‘SEO is like a party. If you do it right, everyone wants to come.’

Read time: 3 minutes

Great websites don’t do SEO differently, they follow the best practices with undivided focus and maintain an unprecedented pace.

The most essential pillar of a good SEO is the content you put on your webpage.

From an SEO perspective, the textual content is still more critical than images or videos.

If you can add images and videos it adds more gravitas to your page but having textual content is of paramount importance.

Quality, authority, trustworthiness. These are the pillars on which your SEO content should be based.

Plagiarism, duplicate content (copy-pasting content within your own website), keyword stuffing. Avoid these 3 as much as you can while writing SEO content.

The SEO content you write for your webpage cannot be fluid.

You will not change this content frequently. Hence, take time, do primary or secondary research, spend time editing the content and then take it live on your website.

There are primarily 2 kinds of SEO content pegs you will write:

1. Blogs:

The first exercise you should do before you write your first blog is to figure out the themes in which you wish to write content.

Every theme should result in a dedicated subfolder.

And every blog webpage should originate from a relevant subfolder.

What is a subfolder?

A subfolder or subdirectory hosting is a type of website hierarchy under a root domain that uses folders to organize content on a website.

Let’s understand this with an example:

There is a popular health and wellness information website: healthline.com

Here are some mindblowing SEO stats of this website:

Healthline gets 45.6M users a month from SEO in India. That’s massive.

There are many reasons that lead to such numbers. One such reason is the clear categorisation of subfolders on their website.

Once you have such clear subfolders created, it gets easier to place a new webpage on the blog under the relevant subfolder.

Just to reiterate websites follow this URL structure:

root domain —> subfolder —> webpage

For example,

www.healthline.com is the root domain

www.healthline.com/nutrition is the subfolder

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-long-does-it-take-to-lose-weight is the webpage.

People land on a blog seeking information.

Hence your blogs should be descriptive and should follow a design sense to capture the digital footprints of users which I covered extensively in my last newsletter- Blog design that sells.

Aim to write the most complete blog post that exists on your topic.

Also, add as much authority as you can to your blogs.

Add References, name of the author, experience and background of the author, and estimated read time.

One of the underrated best practices is writing the name of the author with the blog and having a dedicated landing page that links to every blog that the author has written.

If you look at any blog of Healthline they specifically mention that a blog post has been medically reviewed by an expert which links back to a dedicated page which has more details about the author along with all the blogs that author has written or validated.

2. Content on category pages

In order to rank for transactional intent keywords, you have to write content for category pages.

These are the pages that will drive sales for you and hence will be highly competitive.

My thumb rule for SEO content on category pages is to choose 5 keywords for every category page and write content around these keywords.

Out of these 5 keywords; 2 can be high-volume keywords and 3 can be mid-scale volume keywords.

Because high volume keywords will take time to rank but once they do they will give a major chunk of traffic and conversions.

Mid-scale volume keywords will comparatively rank faster hence giving traction before high-volume keywords.

Keep a keyword density of 5-6% in your article. For ex., if you are writing content on ‘keto diet‘. Mention the keyword ‘keto diet’ 5-6 times in a 100-word article.

You can aim to rank the same category page of your website for a variety of searches if you follow this approach.

Also, always interlink one category page to the other. So that if one category page ranks well on Google, SEO equity is passed to other category pages as well helping those pages rank better.

You don’t have to do storytelling with category page SEO content.

You can talk about the product/services, your differentiator, and testimonials, all of these count as unique content on a category page.

The key is writing more conversational, elaborative and authentic content for category pages.

Are AI tools helpful in SEO content writing?

Very early days to answer this with precision.

But the challenge with AI is it lacks creativity and insight that you will be able to draw from your own research.

Hence SEO content generated by AI may not help you to rank for high-competition keywords.

Use AI to generate ideas around your blog, avoid using AI to write blogs altogether.

That’s it for today folks!

Hope this helps you in your thought process of writing quality SEO content.

I have recently opened up my schedule to take 1:1 LIVE SEO sessions.

You can book your slot with me here.

Have an awesome weekend!

Cheers,

Apurv