Web writing: all our tips for successful content in 2023

Lost in the evolution of SEO and the challenges of web writing in 2021? Our tips for reaching your target audience with quality content.

Writing for the web in 2023: what does it involve?

The challenge of web writing is to deliver interesting and engaging conten t for readers while respecting a number of rules set by search engines like Google.

Writing for the web means offering content that can capture a target audience’s attention and encourage them to share it. Web writing can thus enable companies to speak to their customers, but also to gain visibility with potential customers.

Writing in 2021 also means taking into account the evolution of SEO, marked by the growing importance of Google’s artificial intelligence, Google RankBrain. RankBrain can interpret users’ queries by drawing on its knowledge of broader semantic fields. The keyword typed by the user doesn’t even need to appear exactly in the content. Google’s goal: to keep refining SERP (results pages) results and to respond appropriately to voice queries.

Another point that should impact writing in 2021. Next May, Google will release a new update to its algorithm that will further strengthen the role of user experience in search rankings. SXO, or Search eXperience Optimization, the combination of SEO and UX, should therefore take on a central role in web strategy in the coming years.

Why and for whom should you do SEO writing? The challenges facing web writers in 2023

As you’ve gathered, following the various changes in organic search, writers face many challenges.

In a hurry? 👉Download our ultimate web writing checklist!

To really understand the value of web writing, it’s important to keep these figures in mind:

queries are submitted every second

is the average attention level for an internet user

%

of visits to a page last less than 4 seconds

%

only of the words are read on a page of about 500 words

Source: http://ramus.se.uni-hannover.de/glosebase/images/b/b8/Weinreich2008-commented.pdf

Moreover, according to a study published by SEMrush and CMI in 2018, the main challenges facing web content writers are mainly to:

• Find a balance between creativity and SEO optimization
• Understand their audience and its concerns
• Meet deadlines and master time management

Unlike a journalist or a magazine writer, the web writing professional isn’t entirely free in the substance and form of their text. They have to take into account their target audience’s expectations and the constraints tied to organic search. More than ever on the web, word choice is crucial. And depending on the words chosen, the semantic field, the way the content is structured, and so on, the page will be more or less visible for users’ queries. The choice of words, those of the target audience, is therefore essential for speaking to the right people.

In a context where visibility relies on increasingly complex rules, how can you deliver quality content that meets the demands of both Google and readers?

Many tools exist to support web writers in this process. A solution like Semji, for example, helps writers identify the questions users are asking and the answers they’re looking for, so they can address them with perfectly optimized content.

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Writing well for the web: creating successful content in 11 steps

How can you be sure your content succeeds and is visible to your target audience? Semji reveals all the steps to follow to produce quality content. Our tips apply to all content types on the web.

And as the results achieved by Qilibri, a Semji Platform customer, prove, it works! Here’s an example with one of their blog posts created in 2020 with Semji Platform, which generated great SEO results in just 4 months. A real visibility boost, since the article now ranks in position 0 for the query “how to get hips”.

Traffic generated after creating and optimizing the content with Semji Platform.

To learn more about these results and get practical tips for doing the same, check out the full testimonial from Quentin Leandri, traffic & acquisition manager at Qilibri. You’ll discover how this start-up managed to gain visibility in the ultra-competitive dietary rebalancing market and achieve +3400% SEO traffic in just 12 months!

The challenge of visibility on search engines is extremely high today due to strong competition. SEO writing can address this issue. However, it isn’t done at random, but is part of a digital and content strategy developed in advance, based on a thorough knowledge of your target audience.

Step 1: Research an article topic based on specific objectives

Writing without a specific objective is a waste of time and money. Writing content must absolutely be part of a communication strategy, itself guided by SMART objectives:

• Simple
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

The communication strategy relies on specific tracking indicators: article rankings on the SERP, website traffic analysis, the number of reactions content generates on social media, conversion rate, and so on.

Which queries do you want to be visible for? What are the expectations and needs of your customers and prospects? It’s about aligning your business objectives with the needs of your target audience.

At Semji, we understand the importance of tracking content performance. Our platform makes it possible to track SEO gains at a glance to evaluate the ROI of your content.

Here, our client chose to target the topic of hips in women because it presented strong opportunities.

Step 2: Define the keywords to target

Start by understanding what users expect

Drawing on your personas, try to imagine the user journey and what might lead them to enter this topic into search engines.

Indeed, the prospect goes through many stages between the moment they search for a service or product to meet their need and the moment they commit. Throughout this decision-making process, their behavior keeps evolving, and the content type must therefore adapt to each phase. We identify 3 major ones:

• The awareness phase: the visitor becomes aware of their need and of the existing solutions to address it. Here, be educational and show them that you’re the leading expert in your field. Blog posts, guides, and infographics are very effective for establishing your authority in your sector.
• The evaluation phase: the user compares and analyzes different solutions before making a decision. Here, demonstrate that you’re best placed to understand their pain point and set yourself apart from the competition. White papers, podcasts, and videos are excellent vehicles for boosting credibility.
• The conversion phase: this is where everything is decided and where the switch from “visitor” to “customer” can happen. Be convincing and take a personalized approach through your content. Demonstrating your offer, using case studies, customer testimonials, and so on can be highly impactful in the decision-making process. They help people relate to and picture themselves with your solution.

Beyond the journey, and to define the queries to work on, try to identify the terms used, the vocabulary your audience uses when expressing their need. Depending on the type of query, the user’s expectations regarding content and results won’t be the same. You therefore need to understand what lies behind it in order to respond in the best possible way. Be careful, though: look closely at the SERP results for the query you want to work on and pay attention to how Google interprets users’ intentions. There can be differences. In any case, it’s often Google that has the final say!

Target relevant, priority keywords

Once you have your topic, it’s time to define the article’s main keyword or keywords.

What is a main keyword? It’s your primary objective, the term or terms you want your content to rank for as a priority. It must both meet your visibility objectives and match users’ expectations. Its relatively high search volume should therefore offer you strong traffic potential.

Be careful to clearly distinguish the type of keyword you want to rank for. There are several types:

• Navigational keyword: a keyword intended to find a specific site or company. E.g. “Fitness Boutique Lyon”
• Informational keyword: a more or less generic keyword used to obtain information about a product or service. E.g. “how to get hips without exercise?”
• Transactional keyword: a keyword that indicates the user is in a more advanced purchasing process but needs additional information to make a decision. E.g. “cheap slimming program”

Keywords suggested by Semji Platform for “Hips”.

Semji Platform can help you define your article’s main query. It also suggests long-tail keywords to rank for more specific topics. Here, for the term “hips”, the platform offers various keywords such as “how to get hips”. This term represents an average volume of 1,000 searches per month.

Reach out to one of our experts for a Semji demo and discover how to define your main queries.

Interested in this topic? Feel free to rewatch our webinar “ Search-intent-based SEO: breakdown and strategy“.

Step 3: Create an outline that meets user intent

This is the crucial moment of optimization: defining the right angle. The goal is threefold:

• Give your audience the most useful, relevant, and complete information.
• Support the keywords you want to rank for.
• Mark up the content hierarchy (the famous Hn tags) to make the article easier for Google to understand.

To take the right direction and structure the outline that follows from it, at Semji we recommend the following approach:

1. Starting from your main keyword, study the competitors (at least the top three results) ranking for the topic. Evaluate their content, the subjects covered in the articles, the word count, and so on.
2. Look at the SERP to determine which elements make it up. Is there a position 0, PAA (People Also Ask) boxes, videos, and so on? Through this observation, you’ll be able to understand how Google interprets users’ search intentions.

This information is automatically surfaced in Semji’s “ Competitors” tab. You can directly view your various competitors’ pages as well as the outlines of their articles.

Semji Platform’s Competitors tab, which displays the structure of competing content for the query “how to get hips”.

To structure a relevant writing outline, the platform also incorporates users’ questions and search intents. As the name suggests, search intents indicate the topics your audience is interested in. Prioritized according to search volume and competing content, these suggestions should be built into your Hn tags (headings and subheadings).

The essential techniques for structuring web content

There are several techniques for structuring an article. The best known (and most used) are the 5 Ws rule and the inverted pyramid.

The 5 Ws rule involves answering 5 questions, if possible, in the very first lines of the article but also in the subheadings: Who? When? Where? What? Why? You can also add the questions “How?” and “How many?” to be perfectly thorough.

Complementary to the 5 Ws, the inverted pyramid lets you organize information by playing with the depth of the article. The essential information is delivered briefly at the start of the article and then expanded on paragraph by paragraph.

Source: adeomarketing

Writing quality web content

Do you have your topic and your article angle? It’s time to move on to writing!

On the optimization side, if you want to be sure to reach the highest level, a solution like Semji can help! All you have to do is follow the**suggestions**listed by the platform. To make writing even more fun, the assessment of your text’s SEO relevance is done through a Content Score. The mechanics are simple: the more you follow the recommendations, the more you increase your score and the more certain you are to publish 100% optimized content with great results to boot!

In this new section, we reveal the approach followed in Semji, the steps not to skip to reach the highest level of optimization.

Step 4: A well-optimized, catchy H1

If there’s one element not to neglect, it’s this one. The article’s title must both give enough information about what readers will find in the article and make them want to go further. Not forgetting that it must include the main keyword of the content!

Certain title formats are catchier, such as:

• The question format: “What is a food diet?”
• How-to articles: “How do you start a dietary rebalancing?”,
• Numbers: “10 tips to avoid snacking”

Example:

Here, the title matches the main keyword perfectly and can stand on its own.

Step 5: A title tag and meta description that make people want to go further

As a SERP element, the title tag is an essential SEO tool and must include, at a minimum, the main keyword. As for the meta description, its primary goal is to encourage users to click on the search result, either by providing additional information beyond the title or by piquing the user’s curiosity.

Example:

Step 6: An introduction and first paragraph that set the tone

Did you know that the first lines of an article are crucial for keeping the reader’s interest? With an attention span of a few seconds, users rarely take the time to read articles in full. The title, subheadings, and hook are the most-read elements. Next come the introduction and the first paragraph, which must answer the reader’s questions but above all make them want to dig deeper into the topic. So don’t hesitate to pay particular attention to these two elements of the content.

Example:

Step 7: Subheadings built around the keyword and search intent

As we saw earlier, subheadings (commonly called headings or Hn) help structure the article around your main keyword and the search intent behind it. These subheadings also make it possible to introduce variations of the main keyword. These are the secondary keywords.

Examples:

As you’ll have understood, for each keyword there’s a search intent to define. This step is essential, since it will affect how you build your outline. In our example with the Qilibri article, Semji’s search intents recommend topics to cover and to include in the Hn tags. Displayed by cluster, these suggestions are prioritized according to search volume and competing content.

Search intent suggestions by Semji Platform for the query “how to get hips”

Behind the query “how to get hips”, the writer discovers users’ expectations here : exercises to tone the glutes and slim the hips, tips for having nice hips, and so on. Thanks to this information, they find the right angle and mark up their article correctly. They’re sure to write useful content with high organic traffic potential.

Create relevant content that meets user intent with Semji Platform!

Step 8: Clear, concise, and above all complete paragraphs

The golden rule: 1 idea = 1 paragraph. To avoid losing your readers, it’s best to opt for fairly short paragraphs and well-defined subsections. Don’t hesitate to play with subheading levels to develop your ideas. The user should be able to know what your article contains just by reading them.

To aim for the top positions, your paragraphs must be well built but also very complete. Depending on the targeted query, there is indeed a whole semantic field to address for your audience and for Google. Your professional expertise is therefore key to covering every aspect of the main topic.

Query “how to get hips”: here Semji analyzes the content of competitors present on the Google results page and identifies the terms that come up most often.

This is the approach taken by the Qilibri writer here. Around the keyword “how to get hips”, they discover a number of “ Topics” with Semji and find all the information to cover in their content. They then round out their argument with new ideas and optimize their content to capture even more visibility.

Step 9: Useful, high-quality hyperlinks

To enrich your content, it’s recommended to add links to other pages. These can be internal pages on your site dealing with related topics (see our article on the semantic cocoon). It’s also advisable to add links to external pages that will help enrich or illustrate your point.

Pay particular attention to the quality of the sites in question and to your link anchors, which must be explicit. Also be careful not to direct users only to your product pages, so you don’t undermine your credibility. Above all, it’s about offering your audience the best possible reading experience and therefore suggesting pages that might interest them.

Also think about internal linking, that is, linking your articles to one another. This will also have a positive effect on organic search.

Example:

To boost the visibility of this content, Semji incorporates the two concepts of incoming and outgoing links and tells the Qilibri writer how many outgoing and incoming links to insert. To strengthen the brand’s authority on the fitness topic, Semji goes even further by listing the most relevant articles on the mag.qilibri.fr site that will enrich the original content.

Step 10: Visuals for a better user experience

Visuals aren’t just there to illustrate your point. They also provide a change of pace in the content, some breathing room in the reading. Choose them carefully. The more original and varied they are, the more they’ll help hold the attention of the user, and therefore get your message across.

In addition, by correctly filling in the ALT attribute, you can also rank your page in Google image searches.

Step 11: Strategically placed CTAs

The CTA, or call to action, encourages the user to take an action, most often a commercial one. This can be:

• Clicking a link to a product page,
• Subscribing to a newsletter,
• Requesting a quote,
• Signing up for a demo,
• Asking to be called back, and so on.

Example:

It must be visible, placed strategically so that it fits into the text as naturally as possible.

Sharing web content

You now know your target audiences. So you should know which media or social networks to reach them on. Here are a few tips for sharing your content effectively.

• Rather than quantity, focus on quality and go find your target audience on the networks they use most.
• Adapt your content to the medium in question. E.g. On Instagram, create a post in which you summarize the key ideas of your article or tease it to encourage users to go read the article in full.
• Rely on visuals, or even very short videos, to present your article.
• Stir emotion, get your readers to react, and encourage them to comment on and/or share your article.

Example of an article shared on Instagram by the site https://www.psychologue.net/

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CLWp5sGne6I/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CLT3dwPjraR/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Need a summary? Feel free to download our checklist of 24 points to verify to ensure the visibility of your content

Tools to help you write better

There are many tools, free or paid, available to web writers to help them write their content. These can be tools to help with keyword research, tag optimization, spell checkers(like the latest correction software MerciApp, very comprehensive for polishing everything you write online), and so on. In our checklist for successful SEO content, we offer a selection of writing-assistance tools.

Nevertheless, the multitude of writing-assistance tools only provides partial help to the writer. This is the problem Semji set out to solve by offering an all-in-one solution. The Semji platform supports writers at every step of the writing process, from preparation to performance tracking, including optimization.

So, with Semji, you can:

• Be guided in optimizing your content and write with confidence

• Know the search volumes for a keyword and find related keywords and questions about the topic

• Identify and analyze competing content quickly

• Detect search intents and the content your audience expects

• Always keep an eye on the editorial calendar and assign articles across your various collaborators and writers

• Track the performance of published content

With Semji, you only publish what’s relevant and perfectly optimized for Google! To learn more about our offering and discover how to reach your goals faster with our solution, feel free to contact us or ask us for a demo

In short: what to remember about web writing in 2021

• Leave nothing to chance and write with specific target audiences and objectives in mind.
• Rely on quality tools to save time.
• Always seek to improve the user experience by offering content suited to reading on all screens.
• Take an interest in your topic to make it interesting.