You can gain a lot of advantages in SEO just by regularly producing new, relevant content on your website. 2 hours should be enough to write and publish 1000 words of content in WordPress. Even better, write content that is optimized for your keywords. Even if you are not responsible for producing content on your website, go through this routine to make sure that new content is being correctly prepared to maximize SEO.
In this two-hour period, you will
- Do keyword research using Google and SEOPress
- Find ideas for new pages and blog posts
- Write text for existing or new posts and pages
Guidelines for length of posts and pages
In WordPress, pages typically correspond to static information about you and your products / services whereas postsare typically used to add news articles to a blog.
To ensure that Google finds any piece of content interesting enough to index, whether it be a post or a page (or a product page on a WooCommerce site), we recommend that it contains at least 300 words of unique content. General consensus in SEO is that pages (including product pages) should be 300 to 500 words long and that posts should be over 1000 words long. This is not a hard and fast rule, but various studies such as this one by SEMRush shows that Longer Content Ranks for More Keywords and Shows Up in the Top 10 More Often.
When counting words on a page, don’t include words from the header or footer or any text that you repeat from one page to another. When you analyze any page or post using SEOPress Content Analysis, you will be warned when a page or article does not contain at least 300 words.
In our fictive example, Vegas Fit Zone (a fitness Gym in Bristol), the text on the Spin class page is only 88 words long. This text is not long enough for the page to be considered as correctly optimized for SEO and it is probably not detailed enough for a prospective client who wants more information about this class.
One of the first jobs that the person who is responsible for SEO on the Vegas Fit Zone will be to add more text to these pages.
If you need ideas for content, you can use our general advice on keyword research to find what questions a page should answer: Brainstorm with other people, use Google Search Console data, use Google Suggest and People Also Asked in search results. You can also use SEOPress PRO to get keyword suggestions directly in WordPress.
Using keywords to generate article ideas
While you are doing keyword research, bear in mind that some questions asked in Google may merit a whole article to themselves. The keyword “What are the benefits of spin classes” is a good example of this.
The question has been answered by posts such as What are the benefits of spinning? An expert spin class instructor explains all… on Cosmopolitan.com or by 8 Reasons Why You Should Give Spin Class a Try on Bicycling.com. Both these 1000-word articles are ranking well on Google.co.uk for searchers Bristol (and the rest of the UK) at the time of writing.
By regularly adding new content like this to your website, you could rank for a new keyword, but more generally adding new content will help improve the site’s overall ranking. Vegas Fit Zone may never rank in the top 10 results for “benefits of spin classes” on Google.co.uk, but the fact that it has published new content and linked it to the Spin Vegas page may well help that page rank for its target keyword “Spin Class Bristol”.
There is also the chance that another site will find and cite your article with a link (as we have done for Cosmopolitan.com and Bicycling.com) and give you an all-important backlink.
“Benefits of Spin Classes” is a great idea of an article. During your keyword research, you may also find some great ideas for articles. If you are not going to write these articles now, in the 2 hours you have for SEO this week, note the article idea in your SEO spreadsheet so as not to forget it!
Using keywords to structure articles
The example of the article on Cosmopolitan.com also serves to illustrate how keyword ideas can be used to structure the article. The author of this article has structured it by answering 5 questions (probably found as People Also Asked suggestions in Google):
- Is spinning a good workout?
- Is spinning better than running?
- Is spinning good for beginners?
- How many calories does spinning burn?
- How many spin classes should you do a week?
If you are daunted about writing 1000 words, this method may help you. Writing 200-word-long answers to 5 questions sounds much easier than writing 1000 words! And it is.
Writing 1000 words
Enough of theory, if you are the only person who can produce content for your website, then your 2 hours routine this week should be dedicated to writing. Two hours is just enough time to write and publish a 1000-word article on your blog. In two hours, you could also write and publish 2 or 3 product pages. Publishing 1000 words of new content every month is a good target to set yourself. A site that continues to publish new content over time will rank better in Google.
Some people prefer to prepare and write their articles directly in WordPress. Others prefer to write in Word and then integrate content into WordPress later. It will mainly depend on how much you need Word’s spell checker to avoid spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. If you do write in WordPress, make sure that you save your post as a draft regularly.
If you are not a specialist in the subject you are writing about, start by doing some research online and / or interviewing an expert. Even if you are the expert, do some basic keyword research to familiarize yourself with terms and questions used the general public when they search in Google. If you find ideas for new articles while you are doing this, note them in the SEO spreadsheet.
Start by writing the title of the article and then structure the future article by adding headings. Some people may find tools like Clearscope, ChatGPT, Bing Chat or Google Bard really useful to speed up this process. We encourage you to use them but suggest you resist the temptation to ask an AI to write the article for you! AI tools are too likely to create incorrect or unhelpful content that cannot rank in Google. Adding too much unhelpful content to a site may harm rankings for all the pages on the site – even the ones written by humans.
From the layout created with a title and headings, start by writing the introduction and then write two or three paragraphs under each heading. Treat the headers as questions and your paragraphs as replies to that question. Give examples to illustrate your points, add visual illustrations and links to other websites where it is useful. Finish with a one-paragraph conclusion.
Don’t stop at 1000 words if you are “in the flow” and don’t worry too much if you fall just short of this word count. Leave enough time (10 to 30 minutes) to add the article to WordPress if you have written it in Word.
Proofread your article before publishing it, and make sure that you have added at least one internal link to another page on your site. It is important to add links to relevant words such as “discover our spin classes in Bristol” in the text of the articles rather than link using “click here”, images or buttons.
Adding more text to existing pages
As mentioned above for the Vegas Fit Zone example. You may need to add text to existing pages before you start producing blog posts. The site may also be missing pages that target keywords.
Generally, we can say that adding good content to an existing page will help it rank better for its main keyword and it also increases the potential to rank for other keywords. However, other on-page factors can also be taken into consideration when updating pages. If like Vegas Fit Zone, you have pages that are not ranking and need new content, you can write the content this week but wait for next week’s On-Page optimization routine before adding new content to the pages in WordPress.
