What is SEO Copywriting?
Copywriting is an extremely important, and often overlooked, part of every website. You must provide value to your visitors while balancing search engine optimization tactics. SEO copywriting focuses on great content for your website while also considering:
1. Keywords are used – your targeted keywords and variations of those terms must be used on your website.
2. focusing on a topic to help your page rank higher.
3. attracting qualified traffic that will become leads.
SEO Copywriting and Content Creation
The often used saying that content is king is extremely true when it comes to optimizing a website. Search engines love good content; content that is relevant to your topic, and that searches will find beneficial. Good content, and avoiding duplicate content, will assist in the user experience, search engine ranking and generating more traffic. The end goal is to convince colleagues and the search engines that you are a subject matter expert. Content is not limited to text. Images, support material, or information graphics, and even videos play an important role.
Copywriting for Search Engine Optimization
SEO Copywriting provides content that is intended for web page marketing. It serves several benefits, because well-written page content satisfies your visitors and search engines alike. Better content helps increase conversions, differentiates you from your competition, and should position you as an industry expert. You must balance the keywords you are targeting with naturally written sentence structure that delivers your message.
If your page content is missing the keyword terms users are submitting to the engines you will not rank for those terms. Using the terms too often, keyword stuffing, you may turn your visitors off and be considered a spammer. Become a spammer and you will not be indexed by the search engines.
SEO writing basics
Your approach should be the same as you learned in high school. Your first step is to create an outline and use it. Organize your thoughts into well-structured categories and topics. Don’t worry about writing paragraphs yet. Once you have a logical site outline create any subcategories. This visual will assist you, making sure all content is organized logically and ensuring you have an idea of your site structure. You may then use this outline to start filling in the blanks with body copy and keywords. Keyword research will influence this outline and it is recommended you create an outline first, perform your keyword research, and then revisit your outline.
You must keep each web page focused on a topic. Limit the targeted keywords to one to five terms strategically placed within the text. There is no hard rule for the amount of words your page should be. For most industries up to 500 words are recommended. Stuffing additional keywords will just confuse your visitors as to what the page topic is, and dilute the relevancy of the terms you really want to target.
Keep your readers needs in mind when writing a page. Our approach to web page text is to have a summary or overview section for those readers who quickly want to understand what the page is about. Then provide more in-depth explanations for those who really want to learn more and dig deeper into what you have to say. Short paragraphs and call outs are good for keeping and attracting readers’ attention.
Fresh content
Your website needs relevant content in order to be successful at SEO. The more authoritative your content is, the more likely it is to rank in search engines and attract links to your site. SEO copywriting dictates that you perform regular updates to your text. Review your pages to ensure that they are accurate, up-to-date, and makes sense. If you have a blog update it regularly. Adding pages, not just making small changes to existing pages, is also an important step. Finally, watch your competition in order to get a sense of how often the industry makes updates. Ranking well, and staying there, takes a lot of work and effort. SEO copywriting will help you to rank well and avoid falling in the rankings when done properly.
Keyword density
Keyword density is the percentage that a given keyword or phrase appears on a webpage (and within text) compared to the total number of words on the page. For search engine optimization purposes, keyword density is used to determine whether a page is relevant for a specific keyword or keyword phrase. Keyword density is less of a factor when determine rankings than it used to be, but is still very important to measure in order to avoid being penalized for spamming. If your keyword is not on the page – it isn’t going to rank for that keyword.
Landing pages
Landing pages are pages that are target a particular user, a conversion landing page, or topic, which contains subcategories. Your topical landing page may cover a larger topic and contain a pathway to multiple sub categories within that topic. For example, if you sold cars, you could have a well-written landing page that contained the brands you carried. When your visitor selected a brand they could then be brought to another landing page, which contains all models within the selected brand. As long as landing pages contain ‘on topic’ copy they assist users and search engines to establish relevancy and more in-depth content on the topic.
SEO copywriting for conversion landing pages must have a goal of converting visitors and promoting an action versus providing information. You may want a visitor to click on something, buy a product, tell a friend, leave feedback or give permission for you to follow up and your writing must reflect this. Landing pages are especially important for PPC marketing and email campaigns where you content is targeting a specific offer or call to action, and must reinforce that action. Driving traffic to a targeted and well written web page will reduce effectiveness and conversions. You must copy write to optimize the user experience and maximize conversions.
Writing to avoid duplicate content
When copywriting for your website, you must avoid writing page text that is substantially similar to other pages on your site. Duplicate content will hurt your chance to be indexed and rank well for your keywords. Duplicate content may cause pages to be filtered and there is no way to control which version of a page will be indexed by search engines. It may also cause your pages to not be indexed as crawlers have already found too many copies of the same content under different urls.
Avoiding duplicate content is easy. Write your own unique and relevant content. There are instances where having duplicate content makes sense like printer friendly versions. For these instances make use of robots.txt disallow statement and the meta “noindex.” You may be syndicating your content but must be aware that search engines may give credit to only one site, and that site is not necessarily yours.
Search engines see URLs and not pages, it is possible to index a page different ways. The same page may have multiple URLs pointing to them, ie. https://sample.com, https://sample.com and https://sample.com/index.thm. The canonical tag or canonicla URL is code that will tell search engines what URL to follow.
E-commerce sites have a unique challenge in that they may receive the same product information as every other distributor. The same rules apply though and you must spend the time to either create unique text or implement user generated content. User generated content usually consists of reviews and opinions which generate unique and fresh text for your web pages. You must also focus on unique title pages and unique meta description tags for each page.
Professional SEO copywriting services
Atomic Design provides professional search engine optimization services. Helping you to make sure your website has the best chance of achieving and maintaining successful rankings on the search engines. Web page content includes title tag, Meta Tag, Headers, content, anchor text (links), alt tags, graphics and even video. You may choose from three options:
- Full copywriting and SEO copywriting services. A professional copy writer will meet with you and write all, or as much, web content as is needed. Once the content is naturally written and approved it will be optimized by SEO experts and submitted for your approval. Depending on the complexity of the content one optimized draft may suffice. Best for those without the time or resources to create the text needed to succeed.
- Copy editing and SEO copywriting services. You may provide your own content and your SEO expert will optimize the text. A professional copywriter will then edit and proof the content to be applied to your website. Best for those will in-house writers or good existing content.
- SEO copywriting services. You may provide your own content which will be optimized and submitted for your approval before being applied to your website. Best for those will in-house writers and newly created content.
