woman writing content

SEO Content Writing Services: Unlock Your Site’s Organic Potential

Carl Hiehn Senior Account Strategist at Pedestal Search

Carl Hiehn Senior Account Strategist

March 21, 2022 | 5 Min Read

Article updated on July 8, 2022

Invisible ink is a term us SEO specialists use to describe high-quality writing that, for a variety of reasons, does not rank in search engines.

If your company is investing heavily in content marketing but you’re not seeing your organic traffic increasing, you’re writing in invisible ink.

SEO content writing agencies like Pedestal Search can produce content that ranks in Google, drives traffic, and, most importantly, increases conversions.

How? Let me show you.

What Is the Relationship Between SEO and Content Marketing?

When it comes to SEO, content is king.

If a website didn’t have content, there wouldn’t be anything to rank for.

While single-page websites have their time and place, most businesses want to have multi-page websites to increase their chances of ranking for a variety of keywords. Each page is uniquely designed to target a specific keyword. A good SEO content strategy should ensure each of those keywords are targeting different stages of the customer journey.

But choosing the right keywords requires significant research, analysis, and common sense.

SEO specialists like myself use our understanding of search engine algorithms to create content that’ll not only rank on Google, but also help build the site’s domain authority (DA) so the entire site begins to rank better.

DA is a third-party metric used to measure a website’s likelihood to rank. It’s expressed on a scale of 1–100, with 100 being a perfect—albeit impossible to reach—score.

Writing high-quality content that answers search queries can have a positive impact on the website’s DA, both directly and indirectly.

High-quality SEO-driven content will directly impact a site’s DA by driving traffic to the site that sticks around. User behavior metrics like average session duration help Google understand if a website is Experienced, Authoritative, and Trustworthy (E-A-T)—the three ingredients that make up DA.

SEO-driven content also indirectly impacts a website’s DA because it is more likely to be shared or referenced by other content creators, thus aiding link building. It is also more likely to be shared meaningfully on social media. Both backlinks and social media shares are significant variables that help determine E-A-T.

If your team is producing high-quality content that’s still not ranking, you’re probably not focusing on the right topics or keywords.

How We Create SEO Blog Content Ideas

Great content begins with a great topic.

Most SEO content writing agencies will tell you a great topic thoroughly answers a user’s question.

But how do you know what users are asking?

Keyword research, of course!

Here at Pedestal Search, we have a vetted system to conduct keyword research. We use tools like Google Ads’ Keyword Planner, Google Trends, SEMRush, and other third-party platforms to analyze search queries.

Specifically, we’ll run a business’s primary products, services and case studies through our keyword tools to find the most common questions users are asking. After we’ve generated a list of questions, we sort them based on several criteria: relevance to the business, monthly search volume, keyword difficulty scores, and user intent.

Relevance: How relevant is the search query to the business. Good SEO-driven content should focus on highly-relevant keywords.

Search Volume: How many searches of the keyword are conducted per month in the business’s targeted geographic region? The higher the search volume, the more potential visibility a piece of content can generate.

Keyword Difficulty: How competitive is the keyword. The higher the difficulty score, the more difficult it will be to rank for. In order to rank for highly-competitive keywords, a website will need a high DA plus the article must be of the highest quality.

User Intent: This is a relatively new metric available through SEMRush that gauge’s the searcher’s intent. Are they looking for information, comparing brands, or seeking a specific product?

Once we have these metrics in place, we can begin creating topics focused on answering the most relevant, highly-searched questions that also have low keyword difficulty scores.

Regarding user intent, ‘purchase’ and ‘commercial’ search queries are much lower in the customer journey and will likely result in higher conversion rates than ‘informational’ searches.

How We Write Quality SEO Content

After we’ve completed our keyword research and settled on a selection of SEO blog content ideas, we begin writing.

Personally, I begin writing SEO content by mapping out all of my headings and subheadings. I ensure all of the headings reflect the keyword research I conducted, guaranteeing I’m sticking to the exact search queries I’m trying to answer. This also helps me structure my content.

After I’ve structured my article, I allow myself to write freely without any thought of keywords or search queries. I simply focus on quality writing for a human being. This is critical to avoiding keyword stuffing.

One of the biggest mistakes content writers make when breaking into SEO content is keyword stuffing. Essentially, they hamfist the target keyword into their writing as much as possible on the assumption that the more times they use the keyword, the more likely they are to rank for it.

This is a huge mistake. In its Quality Evaluator Guidelines, Google clearly states that even if content feels slightly keyword stuffed, it will be penalized.

It’s important to triple underline that Google’s algorithm is extremely advanced. It is intended to rank content that feels like it’s written for humans, not robots.

This is why I always put my SEO hat aside for a good chunk of my writing process and just focus on quality, quality, quality.

After I’ve written my content, had it edited by a colleague, possibly written a second or third draft, then I go back in to fill in the final SEO elements. These include the URL, title tag, and meta description.

These three SEO elements may seem small but they directly impact a piece of content’s click-through rate. In fact, if you notice a piece of content is ranking well in Google but isn’t generating clicks, you likely need to optimize these elements.

SEO Follow-Up

SEO content writing agencies follow-through on one final step that almost no internal content team does. We follow-up on the performance of each individual piece of content.

At Pedestal Search, we check Google Search Console three days after a piece of content has been published to ensure it has been crawled and indexed.

If we notice our content has not been crawled in this period, we request a crawl.

If we notice content has been crawled but is not being indexed due to an error, we work with our technical team to remediate the issue.

After a month has passed since publishement, SEO content writing agencies will go back in one final time to review the performance of the article and see what keywords its actually ranking for.

In some instances, an article will begin ranking for a question or query we weren’t expecting. In these instances, we will optimize the piece to better answer that query and hopefully gain more traction.

When we do our final follow-up, we also watch out for average position and click-through rates. If the content has a good average position but a poor click-through rate, we’ll A/B test new title tags and meta descriptions. This often helps improve CTR.

Partner With an SEO Content Writing Agency

Content is king. But writing good SEO-driven content is difficult.

Hiring an SEO agency is your best bet at producing high-quality content that ranks, drives traffic, and converts.

If you want to learn more about Pedestal’s SEO content writing services, get in touch today. We’d be happy to discuss our process in detail. We can even conduct an SEO audit of your website completely for free.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Categories:

Content Marketing, SEO

Carl Hiehn Senior Account Strategist at Pedestal Search

Carl Hiehn

Senior Account Strategist

With over seven years of digital marketing experience, Carl leads Pedestal's Account Strategist team. He holds a degree in professional writing from York University and a certificate in digital marketing from the University of Toronto. Before narrowing in on SEO at Pedestal, Carl worked as a content writer, social media manager, and digital ads manager in the travel & tourism industry. He has worked at internationally lauded companies such as Intrepid Travel and Outward Bound Canada, as well as boutique businesses such as Out Adventures.