How To Create Most Engaging & SEO-Friendly Content In 2023

Nicholas Amundson

September 17, 2020
9 min read

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How do I create SEO-Friendly & Engaging Content?

Blogging is not as easy as it seems.

It might seem that writing articles while lying in your bed is just about making great content, but people who do the work know they can not be any further from reality.

It is not hard to create articles when writing (and the topics you are writing on) is your passion. But it takes a long time to take all the technical steps, from formatting the final product to optimizing the article for Google search.

The good news is that there are a lot of tools that can automate these processes for you so that you can focus on the fun part: writing.

In this article, I will share the tools I use to execute all of these components.

How to Create Seo-friendly Content

Tool#1: Use Buzzsumo to Make a Decision on the Topic

First, you need to find the right topic for your article.

You may have a lot of good ideas, but you should do some research to make sure that someone else (or hundreds of others) has not addressed your concept.

I am using Buzzsumo to do some research.

This tool helps you to find the most popular content on any topic. It is useful to:

Make sure your idea (or the same) is interesting for people now.
At the same time, make sure that your idea is not overused. It is not necessary to write content on subjects discussed until death, especially if existing articles are complete and well-written. However, if there are several articles on similar low-quality problems, try them.
Analyze the content of the rivals and figure out what they have missed and what their strengths are. You may address ideas this way, but make sure you do not write the same article.
Look for bloggers who are interested in your topic and ask them to share your article.

You can choose the date and sort by language, country, content type, and several words. You can also use those social media networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+).

Even if you find articles about your subject, do not lose hope.

Analyze all of these posts to find out how you can write something ten times better: update, add more research to statistics, do two or five times more, add your point of view or experience, etc.

Always a different perspective, you can add to improve this and make it your own. Once you have determined a great topic and discovered how to improve it, go ahead with the next step.

Tool#2: Use Serpstat to Handle SEO Factors

Serpstat is a complete SEO framework consisting of five modules to help you get a higher position.

This method can be useful in the following ways.

Keyword Search

It has a fantastic keyword research tool that makes it much more helpful to find keywords for your article.

You can have different ways to incorporate a list of keywords, like related keywords and search recommendations.

Related keywords are LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords that can help to make your article more natural.

These keywords are semantically related to the main keywords you are searching in. For example, here is a short list of LSI keywords for the “Windows” query:

The search recommendation feature generates queries that appear below the search bar when you type something on Google, YouTube, or Amazon.

It may sound familiar to you:

The tool captures all these keywords in one place, and you can export them to a spreadsheet.

With this wide range of keywords, you would be sure that your content is optimized for Google robots and readable to humans.

Competition Items

Also, you can check whether your competitors have great articles on your topic.

This tool classifies “Main Pages” by the number of organic keywords used, making it easy to search the list and make sure your idea is not shielded.

You can also see how many Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ shares, as well as expected traffic, have been acquired.

In the below image, you can see who wrote on the topic “content marketing”.

Buffer and HubSpot take first place in the number of organic keywords used, but HubSpot and Sprout Social take first place in social networks, which means more eyes to the article.

Please keep in mind that, despite the low number of keywords and social resources, Wikipedia is up to Buffer for site traffic.

Currently, I take three direct competitors and review their main pages. If I saw something close to my idea, I will read the posts, evaluate them, and then I will start writing.

You can create a spreadsheet for analysis at your convenience.

Columns can vary according to their goals, but the goal is to keep track of what has been written so that you can improve it!

Article Structure

Once you have finally decided what to write about and how to create better content than the competitors, you can find out exactly what people want to hear about the topic.

For this reason, I use the research questions function and related keywords.

List out all the main questions that people are writing on Google, YouTube, and Amazon.

Exactly, Knowing what people want to know about your topic will allow you to answer those questions in your article and title, making it easier to search for content after searching for that query.

This decent list will help you create the structure of your writing by using additional titles similar to those of the subheaders.

Also, you can explore the question and answer sites, such as Quora and Reddit, or Google’s “Best SEO Forums” to find valuable resources.

I recommend that you choose only those questions that haven’t even been answered in detail to make sure your article stands out.

Tool#3: Use Grammarly to Check for Errors and Remove Plagiarism

You decided on a great topic and, after researching, you wrote an exclusive 10x article.

Now, it is a decent idea to set it aside for a day or two to free your mind before returning and editing it. You will think it is an excellent article after a draft, but I can guarantee it is full of mistakes.

You really can not see them because they are very near to that.

When you come back and are ready to start, then edit your article, I suggest you check with Grammarly, a free grammar, spelling, and syntax tool.

It will also alert you whether you used too many words (and give synonyms) or whether the sentence is too long and difficult to understand.

It also has a plagiarism checker that checks the text on more than 8 billion web pages and shows all the parts you need to modify to avoid being charged with theft.

Even if you are a native English speaker, this is a useful tool, though, as, with any other means, you should not have full trust in it.

I also suggest Linguix a similar application, to check spelling and grammatical errors, phrase reformulation, and translation.

It can also help you improve your English skills with a personal trainer.

Tool#4: Use Hemingway

We all know the best practices for online writing: short sentences, short paragraphs, subtitles, bulleted lists, etc.

As of 2016, more people are browsing the web on their mobile phones than on their computers, and when the entire screen is full of long and unnecessary sentences, you don’t want to keep reading.

You can never be as good a writer as Ernest Hemingway, but the Hemingway application will help you write in simple, straightforward, understandable language.

Provide suggestions on how to make your article as comfortable to read as possible, highlight specific errors and describe the color code mistake.

For example, in the previous screenshot, yellow means that the phrase is complicated to understand, pink means that there is a more straightforward option, green means that you used passive voice, and so on.

It also includes a readability note to its contents.

Again, do not trust it fully. If you think your sentence should be a little longer than this tool recommends, leave it blank.

Sometimes you know better than Hemingway.

Tool#5: Use the Keyword Density Checker to Avoid Spam

A while ago, if I used as many keywords as possible, I might get a higher ranking. Today, this is known to be an excess of keywords and can be penalized.

It is essential to maintain a balance when optimizing your article. Sadly, there are still such sites:

I always check my content with the Keyword Density Checker:

Shows the number of times you have used those keywords on the list.

You may use LSI keywords (from tool number two above) or even an online Thesaurus to avoid using the same terms in the article.

I do not use this tool every time I modify an article. Since Grammarly often helps me deal with this issue, if the post is critical, it is always a good idea to check it out.

Summarizing

Here is the list of tools that I often use when creating content.

With these easy steps, you can save a lot of time and trouble producing exclusive, excellent content. All in all, these resources can help you with the following:

Great topic (updated, popular, but not overused)
Keyword research, articles of main competitors
Grammar, spelling, and plagiarism.
Simple, concise, and easy-to-read sentences.
Avoid completing keywords and possible penalties.

Writing is a lot more fun when you can use these simple tools to perform the time-consuming or technical elements of making good content.

Use these tips to make your SEO content Google-friendly and exciting for the reader.