word about your brand. So, your content should answer these questions:

• How can I offer lots of value to my readers?
• What knowledge can I share that’s different from what they know?
  
  

14. Use your Dictionary

Trying to paint the best picture for your audience is excellent, but beware of misuse. Many persons misuse words regularly because they assume they know the meaning.

Sometimes this misuse happens in terms of contractions, apostrophes, and quotations. Other times, it’s about two words with the same pronunciation but different meanings.

The solution – make your dictionary your friend. Spice up your vocabulary with onelook.com, merriam-webster.com, and dictionary.com.

15. Write for a 13 years Old Kid

No one wants to visit a website with a dictionary by their side.

Using complex words in your blog posts is the quickest way to drive valuable traffic away from your website.

Make your blog posts easy for 7th and 8th-grade kids to understand.

If you use WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin has the Flesch reading ease feature that notifies you if your content is hard to read. You can also use readable to assess the readability of your content.

Here are additional tips to keep your content nice and straightforward:

• Use simple words: Instead of saying “utilize,” say “use,”
• Keep things informal. We all love conversations
• Use bullets or numbered lists
• Add images, charts, and graphics
• Write in short paragraphs and sentences.
• Keep words per sentence low.
• Spice up your writing by starting each sentence with a different word, especially when they appear consecutively.
• Get rid of the passive voice.

16. Give Credit by Linking to Sources

Linking your content to other websites doesn’t create an exit portal for visitors.

On the flip side, outbound links boost your rankings.

When you hyperlink to your sources, you increase your credibility because your audience knows you have done your homework.

I like to get more information on what I read. If people like me make up 90% of your web visitors, we will surely visit your site repeatedly because you make our search easier.

A review of major media houses on the web show websites that link to others outperforms those that don’t.

17. Write Long-form Blog Posts that Count

Tweets, Facebook, and other social pages might do well with posts below 300 words, but not so much on your website.

Search engines favor long-form and informative content.

Your industry determines the length of your content. If every website owner is writing 1,000 to 1,500 words for a keyword, you should stay within that range.

SEO tools like SurferSEO help in this regard. Regardless of your content length, your primary goal should be to provide value.