SEO Copywriting 101: An Extensive Beginners Guide to Improving Organic Traffic With Good Copywriting
You want more views. You want to sell more products. You want more people to know who you are and what you stand for. We understand, and we’re here to help you achieve those goals with SEO Copywriting 101.
The search engine optimization process is a lot more nuanced than most people give it credit for. To rank well on Google, you need to think as much about user experience as you do keyword density and placement. Content is your SEO passport — the less ambiguous and more compelling it is, the better your content will rank.
SEO is more important than ever, but even with the abundance of online guides and experts willing to help at every turn, there’s still quite a bit of confusion around what makes good SEO copywriting, and how best to implement it into your own content.
Google has over 200 ranking factors, most of which are smaller and are known only by Google. But the main algorithms, and how those algorithms determine ‘good’ and ‘relevant’ content, is public information — and that means you can optimise your content to rank better, and get it seen by more people. The information on how to do it is already out there, it’s just a case of implementing it.
In this blog post, we’re going to give you the full SEO Copywriting 101 experience. We’ll guide you through everything you need to know to get started with a killer SEO strategy: what SEO means, what the benefits are, and how it’s done. We cover it all in our comprehensive lesson for SEO beginners.
Welcome to SEO Copywriting 101. We hope you’re paying attention in the back.
What is SEO copywriting and how does it work?
Let’s delve right into the basics.
SEO copywriting is writing content with SERPs in mind. If you don’t know, SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page — the page you see when you enter a search term on a search engine. There are over 200 ranking factors that search engines like Google consider, and the search engine decides the best content that matches the search term.
Search engines such as Google ‘crawl’ websites to look at and evaluate their content. Then, an algorithm decides how relevant that content is for various searches performed by users.
SEO copywriting is optimising your content so that it ranks better on the SERPs than others do when people search for certain terms. You do this by making sure it’s as relevant as possible to a certain topic, and providing valuable, extensive, relevant information that relates to the search term and search intent. You also need to master the art of keywords in order to fully optimise your content. Both quality and keywords are important, so you need to be good at both.
Why is SEO copywriting so important?
Organic search traffic is usually one of the key drivers you use to get new eyes on your products.
‘Organic search traffic’ just means ‘people who come to your website through Google search’. People have questions that need to be answered and problems that need to be solved — and you have the solution. Your job is to make sure that people find those answers and solutions.
So, how do you do that? SEO copywriting, of course. It may not seem as important as people make it out to be, but let’s go through what makes it so vital for your business.
You need people to see your content
For your content to have any impact at all, it needs to be seen. SEO is crucial in driving traffic to your website and social media pages, and if you don’t drive traffic, then no one will know who you are or what you have to offer.
You may have a revolutionary product that could make you millions, but if no one knows about it, it won’t make you anything at all.
You need to get your product, brand, and message out there so people can find your business and, ultimately, have a chance of becoming loyal customers.
You need people to like your content
Bad SEO copywriting can reduce brand confidence and, if not done to a high standard, harm your brand and business.
Believe it or not, SEO copywriting focuses largely on quality and relevance. Long gone are the days of black-hat SEO link-building and keyword-stuffing. The world of SEO is a much better, more user-experience-driven place now.
What does that mean for you? In short, simple terms, it means that good SEO copywriting will leave your audience happier.
Focus on quality, relevance to the search term, and adding value to the audience, then throw in some personality and you’ve got them hooked.
What are the benefits of good SEO copywriting?
In order to understand our SEO Copywriting 101 lesson in full, you need to know why it’s so crucial. What does it actually do for you? SEO copywriting done well can give you a massive boost to your views, engagement, user experience, and, ultimately, your conversion rate.
Let’s go into a bit more detail.
User experience
User experience is huge. It’s not just about keywords with SEO copywriting (we really can’t stress that enough). How inviting, fast, and easy to use your website is all contributes to user experience — but so does copy.
Answering the audience’s questions, giving them the information they’re looking for, adding value to their day through your message; these all enhance user experience.
Enhance the user experience and people are more likely to stay on your website longer, respond to calls to action you’ve placed in the content, and share the content with others, improving your reach.
Improved reach
The main direct benefit of good SEO copywriting is that it makes your content rank better in Google searches. The higher up on the Google SERP you are, the more likely someone is to click through and take in your content.
And if they see your content, they can be persuaded by it.
Improved reach through good SEO copywriting refers to reaching a wider audience by making your content more visible in search engine results. By optimising your content with relevant keywords, it can rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP), making it more likely for people to discover it when they search for related topics. This increased visibility can lead to more traffic to your website, which can help to increase brand awareness and generate leads.
In addition, using long-tail keywords can attract a more specific, targeted audience who are more likely to be interested in your products or services, resulting in higher chances of conversion. SEO copywriting also helps improve the user’s experience by providing them with the information they are looking for, which can increase their chances of staying on your website and engaging with your content.
In summary, good SEO copywriting is a powerful way to improve reach by increasing the visibility and relevance of your content in search engine results, resulting in more traffic, higher chance of conversion, and improved user experience.
Brand awareness
Good SEO content demands relevant, high-quality information that people actually want. Doing that successfully also increases your brand awareness, as well as brand confidence.
Make yourself recognisable by using concise and clear branding in your content, and your visitors will remember you. If they remember you, and remember that your content helped them in some way, they’re likely to come to you again in the future.
SEO Copywriting 101: how do you do it?
The real bulk of SEO Copywriting 101 is how you actually do it — and do it well. This is what you’ve been waiting for, and what we’ve been leading up to.
Use targeted keywords
Let’s talk about keywords (they’re important, after all). The first thing you should know about optimising your content for keywords is that each page should have a unique focus keyword.
Using the same focus keyword for different pages on your website causes your own web pages to compete against each other in the rankings, so it doesn’t really gain you all that much. Google can also penalise you for not having enough keyword variety throughout your website as a whole.
You need to make sure the keyword is the best fit for your content. Consider the intent of the audience (are they looking to buy, get information, or research options?) and the context in which they’ll be finding your content.
You can use semantically similar keywords for separate pages that are linked together in context and content, but never the same exact match.
Top Tip: Some keywords have a lot of competition, so they aren’t always the best option for your content. Always make sure you check the difficulty rating of a keyword, as well as the websites that are currently ranked on the first page. High-difficulty keywords that already have high-authority results on the first page (from companies/websites/organisations that are well-known and established) are rarely a good choice for most SMEs.
Use keywords naturally
Throwing in a lot of keywords at random — also known as ‘keyword stuffing’ — is going to do a lot more harm than good. SEO copywriters are best-placed to insert keywords into your content because they’re masters at getting them in there naturally.
‘Naturally’ is the operative word here; keywords must be used in a way that reads naturally to the audience. It has to make sense, be relevant to the sentence and section it’s in, and be grammatically correct.
Top Tip: Google ignores most standard punctuation in your keywords and usually ignores most ‘stop’ words. This means you can insert commas and words like ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘in’, etc. into your keywords, with effectively no difference in ranking.
Write for your audience
More clicks means better rankings, but the more time someone spends on your site can mean better rankings too. Writing for your audience instead of a search engine naturally improves SEO.
SEO copy is written to be specifically aimed at your audience so that it relates to them better and adds more value to their lives.
If you want to make the most of it, then you need to know who your audience is. Customer profiling takes care of this; simply look at your website data to see the types of people who are most likely to absorb your content and buy your products.
What age bracket are they in? What do they like to do as a hobby? Where are they? What is their job?
All of these things can help you to build the perfect profile that an SEO copywriter can target content towards.
Top Tip: Be as specific as you can with customer profiles. If you try to reach everyone, you may not be specific enough to reach anyone.
Be relevant and add value
This is where intent and context play their biggest role. When you write high-quality copy, it doesn’t just mean that it’s accurate, well-written, well-structured, and grammatically correct. It also means that it’s relevant to what the user searched for, and what they want to see.
Your content has to cut through a sea of others, all trying to say or offer roughly the same thing, so you need to make sure that what your audience wants to see is what you show them, plus a little extra on top.
Tell them what they want to know, and then expand on it. Give them more information than your competitors do. Be sure to sell to them if they want to buy, and give them information if they want to know something.
For example, our SEO Copywriting 101 lesson is targeted specifically to the questions you, as the reader, have about SEO copywriting. We add value in this article (we hope!) by answering those questions — and answering them in detail.
How do you know if your SEO copywriting is working?
Simple: use analytics to measure the performance of your content.
“How do I do that?”, we hear you ask. Well, for each page of your website, blog, or even social media, you need to check a few things.
First, check the reach of the page. How many people saw it? Then, engagement. How many people interacted with the content in some way?
Now check how many people who saw it engaged with it. Is the percentage lower than you’d like? Then you need better, more tailored, and more engaging content.
Is the reach not good enough, but engagement is high? Then you have fabulous content, but unfortunately it’s not optimised enough for search engines.
Also, check the time users spend on the page, their journey after they leave the page, bounce rate, and conversion rate.
All of this data put together will tell you whether or not your SEO content is performing well.
SEO Copywriting 101: the final lesson
Now that you’ve reached the end of SEO Copywriting 101, you’ve hopefully learnt a lot. You’ve read all about how important SEO copywriting is, why it matters, how it benefits your brand awareness, engagement, and conversion rates — but there’s just one final thing.
The final lesson is simple, and we’ll put it as concisely and elegantly as we can.
Hire a professional SEO copywriter. Unless you’re one yourself, high-quality SEO content that really makes a difference to your rankings, reach, and conversion is what SEO copywriters do every day, and they’ve been doing it for years.
Take our SEO copywriters for example: tried-and-tested quality that has benefited many clients and is always delivered on time. We not only listen to what your goals are, we reach beyond them.
Do you want value for money? The best quality? The best return on your investment? Then get in contact with the ZippyLingo team today, and we’ll help your SEO content strategy shine.
