If you create a lot of written content for a website, here are the 6 must-have content writing skills to master to create stuff people want to read, the search engines want to rank and convert sales.
Basic On Page SEO
You only need to know the basic on page SEO skills to get your article focused on a particular topic, and rank it on the search engine. Here is the most basic SEO skills you need to know by heart:
- Focus on 1 keyword only
- The main keyword must be in H1 and within the first 90 – 150 words in the intro
- Relevant keywords related to the main keyword can be sprinkled across the page, but not too much
- Fix all grammar errors
- Format content on the page that is easy for visitors to consume, which improves user performance and reduces the bounce rate
- Link to other relevant pages on the website
SEO updates come and go, but ultimately the search engine wants to serve the best results to people who are searching for specific things. Getting good with basic on-page SEO already puts you ahead of the competition to rank the content.
Proper Research
Proper research builds credibility for the long-term success of your website. All that is required here is to be detail orientated to find the information to present in the content and make sure they are accurate.
Just applying a little bit of fact-checking can go a long way to produce high-quality content that people want to bookmark or link to. If your content requires a bit of research, it’s always a good idea to gather the information and present it in a different way to appear more interesting.
Copywriting
Copywriting is the skill to use words to sell. This skillset is crucial to turn visitors to sell, simply by writing with the simplest language to address the visitor’s pain point and bridge them to a solution or a new idea.
Content writing vs copywriting is two different things. Copywriting is kinda like the makeup of the content to make it more interesting and more appealing to people to take action.
These include:
- Approach the topic from a different angle that people don’t think about
- Clearly define problem and solution
- Cut down irrelevant info
- Knowing your audience and use the right words
- Add emotions to your writing
- Clearly communicate features in benefit format
- Know when is enough content, cut the unnecessary and do call to action
You can read more about them here.
Content Formatting
Online blog formatting is actually so much easier than writing research papers back in school. All website content writers have to know to break up the paragraphs, and never let the visitors read giant blocks of text.
Here are good formatting habits to follow:
- Break up 3 – 4 lines of text
- Bold key phrases or ideas, so they stands out on the page
- Use bullet points instead of writing paragraphs
- Do not internal link too much in the same paragraph block to distract the readers
Write Concisely
Concise writing combined with copywriting skills is the most important content writing skill to have. Human readers like it so are the search engines.
Word count isn’t so important overall if the right information is communicated that serves the intent of the person reading.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating blog content:
- Know where your audience is coming, and write stuff that makes sense to them
- Understand the intent of the keyword for the topic, and decide what relevant information to add
- Remove filler content
- Use the simplest language to communicate your ideas
- Word count doesn’t matter if the content suck
Call To Action
Call to action is one of many components of content copywriting. The ultimate goal is to get the visitor on a blog to do the following:
- Subscribe to email list
- Download something
- Sell products including affiliate offers
- Get a free offer
- CTA messages closely match what people want
- To read more
- To check out other content that won’t get search traffic on their own
Knowing how to clearly phrase the intent of what your visitors want is crucial to get results.
Originality
Original content makes your website stand out. It’s the key difference that separates your content and others.
Even if your content has been published by others, you can still make it stand out simply by changing the visual presentation, use of language, topic angle, and format.
Lead Visitors To Other Topics
Leading visitors to other topics on the site is the idea of flipping the traffic by finding backdoor methods to get traffic and flow it to expensive stuff your website can’t compete with yet.
Most content writers go after the big keywords that are hard to rank especially on a new website, but there are so many low-competition keywords to go after as the backdoor method to lead to the stuff your audience ultimately wants.
In this example, let’s take a look at selling web hosting as an affiliate. The keyword “web hosting” is super competitive, but the keyword “how to build eCommerce website from scratch” is very low competition.
Don’t people who want to build ecommerce websites NOT want web hosting? – Of course, they do, and people can easily find the article on how to build an ecom store, and lead visitors to something they want but didn’t know they needed.