Finding the right words to use, whether spoken or written can, at times, desert us. And this, from an SEO copywriting perspective, will hinder your website’s organic progress on Google, whilst also turning-off any potential customers and clients.
A failure to advertise and market your products/services in the right way will work against you, so investing in creative and compelling copy is essential, especially if you are in a highly competitive industry where everything that you do is highly scrutinised by your target audience, whilst meeting the needs of said audience is vital when attempting to increase your online sales and enquiries.
The key skill of an SEO copywriter is identifying the benefits of your products and what separates them to your rivals, then conveying this in a clear, concise message that contains a high level of detail, fun and, of course, all of the necessary elements that are essential for positive SEO rankings. After all, as advertising iconoclast Howard Gossage said, “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad,” and this is what you need to focus on when producing the copy for your website.
Here is a list of some of our top SEO copywriting tips, which we recommend that you try to implement into your copy going forward. These tips can be the difference between receiving a website sale or losing a visitor, whilst also playing a key role in determining where your pages rank on Google for relevant keyword searches:
Know Your Audience: It may sound simple but knowing your audience is essential. If not, your copy will fail to interest or excite your readers, and that combination never works when trying to sell a product or service.
Write Quality, In-Depth Copy: A number of studies – including those by seomoz and serpiq – have proven that webpages that contain a higher volume of copy rank more successfully on Google than pages that contain fewer words. In fact, posts that contain 1,500 words + offer a greater user experience, which allows your page to achieve an increased online authority score, potentially leading to Google deeming the page to be higher in value when compared to rival pages.
Add Imagery and Media: Pages that contain imagery and media files, such as YouTube videos, have a longer visitor retention rate than those that just contain copy. Also, studies have shown that webpages that combine all of the aforementioned elements are deemed to provide a greater user experience, which is likely to aid organic progress on Google.
Include Internal and External Links: Providing relevant links into other pages on your website will improve the quality of your article, whilst also enhancing the user-friendliness of the page and increasing the crawl rate of your website. In addition, providing links into external pages is also valuable, especially if you are linking into high authority, trusted websites, which should help to improve the authority and importance of your own article.
Use Unique Copy: Do not simply copy and paste text from another webpage and use it as your own. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, Google will know that the content has been used on another page that it has indexed, therefore the chances are that the search engine will choose to ignore your article, meaning that it will fail to be indexed. Secondly, you are likely to receive a threatening letter from the company whose content you have stolen, especially if you have failed to provide a credit to them.
Proofread: Check, check and check again. One minor error in your copy will detract from your credibility, so make sure that there are no spelling errors that feature within your copy.
Include Call-to-Action: Want the reader to react positively to your content? If so, ensure that you include a highly visibility and strong call-to-action, including buy buttons, your contact telephone number and email address. Failure to include these, if applicable, will result in users leaving your website and moving elsewhere.
Don’t Forget Your SEO Focus: Do you want your webpage to feature strongly on Google for a specific search term? If so, make sure that you refer to the term within the copy. Failure to do this will result in the page failing to be found effectively, as Google won’t know what terms you are trying to target within the text. However, be sure not to over-stuff your content with references to you targeted term, as this will also work against your organic ranking. General rule of thumb; if your page contains 5 good, quality paragraphs of copy then try to include 2-3 references to your chosen term.
Adopt a Conversational Tone: Try to use words and phrases that resonate with the target audience. This is something that Google, and the other search engines, will pick up on, which will help your webpage/article to achieve an increased level of importance and authority.
Get Social: It is estimated that there are around 2.5 billion social media users at the time of writing (July 2017), and this number is only likely to rise in the future. So, with that in mind, it is vital that you reach out to your target audience through the various social media networks, especially the likes of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, and these will enable your content to receive an increased level of exposure and awareness which, all being well, will drive a higher volume of visits back into your webpage and result in them buying your product(s) or enquiring about your services.
Link Authority: Increasing the number of backlinks into your webpage is a vital factor in raising its authority score. One great way to do this is by encouraging sharing on social media networks, as this will drive additional traffic into your site and gain a higher volume of backlinks into the page that you are promoting, which can both be achieved by making use of social media share buttons. These can be inserted into your webpages and allow your users to share your content across all of the social media networks that you want to promote yourself on.
However, not everyone is a writer, whilst the majority of us simply do not have the time to write in-depth, unique copy. In these cases, it is always worth contacting a specialist SEO copywriter to do the hard work for you, especially if the price is right.
Jump 2 IT Media is a digital marketing agency in the Midlands, providing SEO, social media management, PPC campaign management, website design, logo design and all other forms of online marketing.
Contact us today on 0845 582 3545 or email us at info@jump2itmedia.com.
