SEO Copy Basics
No matter what type of web-writing project you take on, you can increase the value of what you offer by providing an SEO component.
Search Engine Optimization helps search engines like Google serve your copy up to interested searchers. Two things are key: providing valuable copy that is relevant to your audience and including the “signals” to search engines that help them recognize who your copy is meant for.
The goal of SEO copy is to:
Get more pages of a website found
by the audience who is interested in
them …
To cultivate a following of regular visitors …
To rank better on search engines …
The first key of good SEO copy is relevance. If you stuff your site or your client’s site with page after page of subpar copy, even if it ranks well on search engines (and Google’s Panda update has pretty much seen to it that it won’t), you’ve still failed because you won’t hold an audience. Always write high-quality copy that provides value to your audience.
The second key of good SEO copy is clarity. This is how you communicate to both your visitors and search engines what your copy is about. This typically boils down to well-chosen and well-placed key phrases and well-written titles and headlines.
A third key is community. People find good content through other websites as often as they find it through a search engine. And search engines use links from reputable sites to find and rank content as well. You must link to other relevant sites and create quality content that other sites will be willing to link to. Within your website, you must also have internal links that help people and search engines see what your site is all about and to decide what is most important within your site.
Successful SEO Copy
Because all Internet copy can be improved when you optimize it for search, there’s not a specific structure for SEO copy. The structure comes from the specific type of
copy you’re writing — blog posts, category pages, special report, press releases, articles … what-have-you.
But there are consistent steps you should take to optimize your content.
Well-Researched Key Phrases: Choosing topics that your audience is looking for is the first step. You can figure that out by knowing your audience, understanding the website and the associated products, services, or goals, and then doing some keyword research.
Google has a free keyword research tool (type “keyword tool” into your Google search field and you’ll find it).
The Google Keyword Tool is a good place to start. But its results are based on AdWords keywords, their Pay-Per-Click advertising program. So it’s a good idea to round out your research with a subscription keyword tool like Wordtracker or WordStream.
When doing your keyword research, begin with broad terms that a lot of people would search for. These are likely highly competitive terms that will be difficult to rank high for, but your keyword tool will provide you a variety of related terms and you may find some popular searches that aren’t very competitive and that you can use to build a content topic list.
Page Title: The page title is not the headline. It’s the title that appears at the very top of your browser window. It’s one of the places that search engines look to see what your page is about. It may also be the headline that appears for your page in search engine results. This isn’t always the case, but it happens enough that you want to make your page title as relevant and useful as possible to your potential visitors.
Meta Description: Another important place to use your keyword is in the Meta description. This is a brief 140 to 160-character description of the page in question. Search engines check it for keywords, as well. And many search engines will display it as the site description on the search engine results page. Again that means that you have to write the description for your potential visitors first and foremost. What will help them make the decision to click through to your site? But also include your most important keyword phrase so that search engines can identify the topic of your page.
H1 Tags: The headline of your web page, blog post, press release, or article is another place search engines look for your keyword phrases. Again, write this primarily for your potential readers, but work the keyword phrase in if you can do it naturally and without hurting the impact of the headline.
Body Copy: Your keyword phrase should appear at least once in the first two or three paragraphs of your web page’s body copy. It’s also helpful to use the keyword phrase in subheads.
Links: A final element to consider are links. Google likes to see web pages that link internally to other relevant content on the same website and that also link to other websites completely. Other websites linking to your content is also important for SEO results, so look for ways to make your content shareable.
Google and other search engines work hard to return high-quality, relevant content in their results pages. So above all, WRITE GOOD CONTENT!
Questions to Ask Your Client
What is the goal of the SEO strategy?
Tip: Your client may say something to the effect of “To appear on the first page of Google” and then give you a list of keywords. Search engine rankings are important, but work to shift the SEO goal from simply ranking for certain keywords to providing truly exceptional content that targets a specific audience. It’s much easier to get good rankings when you make this your goal than it is when you lead with rankings as the goal.
What are the two or three main groups of visitors you want to attract?
Tip: Part of a good SEO strategy is understanding who you are trying to reach. Really dig deep with your client on this one. Ask about what other websites the audience is likely to spend time on, what their hobbies are, what age group they’re in, how much money they make, and what problems they have that the website will help to solve.
What key phrases are you ranking for now?
Tip: Understanding what’s working is an important part of implementing your strategy. Study the pages and keywords that are ranking and see what’s being done right. Your first step will be to implement those same steps on lower performing pages.
What key phrases would you like to rank for?
Tip: This will give you a good starting place for doing keyword research. Emphasize from the beginning that building rankings for long-tail keywords is often a smart strategy to begin ranking for more competitive keywords.
What are your most important pages?
Tip: Focus your initial energy on improving the pages that will make the biggest difference in your client’s bottom line.
Research Pointers: Getting a Handle on Your Audience, the Message, and Your Client
The first step in good audience research is asking your client questions about the target audience. Learn as much as you can about the client’s views, hobbies, buying habits, and search habits. That will help you better understand the types of keyword phrases you should focus on.
The next step is to use the solutions your client offers — the product or service and associated benefits — to also guide a portion of your keyword research. You want to reach people looking for what the web page you’re writing offers, so this research can be critical.
Remember, a good subscription keyword research tool can be invaluable when it comes to finding keyword phrases that you can build quality, relevant, audience-specific content around.
Another good place to do research is on competitors’ websites. You can learn a lot from the type of keywords they are optimizing for. You might also see some gaps that could prove very useful in your own content development strategy.
Special Considerations
The local element: Many businesses offer a product or service locally. If that’s the case, make sure you optimize for the city, state, and even neighborhood where your client is located. Many, many businesses forget to do this and this simple change alone can deliver results that will knock their socks off.
On site: Internal linking is an important strategy. When you link to content within the website, you’re signaling to search engines what you think is important. That helps them decide what is important and gives certain pages within your site more weight in search engine results.
Off site: Good off-site links are also important. The first and best way to get good off-site links is to write amazing content that people are excited to share and to link to. You can also get quality off-site links by contributing articles to important industry sites, publishing press releases, and sharing your content through social media.
No matter what type of web-writing project you take on, you can increase the value of what you offer by providing an SEO component.
Panda and Penguin: The recent Google updates — Panda and Penguin — were designed to penalize sites that publish a lot of low quality content and that have a lot of low-quality links pointing back to them. Basically, these two updates are meant to disincentivize short cuts. In other words, WRITE GOOD CONTENT!
Deepen Your Knowledge
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Copywriting is one of the hottest skills in the web marketing industry today — and very, very few writers or website owners are equipped to take it on.