It’s the question asked at digital agencies worldwide, so what’s the answer? A resounding yes! 

You may think of SEO writing as purely technical, which is why many are now turning to AI to pump up their pages, but there’s an art to SEO that can only be mastered by a very human, creative mind. That’s why we at Sentius have maintained an internal content-writing team – robots just can’t do what we can.   

While it’s tempting to leave this blog post here (I have answered your question after all), let’s instead jump into the whys and hows of creative SEO writing.  

Why the Effort to Write Creatively is Worth It 

Leaving creativity at the door makes SEO writing a lot quicker and cheaper, which is pretty ideal - especially if you prioritise speed and short-term gains over quality. But taking that extra time will greatly benefit all the parties involved in SEO writing, aka your clients, your agency, and your content writers.  

Clients 

In this digital world, a business’ website is all important – Australians spend hundreds of millions of dollars online every month. The cost-of-living crisis has not curbed this online spending, but it has made people more cautious of what they spend their money on. People are now more likely to research products and services before they buy and will often look online for the best deals. 

What does this have to do with creative SEO? It’s a matter of trust. Your clients need to have clear trust signals on their websites to convince people to buy their products or services. Good content is a trust signal, would you purchase something from a website that doesn’t seem like it was written by a human? 

Your clients will greatly benefit from a creative approach to SEO writing as that extra care will help move people along the sales funnel. Clients will notice this, which is good for you. 

Digital Agencies 

The success of an agency relies on client relationships.  

So, let’s do a little exercise: put yourself in the shoes of a client. You pay a not insignificant amount of money per month for an agency to help boost your SEO ranking, a big part of which is content. You receive some content written by this agency to review, and it’s something that took very little skill and time to write. How would you feel? 

Keyword stuffed paragraphs, robotic sentences, and seemingly irrelevant subheadings clearly designed to boost word count does not make for a fun read. Imagine spending money on it… Personally, I would not stay with that agency.  

Taking a creative approach to SEO writing will always lead to higher-quality content. Producing good work for your clients will always benefit that client relationship. The benefit here is quite clear.  

Content Writers 

Like all writers working in the digital space, I have written my fair share of SEO content. Much of that content, particularly in those early years, was pure SEO with no creativity. Nothing kills your passion as a writer quicker. 

Giving your writers more breathing room when writing, more leeway to flex their creative muscles, will make your writers so much more satisfied with their work. A happy writer is a writer that will stay with your company and produce high-quality work – I hope you can see why this is a great thing for all involved.  

How to Make SEO Creative 

Now that I’ve thoroughly convinced you to begin inserting some creativity into your SEO writing, let’s cover how you can do it. 

Build a Narrative 

Storytelling is at the heart of creativity, so when writing a page for SEO purposes, try to turn it into a story by building a narrative around it. Unsure of what I’m talking about?? I’ll give you an example: I’ve actually written this whole blog as if I were targeting the key term “Creative SEO Writing”. 

In doing this, I created this narrative: there’s a world full of people who need to produce pages upon pages of writing with the singular purpose of increasing their clients' SEO rankings. While they can see that the writing itself is uninteresting to read and even more uninteresting to write, they’re not sure whether there’s a better way. They ask themselves the question, is there room for some creativity here? 

With the story in place, I write this blog – to answer the burning question everyone in this imagined (though not totally unreal) world has. Within this world, I’ve taken on the role of narrator and guide, which you should be able to see through how I’ve been writing.  

Go back through what I’ve written thus far and see that I’ve filled this blog to the brim with the target keyword without ever sounding like a straight SEO blog. This is the magic of creative SEO writing.  

Think About Your Audience 

Building a narrative around the topic you’re writing about will go some way toward helping you imagine your audience. This audience should be central to everything you write – if you aren’t writing something that will be helpful and interesting to them, what’s the point of writing it at all? 

Write in a way that will entertain or intrigue them, only include information they need to know, and make the page as helpful to them as possible. 

Do Something New 

Listicles have saturated the internet, basic questions about how X thing helps Y have been asked and answered, and ‘Ultimate Guides’ lose their impact when there’s 1000 written about the same thing. So do something new!  

This is of course easier said than done, so here’s some things I think about when brainstorming my approach to various topics: 

1. How much has this topic been contextualized? Is there an opportunity to dive into the history and evolution of the thing? 

2. How will emerging technologies and modes of thought impact how we do things? 

3. How does the thing work? We know what we should do, but do we know why? 

4. We know the usual intended audience for the thing, but is there another audience out there who would benefit from it? How will they benefit? 

5. Are there different approaches to thinking about/doing the thing? What are these differences and how did they emerge? 

Insert Some Personality 

Adding personality to your writing is what makes it more engaging because personality makes writing feel more human. When people can get a feel for who a person is simply through reading something they’ve written, that’s a beautiful thing. It’s also a connecting thing. 

This is another thing that’s easier said than done as it requires you to find your voice as a writer. The only way to find your voice is by practicing – so keep writing, write everything and anything, it’s the only way to improve.