Digital Marketing / SEO / Search Engine Optimization
A Basic SEO Checklist for Writers
Use these guidelines to improve your web copy.
I’ve built my career off developing highly-effective marketing websites that attract and convert prospects.
What makes a website perform well?
Over and over, I’ve found that content is the most important part of a marketing website.
Sometimes clients are surprised by this. They over-emphasize the role of visual design and branding when it comes to their website.
And don’t get me wrong, design is important. But design can’t save a website with weak content.
“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design. It’s decoration.” — Jeffrey Zeldman
Websites rely on strong written content.
And I want you to be a more effective writer.
In this article, I’ll show you how you can prepare your written pieces so that they are more likely to show up first when your desired audience does a Google web search.
SEO Terminology
Before we get into the actual steps you need to take to make sure your content is search optimized, we need to review a few key terms. If you’re already familiar with these terms, go ahead and skip ahead to the checklist.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
As with many things in life, writing success is heavily influenced by just showing up. For writers, that means showing up at the right time for the right audience. Enter: The search engine.
Search engines are essentially bots that are programmed to crawl and index content on the Internet. Moz has a great article that goes into more detail on how search engines work, if you are interested.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website.
It’s important to understand that SEO is more than just writing. There are a number of technical factors that matter as well. But for the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus solely on the written component.
Focus Keyword
Every page should have a focus keyword (or phrase) identified. This is the main term that people would search in order to find your content. It should accurately describe what your content is about.
The focus keyword may also be referred to as the focus key-phrase or the primary keyword.
Focus keywords for blogs can be more educational and long (ex: “how to improve your writing for SEO”). Focus keywords for product and solution pages should focus more on the product or product category (ex: “seo tool”) or words that signify an intent to buy (ex: “best seo tool”).
Try to have a unique focus keyword for each page on the site. It’s also good practice to define some secondary keywords that are also important.
The best way to do keyword research? Understand your audience, their questions, their goals. Choose your focus keyword and write your content with these things in mind.
Here’s more information on keyword research and how to decide on the right focus keyword.
I included tips for where to place your focus keyword in the checklist below.
SEO Title
The SEO title is usually the page title (or the H1, if you are familiar with HTML). There are instances when you may want to define a separate title for SEO vs what shows up on your actual page.
I included tips for optimizing your SEO title in the checklist below.
Meta Description
The meta description is an HTML tag that describes your content. It’s what shows up in search engine results, under the title of the article. If you don’t define a meta description, Google will instead grab some of the words from your copy (not ideal).
I included tips for optimizing your meta description in the checklist below.
Alt Tags (Alternative Text)
An alt tag is an attribute in the HTML image tag.
Alt tags should describe the image, so search engines can understand it. Search engines cannot see, so we need to tell them about the image.
Alt tags are important because they also provide a written description to potential audience members who may be blind or vision impaired. For this reason, alt tags are an important component of website accessibility.
Internal Links
These are links that go to another article or page on the same website or domain.
External Links
These are links that go to another article or page on a different website or domain.
There are many more SEO terms, including more advanced topics like schema, but we’ll cover those concepts on another day.
That covers the most basic terms in SEO writing. Here’s how to apply them to your writing.
SEO Writing Checklist
Focus Keyword and Placement
- Have you defined a focus keyword for your article?
- Is your focus keyword a term that people actually use and would search?
- Is the focus keyword relevant to your audience or your business?
- Is the focus keyword used in the introduction of the page?
- Is the focus keyword used in at least one subheading on the page?
- Is the focus keyword used in an image alt tag?
- Is the focus word in the URL for the page?
- Is the focus word in your SEO title and meta description?
Optimize Your SEO Title
- Is your title 50–60 characters long?
- Did you include the focus keyword in your SEO title?
- Did you put the most important words first?
- Did you use a unique title that you haven’t used on other pages or articles?
Optimize Your Meta Description
- Is your meta description around 160 characters long?
- Does your meta description include the focus keyword?
- Is your meta description human-readable? It should not be a list of keywords or features.
Optimize Your Writing
- Are the page headlines and subheads relevant? (Maximize subheads by including important keywords. Try to make it meaningful for your audience. Avoid buzzwords or jargon.)
- Did you include links to related information? Are you including both internal and external links?
- Is the content at least 600 words? (Longer is better for search, but make sure it’s relevant.)
- Are the sentences short and easy to read? If there are particularly long sentences, try splitting them into multiple sentences.
- Are you speaking directly to the reader?
- Did you break up any large walls of text? Content should be broken into scannable, short paragraphs, bullet lists, or chunks of content that are easy to digest
- Did you proof it carefully to make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors?
Additional On-Page Optimization
Besides writing, there are also some behind-the-scenes SEO tasks that you can do when publishing content.
If you are not familiar with how to add these things to a blog or web page, stay tuned for a future step-by-step guide.
- Make sure the page is indexable for search (meta robot tags: index, follow).
- Add the SEO title tag in the correct place. Note: On Medium, you can define the SEO title by going to Settings and then selecting “More Settings.”
- Add the meta description tag in the correct place. Note: On Medium, you can define the meta description by going to Settings and then selecting “More Settings.” The SEO description is the same as the meta description.
- Define an open graph social sharing image (1200 x 630px is the ideal size if using a single image).
- Optimize the URL segment.
Resources To Learn More
I hope this was a useful guide and will help you improve your writing for SEO. If you’d like to learn more, here are some of my favorite resources on the topic (not affiliated).
