Writing for SEO – Best Practice for Tech Businesses

Google rules the internet. This is an unfortunate truth for many but one that many companies still need to come to terms with. Getting website pages onto the first page of search results produces a significant increase in traffic to your website and SEO isn’t something to fear.

Rightly or wrongly, people trust the results on the first page of a search engine and there is no use fighting this. This is why companies need to consider SEO when writing content for their website.

What is SEO and why does it matter for my business content?

Let’s address the elephant in the room: press releases have gotten a bit confused lately.
Over the last ten years, press releases have become muddled. With the emergence of brand comms, the huEssentially, SEO is about ensuring your company is discoverable by search engines. The reality is that even if your company reputation is exemplary and people are finding you by word of mouth, people will always do due diligence.

Where do they do this?

The internet.

You can spend hours creating incredible content, but if it’s not easy to find, it’s as useful as a chocolate teapot. This is why SEO is so important – it allows all your time, effort and money spent on content marketing to deliver the business outcomes you deserve.

And SEO is about doing things right. For example, you might have heard of ‘keyword stuffing’, a practice that involves including the keyword in content as many times as possible to improve search rankings.

Keyword stuffing is what many people still think writing for SEO is but Google has gotten wise to this tactic and penalises content written this way. There are many other naughty tactics too that no longer work.

Is SEO content writing difficult?

People fear that writing for SEO means that writing sounds robotic, or unnatural, but this is a common misconception. Recent Google updates prioritise content written by humans and the search engine is actively searching out poorly written content by AI and penalising it.  

It’s possible to write for SEO and still retain your personal style. Writing for SEO just means keeping searchability in mind, because who doesn’t want their work read by as many people as possible? The internet is enormous so you need to make sure your content is easy to find by the relevant audience.

Why should you alter your words when you’re the subject matter expert? This is something we hear a lot and getting the balance right between accuracy and readability is tricky, but not impossible.

Businesses also say that writing for SEO feels like extra work, an extra set of rules to follow. Considering SEO from the beginning of the writing process makes it easier, which is why we’ve compiled a checklist to help structure and plan out content.

SEO best practice

Some SEO best practices are actually just solid writing fundamentals that improve readability.

• Short sentences and paragraphs – Although it can feel like breaking up a point, shorter sentences rather than multi-line blocks of text help make content more digestible. Breaking up content into shorter paragraphs makes long content easier to read in general but improves the mobile experience too.
• Active voice – it’s common to write in the passive voice but the active voice makes content more engaging, easier to read and improves SEO. Active voice is subject + verb + object. For example, ‘The panda painted the house’ is active, ‘the house was painted by the panda’ is passive. ​
• Relevant and useful headings – including your chosen keyword in your heading and doing some research into Google’s frequently asked questions on a subject pays dividends for your SEO. Headings should be 60 characters or less to ensure they display fully in search results. Subheadings positioned as questions are more likely to appear under Google’s ‘People also ask’ section but also make it easier for readers to find what they need quickly.
• EEAT – EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness and is Google’s way of evaluating if content is relevant and credible. The Google Helpful Content Update focuses on detecting content written by AI and EEAT. Keeping EEAT in mind when writing content for your business could help improve your content’s page ranking. You can read Kat’s EEAT blog for more tips. 
• Bullet points – breaking up content into digestible bullets (like I’ve done here) is good for SEO but also makes it easier for readers to process complex topics. Attention spans are shorter and people are more likely to read your website on phones or skim content for answers. Bullets are a quick and easy way to provide information to your audience.
• Relevant keywords – having a keyword ensures the focus of the content is clear and makes it easier for readers to find. Each piece of content needs a unique keyword to avoid ‘keyword cannibalisation’ – when two pieces of content on the same website are fighting for the top keyword result.

This article itself follows SEO best practice, but does it sound like it was written by a robot? No.

Did it provide relevant and useful information in an easy-to-read format? Yes.

Still feel like you’d benefit from some additional guidance around writing for SEO? Bamboo’s digital marketing services range from editing content for SEO best practice and writing content from scratch to paid advertising management and technical SEO.

Get in touch if you’d like help with your SEO writing today.