The Writing’s on the Wall

The Impact of Strong Writing & Personality In Your SEO Efforts

Maybe it’s a set of keywords you want your company to rank No. 1 for. Maybe it’s a strategy to improve the number of terms your being indexed for in general. Maybe it’s a concerted effort to work in more internal links, more SEO-friendly headers and bullet lists in your blog posts.

So just dump all that stuff on your site, and it’s just onward and upward from there, right? Cool. Thanks for reading!

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OK, fine. You knew it wasn’t going to end there. There’s much more to content marketing than pumping a page full of time-tested SEO tactics – and we’re here to show you how you can add personality and tone throughout your content to speak to your target audience and not bore them to tears!

Cut Out the Shortcuts

No matter how much work you put into your plan to improve your search engine visibility, having a plan only gets you halfway there. Now you have to figure out how to integrate it into your site – without having it stick out like a sore thumb and looking like SEO spam. Are there lazy ways to cram as much optimized content as possible into a web page or blog post? Sure! But search engines are forever getting wise to the tricks we try to pull on them. If you take the quick and easy way, it might benefit you in the short term, but sooner or later, you’re going to get caught and, most likely, penalized.

Search Engines Track Engagement & Notice High Bounce Rate

Even without the looming specter of future ranking penalties, there are disadvantages to slapdash content writing. If someone gets to your site and is immediately put off by awkward wording, irrelevance to the subject they searched for or obnoxiously SEO-targeted content, they’re not going to stick around long enough to do whatever you want them to do.

And Google will notice. Google always notices, my friend. Google sees all.

If you want your SEO improvements to have a lasting impact, you need them to seem like an organic part of your site, and to be appealing enough to visitors to convert them into leads. That’s where a need for a digital marketing agency with strong writing comes into play. A skilled writer and SEO content specialist can make all those optimization tactics you devised look like they’ve been part of your site all along.

The Feature Writing-Content Writing Connection

This kind of seamless message integration is awfully similar to feature writing, so it’s no surprise that a lot of folks who get into digital marketing come from a journalism background. We would know.

You’ve got a lot of information that fits with an overarching theme, and you want to make sure the net you cast is wide enough to catch the kinds of visitors who’ll become customers. You need to ensure that the information flows from one keyword or data point to the next. Well, that’s not too different from the material you have to work with to write a solid feature story that enlightens the reader and keeps their attention.

Segues, Transition Sentences & Storytelling, Oh My!

You’ve done all the interviews and research, so you’ve got an impressive number of quotes, insights and data points. But you can’t just jump from quote to quote, or data point to data point; you need to put together a narrative that will wind its way through the entire story, fitting in all the important content you’ve gathered.

Ever read a professionally written story shortly after reading an amateur blog post on the same topic, or vice versa? Yeah, you have. And you don’t want your website to look like the latter. You want your material to be presented more like this – plenty of insight, each point flowing logically from the one before.

Reading Your Writers: Give the People What They Want!

You’d like to think the information you have to present is compelling enough to keep the reader hooked. And, to you, it probably is! But readers are fickle – as journalists and feature writers know only too well – and there are a million things trying to pull them away from the super-awesome content you just put together. However, if you can humanize your writing, make it appeal to the reader on a personal level, make the transitions between data points exciting enough to bridge the gap between them … well, now you’ve got something that won’t lose the reader’s interest!

A content writer who knows what they’re doing knows to:

• Find innovative ways to seamlessly incorporate all the relevant content
• Smoothly transition from one piece of information to the next while maintaining a consistent voice
• Work in additional keywords that carry SEO power but don’t directly fit the narrative by other means; e.g., alt. text on images, meta titles, etc.
• Present information in ways that appeal to search engines – turning comma-separated, run-on sentences into bulleted or numbered lists, applying boldface to the most SEO-friendly terms, etc.
• Spot misspellings, typos and grammatical inconsistencies that subconsciously distract visitors
• Create the perfect cocktail of brand messaging, SEO power and readability

Need to know more about the role personalized writing plays in successful SEO? Reach out to ForeFront Web today. We’ve got more than enough information for you.