How to Keep Balance Between SEO Friendly and User Friendly Content

Creating content that keeps search engines as well as users happy isn’t tough. In fact, when it comes to writing content you should know that SEO-friendliness and user-friendliness are not mutually exclusive. The popularity of a content among users plays an important role in its search engine rankings. Vice versa, the more SEO-friendly your content is, the higher it is likely to rank on search engine and as a result attract more audience.

Here are some thumb rules that you should stick to and some pitfalls that you should avoid when trying to create content that is SEO-friendly and user-friendly:

Understand Your Target Audience

Buyer’s persona is a popular term in the marketing field. It means a carefully constructed profile of your ideal prospective buyer. This is what you need to keep in mind while writing content. Who are you writing for? Who is your target reader? What are your reader’s pain points, challenges, expectations, hopes and questions? What would your prospective buyer like to read about? Asking these questions will help you pinpoint the audience that has the potential of becoming your customers and create content that directly caters to their needs.

Keep the Emotional Quotient Alive

As much as you would love to brag about your business, product or service, the reader is not likely to care much about the fancy facts and figures. The best way you can engage readers is by evoking powerful emotions in their mind while they are reading your content. Your content should leave your customers feeling at least something: it could be happy, hopeful, inspired or even surprised.

Avoid These Common Content Writing Mistakes

1. Writing without one clear proposition in mind usually leads to aimless rambling. Keep your focus on a single major goal, and make sure that everything you write ultimately ties back to this goal.
2. Proper formatting of the content is as important as the content itself. Use small paragraphs, subheadings and relevant images in your content. Include white spaces too so that your reader doesn’t get overwhelmed by the volume of the text.
3. Don’t use overly complex language and jargon to sound smart. You know what will ooze smartness? If you can explain even the most complex of things in a simple language.
4. Proofread your content thoroughly before publishing. This may seem obvious, but it’s common to see writers skip this step in the rush of putting out their content on the web quickly. Even seemingly minor spelling and grammar mistakes can drive away readers.
5. Don’t write for everyone, write for your target audience. General content often goes unnoticed, but the customised and specific content is more relevant and impactful for the relevant audience and likely to convert them into leads.

Incorporate Relevant Keywords In Your Content

Keywords are the actual phrases that are being used by users on the search engines. If you want to speak to your audience, then you should speak in a language that they use and understand. Apart from the main keywords, you should also use LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) in your content. LSI keywords are the keywords that are semantically related to your main keywords.

Refrain from Stuffing Your Content with Keywords

More is not always better, certainly not when it comes to using keywords in the content. Keyword stuffing not only makes your content read unnatural, but it can also get your website penalised by Google. So while you should be using keywords in your content, you should be doing so in a way that seems almost effortless. Many SEO experts recommend a keyword density of 1-3%.

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