Writing with SEO in mind

SEO helps increase the online visibility of your content. It's always good to write with it in mind

This guide is for anyone writing content for the giffgaff website or blog. It’ll help to identify keywords related to your content and best practices to include them in your work, to help with search engine optimisation (SEO).

Optimising copy for SEO:

It’s best practice to make sure each page contains some copy and it’s not just a collection of links and images. This includes product-listing pages.

Tip: Ensure that copy is unique to every page. Duplicated copy on multiple pages is bad for SEO.

Write naturally:

Make sure that you write your content naturally, so it is readable to humans. When search engines crawl for content, they check for well-written content. So it’s for the benefit of your readers and your page rankings that you write normally.

When writing, think about how any keywords you’ve identified can fit naturally into your content. This is something you can do after you’ve initially drafted your content.

Tip: Keyword stuffing is bad for SEO. Keyword stuffing is when you place as many keywords as possible in your content. This means your content reads poorly and search engines will rank your pages lower.

Headers and titles:

Be sure to use keywords within your header (H1, H2) copy. This is something search engines look for to identify page content.

Internal links help search engines find content and pass authority or “link juice” to the linked page. A page which is only 1 click away from the homepage is more likely to rank higher than a page which is 3 clicks away from the homepage.

It’s important that the link text (aka. anchor text) is as descriptive as possible and it should be naturally readable to a human.

Links from external websites are important for SEO. Search engines see these as a vote of confidence that the content is good and will rank your page higher.

Tip: Where possible, look for opportunities to share links with external partners, suppliers or co-creators.

Images

Use descriptive alt attributes for images. ‘Alt attributes’ inform search engines and screen readers of any image content and/or text content within an image.

This helps:

  • The images to appear in image searches
  • The page to rank for relevant keywords as appropriate
  • Improves accessibility for people using screen readers

Advanced step: keyword insights

This step is usually handled by giffgaff’s SEO team. It’s to identify keywords and phrases that your audience most commonly search for online.

You can research the most commonly searched keywords relevant to your content using:

By comparing keyword search demand, you can see what people are looking for online to help build your content.

Tip: Search trends change, so it’s good practice to check keywords regularly to make sure you’re still targeting the right audience.