So, how does SEO copywriting stack up against other methods of advertising and marketing? Let’s start with the most obvious, the Search Engine Marketing firms that promise to boost business through their own specific methods. They can be quite costly, and the results are often unpredictable. If their marketing techniques fail to raise awareness of your business, it can be difficult to discern whether or not money was well spent. In a worst-case scenario, the marketing firm could employ techniques deemed unethical by search engines, which would in turn cause your business to suffer as rankings plummet. SEO service marketing is a low-cost venture in comparison, and the SEO copywriting behind it is easily monitored, with clear results at every stage of the advertising process. When compared to Pay-Per-Click advertising, SEO copywriting keeps on delivering. With Pay-Per-Click advertising, being billed heavily will not necessarily lead to a high conversion rate. Step away from the internet hosting provider, and your ad is instantly gone – as is your money. Running a full internet marketing campaign is costly, and paying for advertising will not get you there any quicker. With effective SEO copywriting, a one-off investment can suffice, payments do not have to be made directly to search engines, and most importantly you can attain a high rate of conversions from the increased traffic, as your website is ranked highly for a multitude of keywords. In the grand scheme of things, with many web development and internet marketing options available, SEO copywriting is the best long-term solution for high ROI.
If you’ve landed on this page, chances are you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur looking to improve your website’s content. Perhaps you have a bricks-and-mortar store that’s a landmark in your community. Or maybe your business is a virtual, purely web-based enterprise. You’ve invested time, energy and money into creating a site that showcases your business and your products. But there’s a problem – your site’s not attracting the kind of traffic you desire. Why is this happening? In many cases, the problem lies in the type of content being created. When crafting copy for your site, it’s important to pay attention to effective, ethical search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. SEO copywriting is not simply about writing an article and slapping on keywords – it is about creating high-quality content that is tailored to specific keywords and is deserving of a high ranking.
What is SEO Copywriting?
A good SEO copywriter also has an understanding of how web content fits into overall SEO strategy. This is something that many writers overlook. They write great content but have no audience. An good SEO writer can create keyword rich content, identify meta tags and a webpage URL. They understand how the content will be used and are able to provide useful guidance to a web developer. This helps the client site to view. And since online exposure has a direct correlation to sales, this is the type of writer that any client is looking to retain.
SEO copywriting is an industry where a little knowledge, and some decent writing skills will go a long way. Any writer worth their salt can make a comfortable living writing for others. But a skilled SEO copywriter will be able to write more effectively and therefore command better pay. Experienced copywriters can better engage a reader and call them to action. This means more sales and leads for the client. Writing effectively also means writing efficiently. An SEO will spend less time editing and rewriting. This means that they can take on more work; meet deadlines and have a profitable career.
SEO copywriting creates useful content. Useful content provides a purpose, it meets a need. It provides answers. Often times, in the process of answering questions, it is inevitable that we are selling something. This is the essence of what search engine optimized copywriting is. A prospective client has a problem, we provide a solution. This solution is often educate the client and guide them to our services. A perfect example is this SEO copywriting. Someone wanted to learn about SEO copywriting. They have a question; hopefully we have provided an answer and a guide to our services.
SEO copywriting consists of crafting keyword-rich content that sells, while also strategically targeting search terms. It’s a delicate balance. The content has to be informative and engaging. In the past, copywriting was about creating a brand, an image. Often times a copywriter would create slogans or catch phrases to help a brand recognition. Unfortunately, this style of writing is not conducive to the web, or the time of SEO.
Importance of SEO Copywriting
SEO copywriting is an extremely important facet of online marketing and also includes creating high-quality content written for the purpose of advertising. What’s the reason? The aim here is to persuade and utilize the art of copywriting to truly make both the reader and the search engines prefer the page. As a copywriter, it is our primary goal. We want our information to rank well with search engines! Usually, if our content is search engine friendly, it will be ranked higher in SERPs. Hence, more users will find and read the information. Now, the main purpose is to get the prospect reader to take some form of action. Are you with me? This could be to subscribe to a newsletter, purchase a product, or simply educate them on your company so they become a customer. In doing this, we must keep in mind that high rankings alone do not bring in business. It’s the subsequent action taken from the user. So, by copywriting for the purpose of gaining higher rankings, we are not only bringing in more targeted traffic but also increasing the chances of the end result being more beneficial. High-quality copywriting will also serve to build your reputation and portray your company in a good light. This, in turn, can bring in more customers, as people generally prefer to do business with those they like and trust. Like and trust, sound familiar? It should. These are the basic principles behind sales and forms of action taken by consumers. So, between increased traffic and credibility, the implementation of copywriting is a key investment to ultimately bring in more sales and customers, while educating the ones you currently have. High-quality copywriting will also serve to build your reputation and portray your company in a good light. This, in turn, can bring in more customers, as people generally prefer to do business with those they like and trust. Like and trust, sound familiar? It should. These are the basic principles behind sales and forms of action taken by consumers. So, between increased traffic and credibility, the implementation of copywriting is a key investment to ultimately bring in more sales and customers, while educating the ones you currently have.
Benefits of SEO Copywriting
Great rankings on the search mention trust. Trust is a compound factor to resolve for in this scenario. First, it’s important to make a decision on the focused territory, state it clearly first, then the ultimate step is to get your site indexed on the top of that focused industry. It takes time to build belief and move up the rankings, but as quickly as you reach the highest position, it is very powerful and very tough to take down. You can also see the energy of belief when you consider the effectiveness of manufacturers putting out any type of announcement. When a market leader puts out an ad, the public will automatically pay attention to it just on the trust that this firm knows what it’s doing. This is an attempt to solidify the present place of the manufacturer as the leader. Now, belief can be measured through how close to the pinnacle your website is to the primary source, trying to ascertain which is the primary credible source available for any information. And the most efficient technique to attain a top spot is to have quality SEO.
Key Elements of SEO Copywriting
On-page optimization is the process of creating and placing written content or other media onto a webpage in a way that is attractively visible to search engines and human readers, with the purpose of drawing organic traffic to the webpage. The optimization process should begin while the webpage is being created; however, it is often an afterthought or something that should be redone in an attempt to draw more traffic to an existing page. This can be more difficult than optimizing a new page, as the design and layout of the page may have limited available space to add keyword-rich content to increase search engine visibility.
The first element described is keyword research. Copywriters should identify target keywords and keyword phrases that represent the theme of their website or product. Typically, a mix of general and specific keywords is the most effective. General keywords will draw visitors to the website or a product that they are interested in, while specific keywords will convince the visitor to continue browsing the website and possibly find a product in which they are interested in purchasing. Often, copywriters and site owners can make the mistake of optimizing for the very broad and general keywords. This may result in attracting large amounts of traffic. However, the traffic may not be from people who are truly interested in the product and are more likely to click away without taking any action. By optimizing for more specific keywords, the copywriter can ensure that they are drawing visitors who are more likely to take the action of purchasing a product. A great way to identify keywords and phrases is to ask existing customers. This can yield a solid mix of general and specific keywords as customers will typically use general terms to find something and specific terms when looking for something that they have in mind.
Keyword Research
The first is to generate a big list of keyphrases. It is important to dream up every possible phrase that a potential customer would use to search for your product. There are several sources of data to pull the phrases from. The first place to look is your server logs. The server logs allow you to see how people are finding your site. You can tell what search engines they used and what keywords were typed. The second place to look is the competitors’ sites. If the site is assuming they have optimized it well, you can view the meta tags they are using and the content that is on the pages. Viewing these meta tags and pages might also give you suggestions for more keyphrases. Another idea is to use a thesaurus to find synonyms for common phrases. This will help to broaden the list of phrases to optimize. The last place to check is using a keyword research tool. This tool will tell you how many times searches have been performed on a particular phrase, and it will also give you a list of related phrases. An excellent free tool to use is the Overture keyword research tool. All of these suggestions will help to generate a big list of phrases.
Keyword research is the practice of discovering what users type into a search engine when performing a search. Using keywords in page content, in turn, helps search engine optimization to be easier. Without the right keywords, everything else done is useless since it is optimizing for the wrong phrase. Optimizing for the wrong phrase results in a lower conversion rate. There are several things to keep in mind when conducting keyword research.
On-Page Optimization
Create a robots.txt file. Although this is not as important as the other steps, it is still a good idea to create one to instruct search engine spiders which parts of your website can be indexed. This prevents your site search results from being included in your website’s search results and also prevents unnecessary database calls being used up.
Create a new sitemap. A sitemap is crucial to guide visitors and search engine spiders in your site. It is important that you create one and then make sure it is updated every time you make a change to your website.
First part of the process and one of the most important. The reason on-page optimization is considered the first part of the process is that the changes made to a website at this stage will result in a permanent change in the website’s search engine performance. There are several steps that need to be taken during the process of on-page optimization and we have explained each of them in detail below:
Compelling Headlines and Meta Descriptions
A very basic formula to construct a meta description is to simply write two or three sentences summarizing what the page is about and the benefits of reading said page. Keep in mind that the meta description needs to deliver on what it promises. A misleading meta description may get you a lot of clicks but it won’t be long before people realize that your page isn’t what they were looking for and hit the back button. This could lead to higher bounce rates and lower overall traffic. Make sure your meta description always accurately describes your page’s content.
Meta descriptions are nearly as important as title tags. They provide searchers with a brief summary of the page’s content. Good meta descriptions can often be the tipping point for your page when it’s found in the search engine results. A meta description should be a few sentences or a short paragraph. It should be written with the intent to inform and entice the viewer to click through to your site. Similar to the title tag, it should focus around the keyword and explain what the page is about. A good meta description will often contain one or two of the page’s sub-keywords to further entice the viewer.
Let’s say you’re offering a free widget. You’ve determined that the keyword widget is the one most crucial to your site so that’s the one you’ll be focusing on. A good title tag might be “Get a free widget and change the way you do things”. This is a very basic example but it gets the point across. With this title tag, someone who is interested in getting a widget will likely be enticed to click through to your site.
Focus your title tag around the single keyword that you’ve chosen. This keyword should usually be the one with the most searches or the one that is most important to your site. A good title tag is usually a few words or a short phrase, and contains the keyword while also creating interest. An abysmal title tag would be something like “word”. An excellent title tag would be “word – more words!”. It’s fairly easy to come up with a good title tag once you’ve chosen your keyword. Just think about what you would say if you were trying to convince someone to visit your site. What is it about your site that makes it worth visiting?
When someone puts your keyword into a search engine, the first thing they see is your title tag. If that’s not compelling or inviting, they’ll skim right over your page and look for something else. Title tags are crucial to SEO because they’re pretty much the first impression that search engine users get of your site. If it doesn’t convince them to click through to your site, it doesn’t matter if you rank #1 in the search engine results, because no one will be seeing that great ranking.
Relevant and Engaging Content
When writing content, it is easy to drift off into an alternate subject. Try to stay focused. If you have an idea that doesn’t relate to the content at hand, save it for a new piece of content. This isn’t to say you can’t have multiple topics on one page. Often a narrow focus is required to reach the desired level of depth.
A source about building a kite may have been more acceptable to a searcher than a description of how to treat a burn from a fire caused by a kite-flying accident. In the first case, the user was looking to fix a problem (in this instance, constructing a kit) and an ad distracting the user to a different task would have been unacceptable.
Searchers are looking for information. When your content doesn’t answer their question and provide new information, it isn’t an answer. Think about the search queries that will bring users to your page. What do they want to know?
Understanding your audience is paramount when creating a piece of content. This is particularly true when considering relevance and engagement. If your content doesn’t speak to your audience and hold their interest, it won’t be effective.
Strategies for Effective SEO Copywriting
There are a number of ways that you can go about creating a search engine optimization copywriting plan. However, before moving forward and detailing how to do this, it’s important to keep in mind what user intent is. User intent is one of the most important factors to consider when trying to rank highly for a certain keyword. Certain keywords will attract a certain type of user that is looking for specific information. For instance, the keyword “free SEO advice” will attract users looking for information and not those looking to purchase a product. This means that the user is not intending to buy anything with this keyword. If the same keyword has no AdWords ads displayed, then it’s most likely not a keyword that will convert into a sale. Users will often convert more over certain keywords when they are in a buying intention. Keywords that imply that the user is considering a purchase are often indicated by words such as “buy,” “purchase,” and include specific product names. At this stage of SEO copywriting, you are going to want to build a list of the types of customers who will be using your service or product. If you don’t already have an understanding of who your reader is, it’s better to develop a general idea with a service such as Quantcast. This is known as creating a user persona. You want to know what type of customers they are, their wants, needs, and what it would take to keep them.
Understanding User Intent
Lastly, there are the increasingly common searches relating to solving current issues. This can be a medical issue, a legal issue, a problem with a car or any other matter that is causing inconvenience to the searcher. The goal is to find information that will enable them to solve their issue.
Transactional queries involves the intention of acquiring a good or service. This can be split into two types; an individual intent and a corporate intent. With an individual intent, the searcher is often looking for information on what is available and would prefer to buy offline. The query may be for a specific product or sometimes more research to find out what is available. With a corporate intent, the searcher usually has a clear idea of what they want and may be researching the best place to get it. This often involves price comparisons.
Navigational queries center on the desire to locate a specific web page or site. The searcher has usually already decided on the specific page or site they want to find and are looking for the most efficient route to get there. Searches may be the name of a specific site, or may be on a broader topic where the searcher is looking for a specific site they had heard about.
Informational queries are searches that are aimed at finding more information on some topic. This can be to resolve a bet with a friend, to settle an argument or just the simple desire to learn more about something. The intent is usually broad and the query is often quite vague. A sample keyword might be “PC” as someone may be looking for information on what they are, or information on the history of personal computers.
Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Though the purpose of that task is incredibly broad, there’s one underlying principle that guides many of the choices that are made, and it’s encapsulated in the idea of the search for information retrieval: people want information in order to learn, to understand, and to do something. While these motivation or intent factors are obviously quite broad and general, they can be categorized in an incredibly useful way, which is what we are going to look at next.
Incorporating Keywords Naturally
When incorporating keywords into a certain area is deemed important, it is equally important that website administrators incorporate the keywords in such a manner that it appears to flow naturally. Keyword densities are extremely important when companies are growing their brands and aiming to get their site ranked highly in search engines. A common misconception is that the higher the keyword density, the higher the site will get ranked. It is well documented that keyword stuffing or having a keyword density that is too high will result in your site being penalized by search engines. This would mean a significant decrease in your site’s search engine ranking. Consider incorporating a proprietary blend of keywords into certain articles and you’ll discover that this unique alternative to a very high density will speak volumes about a website’s search result. When aiming to provide content that ranks and converts, keyword density and keyword relevance are the two factors that need to be balanced correctly. Keyword relevance, of course, is necessary to ensure that your content is indeed related to the keywords being searched for. A common error is making content relevant to one’s own goals rather than it being related to the keywords in question. Failure to do this will not aid your search engine ranking. Keyword density, as previously mentioned, should also not be too high. Generally, using the keyword approximately 1-2% in an article is adequate, and it will not appear forced.
Using Structured Data Markup
There are different types of data that Google can read to create rich snippets, depending on the information on a web page. It is most likely that the displayed search result may include the use of structured data with these data types in mind. These can range from recipes and events to local businesses and organizations, with many types in between. It is important to take a look at Google’s guidelines for each data type, to ensure it is marked up correctly, and to check the search preview after implementation to ensure the best look in the search results. Schema markup can also be useful for gaining knowledge on how to display your data. While the Data Highlighter tool in Google Webmaster Tools can achieve similar results by tagging page resources for data type that use patterns, structured data markup is more reliable for long-term use and more optimal results.
Structured data, or schema markup, is a series of coding developed by the search engines to help them understand more about the information found on a webpage. This can help to provide the richest, most informative results possible, often in the form of rich snippets. From review ratings to location and contact information, schema markup is the best way to optimize your website information for the search engines. Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper is an easy to use tool to get started with structured data. By taking your website’s URL and tagging the data items of interest, it can generate a new HTML page with the marked up data. This can then be added to your website and tested via Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
Optimizing for Mobile Devices
As of 2015, Google has implemented an algorithm to expand the use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change significantly affects search results. This update has caused a huge drop in organic traffic for non-mobile websites. Now it’s common sense that having a website that isn’t mobile-friendly causes the loss of potential mobile traffic, but now the update will cause desktop traffic to drop as well. Now in light of the ‘Snack Pack’ update, mobile-only users have risen. As of September 2016, Search Engine Land reported that nearly 40% of people only search on a smartphone. With the current trends of mobile usage increasing, this number is likely to rise.
More than half of all search queries today are done on mobile devices. Mobile devices are a part of our daily life that we cannot ignore. It’s natural that Google and marketers have been urging people to make the move to being mobile-friendly. With the slew of Google mobile algorithm updates, the mobile device has become an important factor in SEO Copywriting. But not only is mobile device compatibility important for ranking, we should go an extra step further to make our websites mobile-friendly in order to maximize the potential of mobile traffic.
Measuring and Improving SEO Copywriting Success
High goal conversion rate is the end result of effective SEO copywriting, because you will have brought the right sort of visitors to your site, and persuaded them to take the action you desire. By looking at the keywords that led to high goal conversion rates, and comparing the copy for those pages to the copy for pages with lower conversion rates for the same keywords, you can learn what works best for your audience.
While rankings and organic traffic are good measures of success, the most important factor is usually your site’s conversion rate. Your conversion rate can be measured with goals and funnels in Google Analytics. A goal might be a sale or a sign up to a newsletter. A funnel is the path you expect the user to take to reach the goal. For example, the path to a sale might be from the home page > category page > product page > cart > checkout.
Organic traffic refers to any traffic that you receive without any type of advertising. Click on “create a new filter” and create a filter for organic traffic coming from search engines. Set it as “include” and set “source” to “google”. Now you can track your visit and goal conversion rate for your organic traffic and compare to your overall traffic. If this rate is good, then you know the majority of your traffic would be organic.
In order to improve your search engine rankings and create more effective web copy, you need to measure your success. Ideally, this starts with your site’s overall search engine rankings. If you don’t know where you’re starting from, you won’t know if your efforts are making a difference. If your site is new, you can expect it to take six to nine months before you start seeing good results for targeted keywords.
Tracking Rankings and Organic Traffic
If you’re working at a site that has Google Webmaster Tools enabled (and you most definitely should be), comparing the number of targeted keywords a page has received a click from search with the number of clicks to the same page can also be a useful measure of performance for specific keyword phrases. On a related note, tracking changes in rankings and organic traffic for specific keywords can also provide insight into keyword cannibalization issues.
Ideally, you’ll want to use rank tracking software to track the rankings of pages for specific head keywords. However, for longer-tail keywords, it may be more beneficial to simply monitor changes in organic traffic for specific pages.
Ranking prominently for targeted search keywords is the most important dimension of success for SEO copywriting. When it comes to tracking the success of content in ranking for targeted keywords, it’s important to track rankings in relation to organic search traffic. This can be done using any rank tracking software and comparing changes in organic traffic, or by simply monitoring changes in organic traffic for specific pages over time.
Analyzing User Behavior and Engagement
Finally, although measuring the effectiveness of user engagement with a site is important, it’s beyond the scope of this article to show all the ways this data can be used to improve the site. The important thing to remember is that in all cases, the best improvements to user engagement are those which improve the usefulness and/or usability of a site. In other words, make your site more user-centric. By doing so, you will also be making your site more search engine-centric. User-centric changes often directly improve search engines’ satisfaction with your site. Writing better SEO content entails writing content that is easier to find, that meets the needs of a target audience, and that forms information in a way that makes it more useful than competition’s similar information. Any improvements on these fronts are typically the result of gaining a better understanding of the customer, and of the language and methods they use to look for information in your field.
There is a wealth of data available to gain insight on user behavior and engagement with a site. Much of this data can be found by using web analytics software, such as Google Analytics. This type of software is used to track the flow of visitors through a site, including information on the number of page views, the duration of time spent on a page or site, as well as the entrance and exit pages. This data can be incredibly useful for discovering where you may have problems on a site and what content is and isn’t engaging to visitors. Other useful measures of user engagement come from feedback. This can be direct feedback with a user, or with surveys seeking to uncover the voice of customer. It can also be indirect feedback from usability studies and A/B tests, where changes to a site are validated by observed changes in user behavior.
Just as you need to crawl and parse the content of a web page to optimize it for search, the engine needs to crawl and parse its content to determine if your page is worthy of a high ranking. One way search engines do this is by analyzing the user behavior and engagement with the pages in search results. Search engines have the ability to measure how satisfied users are with search results, and how satisfied users are with the experience of visiting a site. They are attempts to understand the interest level of a researcher in a topic or the satisfaction level of a user query. These measures are incredibly complex and are based on data of all kinds. Some of these measures are taken from how people interact with the search results, e.g. how long a user might spend reading an article and how much time might they spend on a particular site. Other measures can be made from the search query itself or a recently visited site, where the engine will infer that the user is trying to find more of the same. Given that search engines now have an extensive amount of data on users, some of this engagement data can impact the search results for specific users. But for the SEO, we are more interested in using these measures to improve our understanding of how well search engines are satisfied with the queries that lead to our site and how we can improve the user experience on our site.
A/B Testing and Conversion Rate Optimization
Through A/B testing and conversion rate optimization, businesses can more effectively attain their goals for the website, eliminating defects and other obstacles to increase sales, and ultimately create a better experience for the customer. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action. It is one of the more telling measures of a website’s success. Testing and optimization provides a way to make dramatic effects on bottom line, by improving the effectiveness of the website in converting visitors to customers. Essentially it helps maximize the return on investment for any marketing/sales campaign. A/B testing compares two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. In this case, better means which page has the higher conversion rate. A/B testing allows you to make more out of your existing traffic. The knowledge is one can systematically improve their website in order to get more of its visitors to take the desired action. A/B testing is simple, it directs customer traffic to a control (existing) and one variation (new) and determines, which is better. With the data it is able to make decisions to adopt the change or stay with the original. This benefits can range from any type of business, for any action to be accomplished. For example signing up for a service, purchase a product, register for a seminar or event, downloading a free utility any many more actions.
