SEO copywriting is the act of writing well-crafted content that will rank well in searches. It’s how you get noticed online and it’s what will ultimately drive traffic to your website and convert your audience to paid customers.
But that doesn’t mean that you stuff your copy with loads of keywords in an effort to draw people in. This black hat practice will actually backfire on you. In copywriting, you need to write with your audience in mind, creating compelling text that is valuable. More on this later. But just know that quality content is what will sell your product or service—not flashy website graphics and expensive tools.
Hands-down, yes! The content you provide on your website is probably the most important thing there, by far. It provides value to your audience, it sells your offerings and it demonstrates that you are a professional in your field. But even more so than that, it lets the search engines know that you’re an authoritative voice in your industry.
We’re not all born writers, and some of us don’t even like writing at all. Your first step to professional SEO copy is to hire a copywriter. Someone who writes for a living can help ensure that your website content is written well and follows some guidelines for quality. This includes using active voice, keeping pronouns consistent, matching your verb tenses and following other grammar rules. A copywriter also has experience writing for the Internet, which can be very different from writing for other mediums.
Good copywriters take some time to get to know their clients. They’ll have an onboarding process, often starting with a comprehensive questionnaire that helps them get to know you, your business and your customers. After all, they need a deep understanding of who they’re representing and who they’re trying to attract with the content.
Copywriters have a lot of tricks up their sleeves that will help get your website noticed online. Just a few of the things they’ll do include:
You need to know who your ideal client is and your copywriter will write to that particular audience. Writing for business executives is going to sound much different than content for retiring teachers or college students. When you write to a particular audience, you evoke an emotional response from your readers. One that encourages them to respond and react.
Subheadings are a great way to break up the text on the page, as are pull-quotes, bolded and italicized words and lists. These tricks allow the reader to skim your content and find the information that’s most important to them. And subheads are another place to include keywords, where they’ll get noticed by the search engines.
We discuss elsewhere the importance of longform text. While your readers won’t read every word (and that’s okay!), the highest-ranked pages on SERPs have over 1,500 words. Your copywriter will write as much information as they can about your topic, without droning on.
Your headline is one of the things that draws in readers. It should contain a keyword, but it should also leave the reader wanting more.
Some content management systems will auto-create meta descriptions for you. But best practices dictate that you customize those descriptions to ensure that your keywords are present and that there’s a clear message that compels your audience to click on your website on the SERPs.
Most copywriters think in words, but also have an idea of how those words will lay on your website. And really good copywriters will include those ideas for the website developer and business owner to consider during the development process.
What do you want your visitors to do as a result of landing on your website? Is it clear? Do you tell them? Including a compelling call to action is an often-forgotten part of the content puzzle.
Most people don’t think about images and content going hand-in-hand, but they do. Images can help the words tell your story. Copywriters often think about the visuals that go on the page with the copy, whether they’re pull-quotes, tables and graphs to illustrate statistics, photos that show a geographic region or products or videos.
We know how important it is to use keywords in copy, but if all your copywriter does is use your keywords over and over, your reader is going to get pretty bored—or they’ll never find your site in the first place. That’s because keyword stuffing is a black hat technique that the search engines have gotten pretty smart about.
