Copywriting

Copywriting

SEO Copywriting

SEO copywriting can be looked upon in many different ways. A skill, art, method – take your pick, because at the end of the day it’s really just designed to do two things. To assist you in reaching the search rankings or listings you desire, generating traffic to your site and to convert that site traffic into sales or whatever your call-to-action objective is once they’ve landed on the page.

There are some things that you need to know about web and SEO copywriting if you choose to do it yourself (anyone can do it). The first thing being, that in the main, writing well constructed copy on its own is highly unlikely to get you to where you want to be amongst the major search engines. However, it is possible.

The key lies in the industry you operate in. For example, if you work in finance, insurance, sex, these are all highly competitive industries, in fact, especially with the event of the web, more and more entrepreneurs have sprung up and created businesses solely for the purpose of marketing via the internet. Many are main stream traditional industries with conventional business models, not just ecommerce and web 2.0 technologies, so the business landscape has changed.

So the trick is to find a key phrase, word or term that is going to be low in competition, but high in relevance.

Don’t just think in terms of chucking in the search term as many times as you can on the page. That strategy is long dead. And don’t think about targeting anymore than two words or phrases per page.

Your web copy has to be relevant to the page it’s written on and in addition, you will need to make sure that you have addressed the needs of the meta data – don’t worry, it’s not that scary, it’s quite simple really.

SEO copywriting fundamentals

Before we go into any detail about SEO copywriting there is one thing that we would strongly advise. Remember at the beginning of this text we mentioned skill, art, method? You need a bit of talent, yes, it’s true, anyone can do it, but it’s a question of doing it well. You may have an incredibly analytical mind, be brilliant at sussing out your competition, but if you (to be blunt) use words and structure sentences that simply don’t show your product or service in a good light, highlighting features, demonstrating benefits and forget your call-to-action objectives, all the traffic in the world is going to be pointless. That’s obvious we hear you say – well, is it? You see, 80% of your competitors fail to communicate their message in some way, most think they are ‘bang on the money’ with their site layout and copy, but they are simply not. But hey, that’s good news for you.

So keep these rules in mind and you may stand a good chance in getting quality traffic from SEO copywriting alone.
First off, choosing your keyword or phrase well. Use one of the many free tools available on the internet to identify a good one for you.

Go for low traffic, relevance and low competition. So what if it only gets 60 unique visits per months? If your product or service is as good as it should be you stand a good chance of making a sale.

Use the word/phrase in a way that you would if you were using it in everyday conversation, in other words don’t unnecessarily over saturate the page with it. Use other relevant variations of the phrase to support it.

Headings, ok, this involves a little coding, but don’t sweat that stuff, get your web guys to do it when they upload the text. Search engines look closely at the relevance of the heading, so input them in order of importance, i.e. h1, h2, h3. You can have up to six headings that will be recognised as such, but keep it relevant, an example of this is on this page. You have probably worked out that the phrase we are pushing is simply SEO copywriting.

In this case, SEO copywriting is highly competitive, so we don’t believe copywriting alone will do it for us, but we’ll have to use other elements of search engine optimisation in order to really make it work, but you get the general idea.

Title tag descriptions. These are the words in the top left hand corner of your browser and describe the page the visitor is on. Make sure it includes your phrase along with other information you feel is appropriate, name of company, possibly location. Meta data description, this kind of sits round the back of the site (to put it simply) and is a description of your business, service, product, whatever the case may be. It’s just as likely to appear in a search as any other copy on your site, so it’s really important you get it right. Remember, it’s a sales message, so place just as much importance in it.

Meta Keywords, ok, so this is obviously important, make sure your main phrase is in there supported by other relevant words and phrases, but don’t go crazy. You probably want to be looking at about ten maximum, and also include the type of business you are along with location.

Images, use ALT tags (alternative tags) to describe what the image is, don’t just use the phrase you want in order to represent it, but use something (and here’s that word again) relevant to the page and service you’re promoting.

Links, link to other pages within your site. This is really important, so it’s not just about linking with other sites (although important), but that in itself is a separate element in the pursuit of good SEO but not one we’ll address now when specifically talking about copywriting.

Persuasive copywriting

Be persuasive; remember this acronym, WIFM, ‘what’s in it for me?’ Trust us, your site visitors don’t care if your staff are going to eat tonight, they just care if your product or service is going to do something for them, and People don’t tend to have needs other than food, shelter and water, so your job is to turn a need into a want.

And finally, call-to-action; what do you want them to do? Pick up the phone and call? Fill out a form? Buy something straight off the site? Then ask them to do it, force them (in the nicest possible way) tap into the emotions of your visitors and write your copy as if you are appealing to one kind of person. Yes, you may have all different kinds of customers, but fundamentally they are all the same, they all take out a credit card and use it in the same way. They are all after the same thing, so don’t try to be clever and cater for all of them, YOU WILL FAIL.

So there we have it. This is a summary really, not an overall comprehensive tutorial about SEO copywriting, but it should give you a good idea of where to start.

Or alternatively, give us a call and we’ll get our top guy on the job.