Almost everyone can write content.
But writing content that resonates with your audience and has an impact on your bottom line? It is a much more difficult task.
The good news is you can create engaging articles, emails, landing pages, and copy that will meet your business goals while keeping the promise to your readers.
We’ll walk you through seven top tips for writing effective content in 2021.
Download the. down Semrush Content writing workbook – Get unique insights from key industry experts.
1. Start with your goals
No matter how skilled you are as a content writer or creator, if you don’t have clear goals, you’re bound to fail.
First, without goals, you have nothing to measure your success with. You have no direction either.
We recommend using SMART goals to start your content marketing plan – that is, your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timed.
To make sure this is the case, answer the following questions with your team:
- What do you have to achieve by when?
- How will you measure your success?
- Can you do this with your current resources?
- Does it advance your most important business goals?
2. Get to know your audience
When does a room full of strangers become an audience? When everyone sits up and notices the person speaking.
In order to get people’s attention, you not only need to know their general questions and concerns, but also speak to them directly. That means filtering people the end as much as it means to speak to them.
As the old saying goes, if you try to please everyone, you won’t hurt anyone.
So how do you make sure your message is broad enough to target a broad market, yet specific enough to target individuals?
This is where buyer personas come into play. In content marketing, these descriptive profiles segment and describe your ideal readership (which is likely to be a broader market than your potential customers).
Buyer personas contain a number of important information. In content marketing, along with the usual demographics and background information, you will likely focus most on:
- Your goals and obstacles.
- How they see your product and the products of your competitors.
- The questions you have about your challenges and your solution.
- The content formats and channels they prefer.
- Broader topics and topics that interest them.
The most important thing about buyer personas is to make sure they really reflect your readers.
Be aware, if you make up these profiles or if they contain inaccurate information, they can lead your content marketing team to make mistakes. Take a look at the following possible data sources:
- Internal customer databases.
- Third party analytics tools.
- User feedback.
- Onboarding or exit interviews.
- Knowledge of sales or customer service.
Once you know what each of your buyer personas looks like, you can refine your messages and create content for each customer segment.
3. Get your readers’ attention
The most important part of an article?
The headline.
Correctly. It’s what makes people click and read great content.
The same goes for a compelling email subject line. Without this your newsletter will remain unread.
There are entire masterclasses devoted to writing great headlines and subject lines, but a few specific tips can wipe years of hard trial and error off your plate:
- Controversy, questions, humor, shock and awe, contrast, uniqueness and emotions are all big attention-grabbers in the headlines. Note, however, that numbered lists outperform normal titles. In fact, according to our research, they get 80% more traffic.
- At the same time, your H1 must be descriptive in terms of content – and unique. The content becomes clear not only to the reader but also to Google. Ultimately, articles and guides that fit on the headline get a higher quality rating than content that doesn’t.
- But it is not only over headlines. Don’t forget pictures. Make sure to choose photos or illustrations that will stop thumbs up on social media. Without a picture to tell your story, you will go unnoticed.
Read more in the Semrush Content Strategy Guide.
4. Keep your audience’s attention
So you’ve opened your article, landing page, or email. The question is, can your writing skills keep them there?
Your content should always focus on delivering valuable, relevant content to a reader. The rest of your work consists of tweaking this content for readability, originality, usefulness, and even divisibility.
So how do you keep someone interested?
Before you start writing something for someone, imagine they are sitting across from you.
- What do you want to know?
- What are your questions, doubts, objections, or misunderstandings?
Your buyer personas are now going to be seriously useful. Write these ideas down as bullet points and focus your attention on writing an outline that is meant for you – not others. If you keep their needs in mind, your message will sound out loud.
And remember, longer posts tend to outperform shorter ones, but your goal is not to write a novel. Rather, it is about producing a comprehensive, valuable piece. Strive for quality content rather than quantity and let the topic determine the length of your writing.
Finally, think about what you want your reader to do when they have finished your piece. Would you like them to sign up for a reading list, download a guide, or go to your ecommerce store?
Your calls to action (CTAs) should be clear, consistent, and concise in all content. If you add too many of these, you will find it difficult to measure the success of your content.
Discover the Semrush Content Writing Workbook
5. Optimize your content for search engines
SEO is all about getting your content out to your readers and achieving the goals that you set out in your marketing plan.
Before writing
Target your keywords. Look for primary keywords with a low level of difficulty and a decent search volume. But don’t let the numbers fool you. It is not What Your readers are looking for it why this is important.
Put your keywords in Google and see what comes out of them. Google’s nifty algorithm estimates why the searcher is browsing and helps you understand search intent:
- Are you looking for topic information?
- Do you want to find a website?
- Are they comparing the products to be bought?
- Or do you have your credit cards ready for purchase right away?
The results that Google provides will give you a clearer picture of the type of content you should be creating for your particular keyword.
While writing
Use a number of title tags (H2, H3, and H4) to organize your content. According to our research, more than half of the posts with a complex structure (H2 + H3 + H4) are powerful.
Add value to your audience and increase your SEO by linking to other content on your website and describing the links using keywords. Also note that any images you include should have alt text for accessibility and SEO.
After writing
Next, you need to write a meta title with your primary keyword. It has to be optimized for search engines, but also attractive to real people. So, keep it short and sweet (under 60 characters).
Your URL should include the primary keyword as well – remove stop words (to, the, a, in, etc.) to keep them concise.
Pro Tip: Make sure you have regular content audits as part of your content marketing efforts. They help you discover high-performing and under-performing content and identify parts that need updating.
Download the SEO Writing Checklist 2021 to optimize your content
6. Hit the right tone of voice
Source: Semrush 2021 Research
According to our recent research, 78% of highly rated and well-optimized texts match their tone of voice. But what exactly does it mean and why is it important?
Maintaining your tone is about finding the right way to communicate with your audience. Talk to your grandma the way you talk to your manager and she’ll cut your ear (and maybe vice versa). Our tone of voice changes with the situation, who our audience is, who weather are and what we need to achieve.
The same applies to our buyer personas. We need to talk to individuals, so we also need to change the way we talk to them.
The question is, how do you keep a consistent brand voice at the same time?
Brand Tone of Voice helps define your brand personality. More specifically, the way your brand speaks through its content affects the way people relate to you.
Despite the optimizations we make when talking to grandma or the boss, we are ultimately recognizable as ourselves. Your brand should follow the same approach to content creation and define a personality that can be flexible yet consistent.
Ask your team to get involved. Together, define how you sound now and how you want to sound in the future.
7. Pay attention to legibility
Source: Research on Semrush 2021
The same factors that determine the content of your content also determine the readability of your text.
Do you write for university professors, business people or vacationers? In online marketing, the complexity, length, style, and content depend on your audience and their immediate goals.
Semrush determines readability by averaging the sentence length and complexity, the choice of words and the total text length. The platform then compares your content to your top ten Google competitors to give you a target reading for readability.
A look at the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant
The SEO Writing Assistant scans and analyzes your content based on the target keywords you entered. You’ll get key insights and advice on tone, readability, SEO, and originality.
- volume: The SEO Writing Assistant will highlight whether your text is casual, neutral, formal, or somewhere in between. It also offers consistency rating and pinpoint sentences that you can update to improve.
- SEO: Based on your target keywords and a summary of your top 10 competitors, the wizard gives you a score of 10 and gives you keyword suggestions for the semantically related keywords to strengthen your text, as well as link, title and alt -Tags suggestions.
- Readability: You will get a score of 10. This is based on your readability target and compares your content to that of your top competitors. It also gives you suggestions on how to fix content problems in your text.
- originality: Avoid plagiarism (accidentally or otherwise) with the originality check.
The tool works seamlessly in Google Docs, Semrush and via WordPress.
Next Steps
Download the Semrush Content Writing Workbook (includes tips from leading content marketing experts and interactive assignments) to optimize your copywriting for engagement, conversion, and SEO.
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