SEO is vital in today’s digital marketing landscape. It can reliably and consistently generate leads for your business. However, the SEO landscape is highly competitive. You’ll need to write great content and include the right technical elements to win out.
This guide focuses on one of the more challenging elements of making great SEO content — balancing keywords and creativity. Read on to learn why these factors matter for SEO and how to balance them.
Understanding SEO-Driven Content
Research suggests that 44% of buying journeys start on Google or another search engine. Users type keywords into Google, review the results, and click on one of the top three pages 68.7% of the time.
So obviously, it’s great to be one of those first three pages for search terms that are relevant to your business. But how do you get there? You do it with SEO-driven content.
To understand why, let’s briefly review how Google ranks search results. It does so through bots and algorithms, which comb through webpages and consider factors like:
- Keywords: Google considers whether the content includes the key phrases that people have searched for and others related to the topic.
- Content quality: Google prefers content that’s highly relevant and useful.
- Links: Google views external links to your site as votes in its favor (the more you have, the better, typically).
- Technical factors: Google considers how long your site takes to load, how mobile-friendly it is, and similar performance-based factors.
When people talk about SEO-driven content, they mean publishing content for the express purpose of ranking high on Google. As we’ve shown above, that means writing high-quality content that contains the right keywords, while also optimizing other parts of your website.
The Role of Keywords
Keywords are what people type into Google when looking something up. Google considers whether those words or phrases are present in the articles it ranks for a search query.
For example, if someone types “Best PCs of 2024” into Google, the search engine will return pages that prominently feature the best PCs of 2024 — often in the title. But just including a primary keyword like this won’t be enough to rank high in the results.
Remember, SEO is competitive. There are often dozens of companies trying to rank for the same search terms. To beat them, you’ll also need the right secondary keywords in your content. These are related to the main search term, but slightly different — like “fastest PCs of 2024” in our example above.
There’s also the question of how often to include keywords. That depends on the length of your content, but you should typically use primary keywords more than once. Just don’t overdo it, as Google penalizes this so-called “keyword stuffing.”
If you’re not sure how to begin, consider what phrases someone might type into Google when researching the products you sell. These may be primary keywords, worthy of building content around.
Most SEO content creators use keyword research tools to simplify the process. We’ll list some of those later if you’re interested.
Incorporating Creativity
Keywords are only half of the battle when you're creating SEO content. You also need blog posts or articles that people want to read. That means the content you write has to be useful and creative enough to hold someone’s attention.
The useful element is pretty straightforward. To satisfy it, your content needs to directly respond to the user’s search query. In our example, with the “Best PCs of 2024,” that could mean writing a guide for evaluating and choosing a new PC.
Creativity is a bit more difficult to define, but it's still vital. It’s how you make your content stand out from all of the other companies writing guides for the best PCs of 2024.
The good news is that there’s an almost endless number of ways to make your content stand out. You can do so by:
- Using more imagery in your content
- Researching how other companies cover a topic, looking for opportunities for differentiation
- Writing in a more casual, easy-to-read style than your competitors
- Skipping the sales pitch and ads that most online content seems to have now
Balancing Act
Is it now clear why SEO content is such a balancing act? Just to write a single blog post, you have to:
- Research primary and secondary keywords
- Include enough keywords in your content — without including too many
- Try to write the most useful version of the article on the internet
- Make it creative enough to stand out
The key to balancing all this is working on your content in stages. We find that it’s best to start by choosing a primary keyword. Then, consider what people who type that term into Google hope to learn from the articles they find. Try to write with that audience in mind — but don’t worry about incorporating keywords just yet.
Once you’ve written a piece of content you’re happy with, you’ll go back and add the keywords afterward. Scatter them throughout the article so they’re not all clumped together.
This approach works because it lets you focus entirely on creating the best content possible during the writing process. Plus, your article still ends up with all of the keywords it needs. If you try to write a high-quality blog post and optimize it for the search engines at the same time, the content tends to become mechanical and dull.
Tools and Resources
If this all sounds like a bit much, you don’t have to do it on your own. There are tons of SEO content tools available that can help with each aspect of your writing.
For keyword research, consider:
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- Moz
For content ideas and help during the writing process, look into:
- Surfer SEO
- BuzzSumo
- AnswerThePublic
When SEO Meets Creativity, Great Things Happen
Balancing keywords with creativity is one of the main challenges of creating great SEO content. But if you can get it right, it could transform your business and seriously increase its revenue.
Or maybe you just want results. If so, consider Pyromaniac Digital. We'll develop a custom digital marketing strategy that generates consistent leads on autopilot. From help with writing to keyword research, we do it all so you don’t have to.
Get in touch with one of our experts to learn more about how we can help.
