Textual content enables search engines to understand your site. The words you choose should engage shoppers and boost your site’s relevance to the keywords and phrases that consumers search for.

If creating articles, blog posts, product descriptions, and other textual content strikes fear into your heart, try some of these tips to make writing easier, more engaging, and more optimal for natural search performance.

9 SEO Writing Tips

Jot down an outline. Listen to your high-school English teacher: Writing improves when you start with an outline. Begin with a list of thoughts you want to address. Pour them on the page without worrying too much about order, then organize.

First expel, then excel. Just start. Forget about quality, conciseness, and sentence construction. Toss your complete idea onto the page in all its run-on-sentence glory, and then cycle back to edit it into shape. Use one final edit to ensure the content highlights your keyword themes.

Consult keyword research. Keyword research provides the foundation for relevance, ensuring that the content you create resonates with your customers and prospects. It also generates content ideas. When you need ideas for your next content piece, turn to keyword research.

Discover questions that real people seek answers to. Uncover previously unknown niches. Identify the phrasings that consumers use when thinking about your products so that you can speak their language.

Keyword research takes effort, but it pays dividends for months.

Review competitors. Dissect the content you see on other quality sites to create your own view of a topic. Never plagiarize — although new, unused ideas are rare. For example, countless articles address the topic of this article: SEO content. The difference between articles comes from each author’s expertise, voice, and ability to relate her points to readers.

Provide value. No shopper wants marketing copy. Determine what your prospects seek and give it to them. Remember, keyword research identifies searchers’ desires. Use it to crack into what they value…