WHAT IS SEO WRITING?

Wondering what is SEO writing and why it’s crucial for your business? SEO writing crafts content that ranks high in search results while appealing to real people. This episode explores how SEO writing helps small businesses target the right keywords and match search intent. By creating intentional, well-structured content, you can boost your site’s visibility, attract more customers, and turn clicks into sales.

How to Start SEO Content Writing With Keywords

SEO writing is a powerful tool for local businesses, and it’s easier to start than you might think. Begin by clarifying your content’s purpose—whether answering a question or promoting a service—to match search intent. Use free tools like Google’s “People Also Ask” to research what is SEO writing and find keywords your audience searches for. Incorporate these keywords naturally into your page title, H1 headline, URL slug, and alt text, ensuring readability for humans. Study top-ranking pages to model your content’s length and structure, such as using sub headlines or bullet points. A clear call to action guides readers to the next step, boosting engagement. With SEO writing, you can create content that ranks higher, connects with local customers, and drives growth for your small business.

Listen to this episode below;

Episode Transcript – What Is SEO Writing?

Jesse Dolan (00:19)
Hey everyone. Welcome back to Luminate Local. I’m your host Jesse Dolan. And for the last 25 plus years, I’ve been helping small and local businesses rank higher in search and online to get better leads, grow their business and implement smart, sustainable local SEO. If you’ve ever sat down to write a blog post or a new page for your website and thought, okay, I’m supposed to do this for SEO, but how do I write something that will actually show up in search? This is for you. We’re going to be answering the question.

What is SEO writing? We’ll cover what it really means, why it matters and how to actually do it and do it in a way that helps your content rank and reach your ideal customers, right? It’s not just for the Googlebot, this is for human beings too. So let’s get into it. Okay, so you’re sitting there again, the local business owner, marketing manager, you know, whatever your position is,

you know you need to rank for keywords that matter to your business. You know that content is important. We’ve heard content is king, content is queen, right? Content, content, content. We need more content. But you don’t have content targeting those keywords you wanna be found for maybe, right? Or worse, you’ve written pages maybe that you thought would rank for particular keywords, but they’re not showing up anywhere. You’re not alone. You’re not the only one that has this problem. That’s why we wanna talk here today

about SEO writing or SEO content writing. So here’s the core problem. Maybe your site doesn’t have the content it needs to rank for the keywords you want. You feel stuck because you’re not sure how to write the content with SEO in mind. And what does that mean versus just writing the content in general, right? How do you apply SEO to this? How do you do SEO content writing? Content that Google likes, but also real people actually want to read.

Again, this isn’t just for the Googlebot, is for human beings too. We have to satisfy both of things here. So SEO writing may feel hard, may feel unnatural, and it may require you to think like a search engine and a human being at the same time, right? Again, we got to satisfy both. Bit of a weird combination. And I don’t think it’s taught very clearly out there. I’m not knocking anybody or anything.

It’s just something that when we talk to clients, this is always a subject that just really needs a lot of education. So that’s what we’re gonna try to fix here today, or at least talk through on some of these points. So who am I? Again, I’m Jesse Dolan. I’ve spent 25 years helping businesses build content strategies and implement SEO that gets results. And here’s what I’ve learned when it comes to SEO writing. It doesn’t have to be a mystery. It’s a skill,

just like writing or creative writing or things like that. Some people are good, some people are bad. And like any skill, it’s gonna get easier once you understand the process and practice it, okay? So let’s walk through some things step by step. Before I get into that though, I do wanna read a review on this episode. If you’ve listened to any other episodes for Luminate Local, you know that we read a review on every episode.

Reviews are very important to us. That’s the way we get feedback from you, the audience, knowing that these episodes are good, that they resonate with you, that our teachings are on point and we’re talking about the things that you want to learn and it’s all working good. So if you are so inclined, please go on out to luminatelocal.com and scroll to the bottom. You’re going to find a link for reviews there. You can read reviews. We’re also going to have buttons for you to leave a review on any platform that you so desire. Facebook, Apple Podcasts,

Google, whatever it is, luminatelocal.com, scroll down and click on reviews. We’d love to hear from you. And if you submit a review, we’re going to read it here on the show, just like this one from Carmela Hagan. She says, this great five-star review from Google, Jesse demystified Google and local SEO in a clear and simple way to get my business and website to be top search results. Thank you for the great five-star review, Carmela and everybody else. Again, if you

feel that same way, if we’re bringing you that kind of value, we would love to get a review from you. In return, go to luminatelocal.com, click on reviews. Alright, back to the show, let’s break SEO writing into, I got four simple parts here that I’m gonna kind of go off some bullet points that I’ve created. So step one, part one, item one, however you want to say it, clarify why you’re writing. Before you start typing,

ask yourself, why am I writing this page or why am I writing this post or whatever? Why am I writing this content? Most likely it’s because you want it to show up in search. That means it needs to match search intent. Okay. Google does a great job of guessing. If I’m a searcher, if I’m typing in something in a search, Google does a great job of guessing what my intention is. Right? A classic example I use all the time is wedding band, right?

YouTube, I’m holding up my wedding band here. If I did a search for wedding band, does Google think that I’m looking for jewelry or does it think I’m looking for a live band to play at my wedding, right? Now, as a searcher, Google knows a ton about me. It’s been tracking me, listens, it watches, it records my searches, everything else, right? And so it’s pretty good at guessing my intent. But as the content writer here on the other end of the keyboard, you have to make sure that your intent on the content you’re creating

is very clear and it has that, because then Google can match it up with me as a searcher, my intent, right? So are you answering a question? Are you promoting a service? Explaining a process, showing a DIY, a how-to, whatever it is, be clear on your purpose because writing for SEO means writing strategically and intentionally. So why are you writing this? Make sure you have that

identified in the back of your mind. Second is do keyword research. You can’t rank for what people are not searching for. Maybe you got a crystal ball and you put some content out there for things that don’t exist yet. Example here I love to always use is Uber. Back in the day Uber wasn’t a thing. We had taxis. So, you know, nobody was searching for ride sharing or Uber, right? Things like that.

So if you had a crystal ball, great, you would have been creating that content ahead of everybody else. But people weren’t searching for that stuff, right? So you can’t rank for what people aren’t searching for, just, that just doesn’t work. So before you do write content, figure out what are people actually typing into Google? Another great metaphor here is if you’re trying to be found for red balloons.

Are people typing in red balloons? Are they typing in party balloons? Are they typing in red party balloons? Right? You just gotta figure out what it is that they’re typing in versus what you think they’re typing. Maybe you have some industry jargon in your mind. Maybe you have the curse of knowledge for what you call the thing. Don’t do that. You wanna do some keyword research. There’s tools. You can go into Google and just do a search for whatever keyword you’re thinking of. Scroll down to the bottom. I love telling this

people all the time, is super, super quick, relatively speaking and free, typing your keyword into Google, scroll down and look for the People Also Ask or, you know, related searches. It can look different depending on what you’re searching for and where you’re at. But Google will give you examples of things that it thinks are related to what you searched for that other people are searching for. Just rinse and repeat that. It could be like six or 10 examples at the bottom, depending on how you’re seeing it and just write those down. So

the free tool, if you will, from Google is effective. There’s also a lot of paid resources out there. Just do a search for keyword research. You’re going to find all kinds of companies. Some might be free. Some might have a small subscription, but they’re going to try to pull in some data for you to help understand the volume behind those keywords, how many people are searching for that thing at any given month. That’s great. A little bit more advanced than the free Google technique.

I do like if you’re just starting out, if you’re listening to this, if this is all new to you, just do the free Google technique. You don’t have to spend any money yet or sign up for anything. Because to an extent, at least what I’m trying to teach here, it’s not about how many people are searching for the thing. It’s that people are searching for the thing. Right. And so if you use this free Google method, if Google says People Also Searched For, right. Well, people have also searched for that. People have searched for that. Right. So you’re going to be pretty darn safe.

So again, you can use the free Google option. If you are doing paid ads within Google, there is a Google Keyword Planner tool and function within there where it’s gonna show you all kinds of great keyword data. Check that out if you are paying for ads on Google. And again, if you just do a search online for keyword research, you’re gonna come up with all kinds of options that are out there. I’m not trying to endorse any particular

brand or portal for that here on this episode. So I’m not gonna go down a list of names, but at the end of the day, you wanna find your main keyword for this article, right? We’re not talking about keyword research for your whole business here at all, right? Just again, you’re gonna write an article. You’ve identified the intent of your article, what kind of content you’re putting out. Now you wanna make sure you identify what are some of the main keyword or keywords or keyword phrases. It doesn’t have to just be one word, right? It can be a phrase.

Identify those main keywords for your topic in your article and gather any related questions, you know, phrases that are kind of around it and make a list of those. That’s going to be your roadmap for the things you want to hit on for your content and include in this article or post. That would lead us to the third part, which is incorporating these keywords intentionally. This is a big part of SEO

is being intentional, right? We don’t wanna just stumble upon things or keep them as default. We want to be intentional with what we’re doing. We wanna craft our pages and our posts here. So once you know those keywords, here’s where you’re gonna wanna use them. Your page title,

if you do a Google search, the biggest text that we see on the screen, that’s usually your page title. Google can rewrite that in some cases, but for all intents and purposes, have your keywords or a keyword or phrase that you want to be found for in your page title. And then also in your primary headline, which is going to be called the H1 or headline one. And that’s like the, the, the big headline should be at the very top of the page. You want to make sure you have a keyword or keywords, keyword phrases in that as well.

I also love seeing keywords or related keywords in the first paragraph right underneath that H1, your primary headline. And then just kind of repeat that cascading down the page. Your sub headlines, content underneath those, you want to work in these keywords and phrases intentionally into your content. Again, you want to make sure you’re typing it in a way that reads well for human beings

in addition to being scanned by the Googlebot here for being found in search, it has to read properly as well. So don’t be mechanical or artificial. We want to be intentional with making sure we put our keywords in, but it has to be readable and digestible for humans as well. Another area people forget is the actual URL of your page, right? So luminatelocal.com slash whatever.

That whatever, right? That’s the URL slug of your page or post that you’re creating and you’re gonna want to make sure that you’re clearly identifying the intent, the topic, the keywords, however you want to say it within that URL. Often something similar to your page title or that primary H1 is going to be a good starting point for what your URL slug or string should look like. A couple other areas you want to make sure you’re intentional with your keywords

is your meta description. That is, again, we do a Google search, the big text you’re gonna see when you click on a result in Google is usually the page title, then the smaller text under it isn’t always, but can often be the meta description. And that’s something on your web page or your content management system you’re gonna have to kind of input. And that’s just a brief description of the article, the content, what it is there.

Another area that’s kind of hidden that people will overlook, I wouldn’t say this is advanced SEO, but this gets a little bit more nuanced is the image file names and alt text for any images that are gonna be on that page or post. And what do I mean when I say image file name? If I were to take a picture with my iPhone and just save it to my computer and it’s default, if it’s, you know, IMG1234.jpg. If I were to just take that off my computer and upload it to my webpage,

that’s the file name, you know, IMG1234.jpeg. Well, instead, if that’s a picture of red balloons, I’d save it to my computer. I would then rename it red-balloons.jpeg and then upload it to my webpage. Now the file name of this picture is red balloons, right? And that has a much more direct indicator on what this picture is and what this page is about if it’s about red balloons in that case. Additionally, you have alt

text, which you can modify for the images that you would include in your web pages. And this is usually, and maybe even technically, this is for if it’s a screen reader, if somebody is trying to just have the content read to them instead of reading it with their eyes, it’s going to, when it comes across an image, it’ll say this is what the image is, the alternate text, the alt text.

But for SEO purposes, this is another spot for us to input, you know, a sentence or a phrase that contains our keywords in there. That makes it relevant. And then in general, so we’re kind of hitting on some of the main technical areas here, your H1s, your sub headlines, paragraphs directly under headlines, images, things like that on how to use your keywords, but then just sprinkle them in naturally throughout the copy.

Maybe throw a bold or an italics on some of them, incorporate some into bullet pointed lists, things like that. The keyword here is naturally, right? Don’t overdo it. Google’s smarter than you think. A lot of these old tricks, just stuffing keywords, you know, having half of the words on the page be keywords or phrases. Google’s smarter now, those are old tricks and your readers deserve better too. That’s gonna make it really hard to read. So don’t do that.

People will ask all the time. Can’t I just put a bunch of keywords at the bottom of the page? That’s a white page. Can I make it white text so they’re hidden? No, no, don’t do that. Don’t do that. It’s not gonna work either. Alright, moving on to the next part here. Sorry, I’m belaboring there a little bit but moving on to the next part is your structure, your format and kind of the length for SEO writing and this is where most people, I’d say, I’d say fall short.

Before you write your article or post, at this point, you’ve got your keywords identified. Do some searching and look at what the top ranking content for those keywords are. Study it. Ask yourself, how long is it? What sections does it cover? How is it formatted? Just take a look at what’s already dominating for those. I should say, what’s tactics and what’s

architecture and style are those pages using for what’s dominating that keyword search and then model your content based on what’s already working. I’m not talking about copying it at all or plagiarizing or cloning in any way but understand if you’re trying to write an article about, again, red balloons and if you have 500 words of text written but the top 10 articles all have 2,000, well, you’re gonna need, you’re gonna need more content, right, because Google’s favoring that, so

do some searches, do some research, do a little reverse engineering, see what they’re doing. How long is the content? What are they doing for headlines, sub headlines? How many sub headlines are they using? A bunch of bullet points, long paragraphs, a lot of pictures, is there videos, right? Things like that. You want to make sure you’re doing all of that. And also I would say this isn’t a hundred percent SEO here, this last bit, but have a clear call to action at the end.

This is good for search engines and AI agents because it helps them identify what the next step is, what the intent is. But just for human beings, this gives them that next step. Let’s just assume you write a great article. Let’s just assume it ranks high in Google. You want to make sure when somebody is done reading it or gets to the bottom of it or, you know, mixed in between, whatever, you’re providing them the next step, you don’t ever want people guessing at what they should do next. So

make sure, have a clear call to action and that you have put that in front of people. Now for you listening here, there’s a call to action as well. I would say go out to luminatelocal.com and take our free SEO audit. If you’ve already created a page that you want to audit or maybe you want to save this and go through this process, do your SEO writing, publish the page and then go score it and see how good that you did.

You can use our free tool, luminatelocal.com. Click on the yellow button for the free SEO audit. You plug in your webpage. This is something that’s page by page. And then you type in the keyword that you want to score it against or that you think you’re optimized for. And it’s gonna, within seconds, it’s gonna run a quick report. It’s gonna pop a PDF up on the screen for you. And it’s gonna show you what’s the good, bad, and the ugly for that page. And it’s gonna give you a checklist of things to fix. So

head on over there, again luminatelocal.com, click on the yellow button, take the free SEO audit, and in just a few clicks, you’ll know where you stand on that. So, and it’s gonna maybe help you write a better, you know, final draft of your article or post. Okay, so hopefully that gives you a good outline and architecture on, you know, the basic one-on-one of what is SEO writing, how do you approach it, what makes it different, and

how to have the right intent and all these things. So as I always like to do, what happens if you don’t, right? What happens if you don’t take SEO writing seriously? And if you don’t incorporate these and you just slap out an article, like maybe you always would have. Well, you’re going to spend probably hours creating that content. Even if you use ChatGPT or something else, you’re going to input into it. You’re going to get the output. You should be massaging it and not just throwing up straight ChatGPT onto your website.

You’re going to have some time into this, right? And then it may not rank, right? Never gets found, never brings in new business. Nobody ever finds it. It doesn’t get shared at the end of the day. That’s wasted time, effort and energy, and lost opportunity for you, where if you would’ve taken a little bit more time, had that intent, mixing your keywords, optimize that page a little bit better with the right architecture. Then you could have success. If you plan, if you research and you structure your content the right way,

you at the very least set yourself up for real growth and give yourself a shot. You can attract the right audience. You can rank for those keywords, the ones that actually matter for your business that you’re targeting and turn that content into visibility. I would say illuminate your content, right? Make it glow, pun intended. And anyway, visibility turns into sales, right? It’s a math, it’s a numbers game. The better content you put out, the more eyeballs that are going to get on it. The more eyeballs that are going to get on it, it’s going to turn into sales for you. There we go. I think that’s a good ending point for this episode. I hope there’s some actionable items in there for you for SEO writing, that’s different than just writing content, right? Or creative writing. It’s that plus SEO. And if you do it in the right way, it’s going to help you rank and then get found online.

Don’t forget to take our free SEO audit at luminatelocal.com. And if you have a question that you would like us to answer on this show, we love doing that. Just go again out to luminatelocal.com, scroll down to the bottom, click on the link for questions, submit your question. If we use it on the show, we’re gonna send you a free swag bag with some Luminate Local gear in there, which is pretty cool. So check that out if you are so inclined. Thanks for listening to this episode and we’ll catch you on the next one. Take care.

Use SEO Copywriting To Improve Your Marketing Today

SEO copywriting doesn’t have to be daunting—you don’t have to be an expert SEO copywriter to succeed! This episode simplifies what is SEO writing, offering a clear roadmap to create content that drives traffic and resonates with search engines. Use SEO tools like Google’s “People Also Ask” to research your primary keyword and match search intent. Structure your content like top-ranking pages, using keywords strategically in headlines, URLs, and alt text, but keep it natural to engage readers. A strong call to action guides your audience, turning clicks into customers. Whether you’re a local business owner or marketer, SEO writing is a skill you can master to boost visibility and attract the right audience. Start implementing these strategies now and watch your small business climb the search rankings with compelling content!

Episode Notes and Resources

• Free SEO Audit Tool: Evaluate your website’s SEO performance with our free tool

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