Writers contribute to SEO rankings more than they might think. Yes, much of SEO is built into the back end of a company’s website, but the site’s front end also has significant ranking power.
When marketing writers and bloggers understand how they can optimize their content for SEO they deliver greater value to their companies and clients. This article discusses how the writer can maximize their contribution to SEO, mostly by ensuring high-quality copy.
How Writers Can Cotribute to SEO
Let’s start by looking at what SEO does, how it works, and what the writer brings to the table.
SEO may apply mostly to blogs and websites, but also to content marketing assets. The underlying concept of SEO is that searchers want relevant, quality content that meets their needs.
Google’s only job is to deliver the web pages that most closely match the searcher’s needs and intent. Google ranks page results according to a complex algorithm that identifies which pages most closely meet the search criteria, and results appear in that order—with the closest match at the top of page one.
For SEO, the copywriter’s writer’s job is to deliver content that gets top ranking on the search page. In doing so, they help the content get noticed by the target audience, draw high-quality leads, and keep them engaged on the page.
While the overall website—front-end and back-end—is designed and developed to be SEO-friendly, the copywriter can play a significant role in SEO effectiveness.
Quality is the Primary Factor in Writing SEO Content
A common phrase in SEO copywriting is “quality is king,” and that’s truer than ever. Over time, quality has overtaken all other components of SEO.
Poor content quality leads to poor ranking position. High quality leads to moving higher up on the results page. Competition for page rank is stiff and it takes time to rise in the rankings, but consistent efforts to maintain high content quality can move the needle.
Writers Boost SEO by Focusing on Quality
Quality can mean many things to different people.In business, quality may refer to how well something performs, technological advances, meeting customer expectations, or other criteria.
For Google, quality is evaluated according to four factors known as E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
E-E-A-T Indicates High-Quality Content to Google
E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor in the Google algorithm, but it does impact it. E-E-A-T is a guideline that helps Google’s algorithm assess a website’s credibility. Websites that demonstrate strong E-E-A-T characteristics are more likely to rank higher.
Below is a cheat sheet of what is meant by each E-E-A-T factor and examples that exemplify each area.
We’ll go into more depth below and discuss how copywriters can focus their copy on each element to increase quality, boost SEO rankings, and better reach digital marketing goals.
EXPERIENCE: Practical Involvement with the Subject Matter
What is Experience?
Experience is a new factor in E-E-A-T, introduced in 2022. Google’s objective was to improve quality by giving more weight to content created by people with first-hand knowledge and practical involvement with the subject matter.
Expertise indicates to Google that the content will be accurate and reliable. Readers will judge the content as more trustworthy. The experience factor is especially significant for complex issues and those with high impact, including medical advice, financial planning, and legal matters.
How Writers Contribute to Experience
Authors can demonstrate experience by writing from a first-person viewpoint, discussing real-world examples, and outcomes of projects they have worked on. From their experience, authors can share insights based on doing, not just on knowing.
Experience can be shown through personal stories and anecdotes, case studies, portfolios, and practical applications. The content can also be based on interviews or collaborations with people who practice in the field.
If publishing with a bylined article, share relevant biographical information about the author, such as career highlights, certifications, training, awards, and likes to the author’s About page.
For example, here’s my About page, which shares my background, writing method, and education. My Westebbe Marketing home page also includes customer testimonials, areas of expertise, and a FAQ for more in-depth information about my career and services.
EXPERTISE: Depth and context related to the subject matter
What is Expertise?
Like the experience factor, Google and readers often judge quality by the depth and level of knowledge a writer brings to the topic or field. Unlike expertise, the expertise may be on a more intellectual plane and perhaps less than by direct experience.
In this vein, the author can demonstrate expertise by sharing qualifications such as formal education, qualifications, participation in expert panels, or other indicators that the content will be accurate and reliable.
As an example, my website includes customer testimonials and degrees, while highlighting my blog articles as evidence of my “product.”
How Writers Contribute to Expertise
Showing substantial experience is one way to demonstrate expertise, so the elements in the section above equally apply to expertise. The writer should focus on solving the audience’s challenges and pain points, providing practical, actionable advice that reflects their expertise.
Some important aspects of showing expertise include:
- In-depth, long-form content, with blog articles of at least 1,000 words, up to 2,000 words
- Transparency of information, with attribution to sources—with hyperlinks as appropriate
- Timeliness, using the most recent data possible
- Well-research work, going the primary source of the data, rather than second-hand sources that may misstate or misinterpret data
- Content provided in the context of current research, industry news, and trends
- Regularly updated content to ensure relevancy and accurately
- Data and insights from original research, surveys, and studies
AUTHORITATIVENESS: Recognized as a reliable, well-respected source
What is Authoritativeness?
Authoritativeness largely depends on industry experts recognizing you as a reputable, reliable, and trustworthy source.
The authoritativeness factor has historically been based on having other reputable sources provide backlinks from their websites to your website, citing your website, or providing information about your brand.
An in-house or freelance copywriter has limited control over backlinks, and multi-faceted website backlinking strategies. Success relies on far more than individual pieces of content. Still, there are many ways that copywriters can affect a website’s authority.
How Writers Contribute to Authoritativeness
The writer’s role in building authoritativeness primarily relies on consistently delivering high-quality content based on their expertise, experience, and trustworthiness.
When readers see that an author or brand consistently offers valuable content with unique insights and perspectives, the individual or brand can be in the enviable position of being recognized as a thought leader—one of the key aspects of authoritativeness.
Writers and brands can build their thought leadership position by publishing opinion pieces, trend analyses, predictions, research papers, white papers, comprehensive guides, and other educational material.
Thought Leadership Reinforces Authority
Thought leadership pieces show that the brand is ahead of the curve by covering industry trends, new developments, or breaking news.
The thought leader focuses on being the first to provide expert commentary on relevant topics, not simply reiterating the opinions of other experts. More than any other E-E-A-T factor, authoritativeness often refers to an individual, rather than the brand.
What is a thought leader? 3 Expert Definitions
“Being a thought leader means having a unique point of view and consistently living it. You must demonstrate strength and discipline in all your actions. You must have clarity about your purpose. That’s how you become known for something, productize it and even monetize it.”
his Forbes article also describes the thought leader as a “person who is specialized in a given area and whom others in that industry turn to for guidance. As the term implies, a thought leader leads others in the thinking around a given topic…A thought leader can be an individual or an organization and typically stands out among competitors.” Forbes
“Thought leadership is a tactic content marketers use to build credibility for themselves or leaders in their company. The main goal of thought leadership is to become recognized as an expert and used as a go-to expert in your field.” HubSpot
“The goal of thought leadership marketing is to promote your business as a leader in your industry while building confidence with your target customer. Effective thought leadership content is insightful, compelling content meant to pique interest in your company.” The New York Times
TRUSTWORTHINESS: The overarching E-E-A-T factor
What is Trustworthiness?
As we’ve seen, the E-E-A-T factors are highly interconnected. Trustworthiness lies at the center of the entire E-E-A-T framework.
According to Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines: “Trust is the most important member of the E-E-A-T family because untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T no matter how Experienced, Expert, or Authoritative they may seem.
For example, a financial scam is untrustworthy, even if the content creator is a highly experienced and expert scammer who is considered the go-to on running scams!”
In other words, Google views trustworthiness as the most important E-E-A-T factor of them all.
Again, Google looks for many indicators of trustworthiness that the author cannot control. For example, the copywriter has little to no input into privacy and security policies, delivering products on time, customer reviews, and transparency about ads.
Yet, copywriters can still enhance a brand’s trustworthiness.
How Writers Contribute to Trustworthiness:
It’s no surprise that trustworthiness wraps up many elements of the E-E-A-T family, such as writing high-quality, timely, and relevant content. Other ways to enhance trustworthiness include:
- Knowing the target audience and how they measure trust
- Providing solutions relevant to the target audience’s issues, challenges, and pain points. Read about How to Leverage Audience Personas.
- Using language that is appropriate to the industry and demographics of the audience
- Building relationships and engaging with your audience by replying to their comments and questions
- Publishing consistently, at regular intervals, and distributing content widely
- Tailoring content to audience intent by creating content for different stages of the customer journey
- Evaluating content performance to see what is resonating with your audience, and adjusting content accordingly
- Focusing on content that is educational, not promotional
- …And my favorite: Writing for humans, not search engines. Your audience responds to a genuine, authentic human more than to keyword-saturated or AI-generated content.
Read more about E-E-A-T: 16 Fool-Proof Tips to Optimize On-Page SEO
A Note on Keywords and SEO Writing Techniques
Most writers today have at least some familiarity with SEO. I would argue that the more SEO knowledge a copywriter has the better. However, many writers don’t stay current on SEO’s evolution, Google trends, or tactics to better optimize content.
Keyword research, while less important than previously, still carries weight. Most writers conduct at least some keyword research, and many practical methods don’t require special tools.
For example, you can identify successful search phrases by studying highly ranked items, or you can get ideas by looking at the “People also search for” box at the bottom of search pages.
Beyond keyword research, it’s not difficult to find advice on SEO-enhancing content techniques, such as researching the ideal length of a headline, formatting content to improve readability, and structuring content for Google’s web crawlers. Enhancing quality can be as easy as running your copy through Grammarly or another grammar checker to avoid typos and grammatical errors.
Here’s a practical article from Semrush on SEO writing.
Create High-Quality Content that Boosts SEO
Many strategies exist for boosting E-E-A-T factors in your content. If you’re a blogger, in-house writer, or freelance copywriter, high-quality content is essential for success in the digital world.
Quality is king, whether your goal is to build brand awareness, generate leads, or develop a successful content marketing campaign. An author is only partially responsible for building E-E-A-T factors for a brand or website. An author can, however, exert influence by using the right techniques.
Contact Westebbe Marketing when you need assistance creating original, high-quality content that strengthens SEO and engages readers. Let us help you gain visibility on search pages, improve traffic, engage readers, and improve demand generation.
Contact us online, by email, or at 617-699-4462.
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