{"id":42911,"date":"2018-01-10T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2018-01-10T20:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/blog\/?p=42911"},"modified":"2019-07-25T12:58:03","modified_gmt":"2019-07-25T19:58:03","slug":"seo-content-tools-for-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/blog\/seo-content-tools-for-writers\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Writers Expected to Do SEO? New WordPress SEO Tools to Support Content Writers"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re in a time when writers carry a heavy responsibility. They produce the fuel \u2014 SEO-ready content \u2014 that marketing engines need to drive sales forward.<\/p>\n

Content marketing requires a LOT of content. In fact, 72% of marketers surveyed said relevant content creation is the most effective SEO tactic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It makes sense, then, that writers should be equipped with tools that help them make informed SEO decisions along the way to making relevant, optimized content<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"content<\/p>\n

At the beginning of each year I share my marketing predictions<\/a>, and last year I wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cNew tools will help content marketers produce targeted, high-quality content at the time of publishing. Content writers demand more data and become more technically bold as easy-to-use tools provide traffic and competitor SEO stats, ushering in a new generation of targeted high-quality content.\u201d<\/p>\n

Admittedly, this led to the WordPress SEO plugin<\/a> that we developed and announced last October. After all, if you predict something, then you should also act on it!<\/p>\n

What a plugin like Bruce Clay SEO for WordPress does is give writers and publishers a tool to create targeted content that is reasonably search engine optimized. Writers are empowered with website and web page analytics data<\/strong> in a familiar environment in a user-friendly UX. Writers get competitive analysis<\/strong> of the targets they are aiming to outrank with their own content. And writers get all this at the point of publishing<\/strong> allowing for streamlined analysis within the World Wide Web\u2019s most popular publishing platform.<\/p>\n

This is critical because …<\/p>\n

Original Content Is Becoming Harder to Produce<\/h2>\n

Marketers are increasingly turning to content as a way to market to ad-averse digital natives. As a result, the amount of content available on every topic possible has grown exponentially. Content works at every stage of the customer journey from brand awareness to lead generation. And everyone knows that content is needed to be in business today. This has led to content burnout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s obvious that today\u2019s best writers have a growing need for SEO skills to help them analyze data and decide what content needs creating.<\/i><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Content burnout or overload has happened as so many topics have been covered in-depth online. Original content is harder to produce because so much has already been written on so many topics. Targeted content is in some ways easier to produce because of the amount of tools available and the lower volume of existing content online, but to produce both original and targeted content is still difficult.<\/p>\n

Is Too Much Content a Bad Thing?<\/h2>\n

This content economy has positive implications for SEO<\/a>. The more quality content you have on a site covering one particular topic, the more likely you are to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs). We believe that authors need SEO to become first among equals.<\/p>\n

Creating a massive amount of quality SEO content<\/a> makes it hard for the competition to keep up. As long as your body of quality content is continually increasing, companies with smaller budgets or that begin producing later will find it difficult to ever catch up to your site in terms of domain authority.<\/p>\n

But if you are new to the web, not all is lost. What helps new bloggers is that even though much content exists online, most of it never gets any attention. In a study of a million articles<\/a>, 75% of 100,000 randomly selected pieces had no external links and fewer than 39 shares.<\/p>\n

\"shares<\/a>
A 2015 study by BuzzSumo and Moz analyzed the shares and links of over 1 million articles to see the format of content that get relatively more shares or links.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We believe that writers who are able to produce great written content with search marketing value have a huge advantage. By properly optimizing their content for search, writers are gradually adding SEO to their normal content-focused duties.<\/p>\n

Are Writers Expected to Do SEO?<\/h2>\n

At one point, 85% of B2B marketers<\/a> reported they couldn\u2019t connect their content marketing activity to business value. This led to a number of reputable organizations making it a priority to determine what the ROI of content marketing was, and what it should be.<\/p>\n

Now we know a lot about the ROI of content marketing, like:<\/p>\n