Ultimate Checklist For Better Content Writing
Writing excellent content is not an easy task even when ignoring SEO. In this article, we will showcase to you our amazing content improvement checklist that will help you turn any article from bad to extraordinary. We have also added a content improvement checklist you can use to follow and check every time you’re writing a new piece of content, so remember to save this page to your favorites.
Why use a checklist for writing?
Many of you might wonder, why should you even need a checklist for writing? The most obvious answer for this is that it helps you to keep track of what you have added to your content, what you have not added, and most importantly helps you visualize what kind of elements your content still needs to be the perfect article or a blog post for your site.
Note – Remember that you are writing for people, not for search engines, even though we are optimizing the content for SEO purposes. For more SEO tips we recommend you to read our Ultimate Guide To WordPress SEO For Beginners.
Why not follow the checklist every time?
Something we want to talk about before showcasing our checklist is that you are not required to follow it with every piece of content you write or create. The checklist is only there to help you to keep track of what you could be adding to your content to make it better and more search engine optimized. If something doesn’t fit the content and it doesn’t serve a real purpose you shouldn’t be adding that to the content itself. Fluff is something that even search engines despise and your readers most likely hate.
The Checklist
Note – Your own checklist might be completely different from ours, but the checklist we are showcasing should work for most content writers as a guide for better content and better SEO results.
Explanations
High CTR Title
Your title is what people will see in the search engines. Make your title something interesting that people will want to click on.
Optimize For Snippets
Snippets are rich search results that are sometimes displayed in the search results. Optimize your article for winning snippets by including paragraphs in your content that directly answer the heading that they appear under.
Add an answer target paragraph under your main title, any relevant subheadings, and again in your conclusion.
Add Links
Internal and external links are important for your site. External links to authoritative sources show Google that your content is trustworthy and well-researched.
Internal links help your users find their way around your site, provide contextual clues to google about your site structure, and help with engagement by increasing your page views per session and overall time on site.
Add Images
Images help make your content more engaging and give you a second source of traffic via image searches.
Your featured image is a chance to strengthen your brand identity by including a logo or filter to your brand colors.
Stock photos should be edited, cropped, or adjusted in some way to make them unique to your site. This also helps SEO-wise by allowing them the potential to rank higher in Google’s image search for being more unique.
Add Data
Google is smart enough now to parse data from data structures including tables and lists.
Tables and lists make your content more engaging and give you an opportunity to present data in an easy-to-read manner.
If you can find some data to use in a table that hasn’t been published anywhere else in an easy-to-read format like a table, other sites are likely to link to you when referencing your data.
Check Grammar
It’s good advice to give your article a final check over with a tool like Grammarly to make sure there aren’t any errors. Having a lot of grammatical errors can hurt your SEO rankings as well as your authoritativeness in the eyes of the reader.
