Completing The Miva Design Picture with SEO Content Writing

So you have a killer Miva design for your online store. You’re ready to sell your great niche products to a hungry market. You’ve heard about SEO (search engine optimization). You don’t know quite how to do it, but you hope to pop up on the first page of Google someday. You keep checking, but your competitors are bumping you down to the 4th, 5th, even the 6th page of search results. What’s going on? Why aren’t your niche customers flocking to your great Miva design?

Miva Design: A Skeleton In Need of Flesh and Blood

Don’t let me confuse you: mobile responsive design is critical to the success of any online store, but it’s only part of the picture. Think of a great Miva design as the skeleton on which you’ll hang the healthy, athletic body you’re building. One critical component of that body is your store’s products. Okay, you’ve got that covered. But the final element—and the most difficult to master—is engaging, well-written content.

The doomsday predictions on increasing web use and decreasing literacy have turned out wrong. If anything, the web has all of us reading more than ever. It’s not how much we read that’s changing—but what we read, and how we read it. Tapping into this knowledge and using it strategically in your content writing is critical to engaging your customers—which, by the way, is critical in SEO.

People search the web for everything imaginable. As this article from Search Engine Land explains, people use Google not only to find specific websites, to get information, and to buy things, but also to delve deeper into a topic for which they have only basic knowledge.

Engaging, Useful Content: The New SEO Rocket Fuel

How can content improve your business’s SEO? That depends on what you’re selling. Take a step back and look at your market. Most markets that can support online stores also have knowledge and entertainment angles that businesses can leverage into blog posts.
Think about it: the only transaction you make without needing further information is your regular grocery shopping. You always get the same kind of toothpaste. You buy whatever toilet paper is on sale. This kind of market—which sells simple, cheap commodities that everyone needs—doesn’t have much of a content angle to it. But niche markets, which sell specialty products to a base of avid enthusiasts, are another story entirely!
Let’s look at it from the user’s perspective. (By the way, that’s the first rule in content writing!) Say you’re a car enthusiast. You just bought a car for customizing, and you’re joining a passionate community who modify this make of car. You’ve customized other cars, but you know very little about the specifics of this model. You want to learn about common modifications, inherent design strengths and weaknesses, and possible pitfalls before you start taking things apart. You google something like, “X model powertrain customization.” You find a great blog post at SomeKindOfCar.com/blog that explains not only the basic characteristics of the stock powertrain in your car, but some of the most popular mods to the powertrain. The post has a few links in it leading to the aftermarket car parts you’ll need for these mods. You buy the parts, noticing that the online store lives at the same URL—SomeKindOfCar.com.
Guess what? The folks at SomeKindOfCar.com just sold you the exact parts you wanted, using SEO-guided content writing.

Leveraging Content Writing for SEO

Writing great content to improve your business’s SEO takes more than an ear for language and a deep knowledge of your products. A good SEO content writer couples three things together: the artistic ability to write with power and precision, the technical knowledge of the subject matter, and a strategic SEO vision derived from detailed keyword analytics tools.

Good SEO writing isn’t just search engine food. It isn’t a poetry contest, either. It hangs squarely between best technical practices, informative coverage, and engaging style.

That’s a demanding list to hit. Many businesses can cover one or two of these requirements in-house, but not all three. If you can’t hit all three of these with your existing staff, consider outsourcing your writing to a dedicated SEO content writing team.

At 216digital, our content writing team researches every client’s market for topics, style, and voice. We analyze our clients’ existing writing on landing pages and blog posts (if a blog exists). We formulate recommendations for improving landing page copy, and we watch these changes jack that page up in Google search. Through consistent communication, we nail down a blog voice for each client. Then we crank out informative, well-written posts day after day—all of it strategically informed by our extensive suite of keyword analytics tools.

If you’re ready to watch your site leap through page rank, get in touch with our SEO content writing team today. We’d love to start talking about your next big thing.