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Copywriting SEO HOW TO CREATE CONTENT THAT SEARCH ENGINES LOVE by ABIDEMI SANUSI Founder, Ready Writer Copywriting

by ABIDEMI SANUSI · SEO Copywriting How to Create Content that Search Engines Love Share this ebook 5 The three steps of SEO copywriting Good SEO copywriting is customer-centred

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Page 1: by ABIDEMI SANUSI · SEO Copywriting How to Create Content that Search Engines Love Share this ebook 5 The three steps of SEO copywriting Good SEO copywriting is customer-centred

CopywritingSEO

HOW TO CREATE CONTENT THAT SEARCH ENGINES LOVE

by

ABIDEMI SANUSIFounder, Ready Writer Copywriting

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CONTENTS

4 SEO copywriting terms

5 Steps to SEO copywriting

5 Step 1: Keyword research

13 Step 2: Writing your SEO content

19 Step 3: Getting results and maintaining your SEO content

20 Conclusion: Next steps

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SEO copywriting is to the web what ad copy is to print

– Abidemi Sanusi, Founder, Ready Writer Copywriting

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SEO copywriting termsSEO copywriting combines killer copywriting skills with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques to create content that ranks well in search engines and also sells to your target customers.

Knowing how to write SEO content that search engines like and which can drive traffic to your website is an essential skill for helping your web business grow and succeed online.

No copywriting guide is complete without a definition of some copywriting terms. To keep within the scope of this guide, we’ll define three SEO copywriting terms:

Copywriting

Copywriting is the art of writing for promotional purposes, for example, selling or marketing a product.

‘Copy’ is the text used on the products. This could be the product description you see on the back of your favourite ice cream tub or ‘hand lotion’ container.

The text on your website is usually referred to as ‘web copy’ or ‘web content’.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimising your website so that it shows up

➲ preferably on the first page ➲ in search engine results.

SEO copywriter

An SEO copywriter combines good web-copywriting skills with SEO techniques so that your website can show up in search engine results for your target customers and drive visitors (sometimes referred to as ‘traffic’) to your website.

If you have a business website, then you need SEO copywriting skills. That way, you can write SEO content for your website that can:

➲ Drive traffic to your website ➲ Connect with your target audience ➲ Increase interaction with your

brand ➲ Increase your visitor–customer

conversion rates

The end result is great content that can help you meet your business goals, your customers’ needs and also create a successful web business for you.

SEO copywriting is a specialised skill that can be mastered. However, if you haven’t the time to do this, it is better to outsource this task than to do it yourself and risk damaging your brand (and, ultimately, your sales) with poorly written SEO copy.

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The three steps of SEO copywritingGood SEO copywriting is customer-centred and business-focused. It starts with knowing how your target customers search for your products and services (by conducting keyword research), using that knowledge to inform your business objectives (and wider SEO content strategy) and ensuring your website is fully optimised to meet those objectives.

Have a look at the three steps to writing good SEO copy for your website.

Step1: Keyword research for your SEO copywritingEvery SEO copywriting project starts with keyword research – it’s the first step. Good keyword research is not only about getting the search volumes for your product or service, but is also about knowing how people search for it. You can then use that information to grow your web business. Fortunately, there are some great tools available that make this task quite easy. And the good news is, the best-known and easiest to use – Google Adwords Keywords Tool – is freely available.

Read on to discover how keyword research can help you identify the search terms that people use to find your products online, using Google’s keyword research tool.

The research is going to be rather functional, because the idea is to familiarise you with the elements of keyword research that you can build on. You can, of course, outsource this to a skilled SEO professional or internet marketing company, who will conduct the research for you and also suggest other SEO techniques to use for your business.

Google’s keyword research tool Good SEO copywriting is customer-centred because it’s based on understanding your potential customers and identifying how they search for your products or services, so that you can attract them to your website using the search terms they use.

Before trying to discover the keywords your potential customers use, you should first identify those customers. Who are they? What is their income bracket? How does your product or service solve their problem or meet their need?

Then put yourself in your potential customers’ shoes. If you were searching for the types of products or services that your business provides, what would you type in search engines? Knowing this can help you structure your web content effectively and also inform your content strategy.

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Identifying your customer types is one of the key processes of keyword research and will also come in useful when designing your website or developing your wider SEO content strategy.

Keyword research in actionTo put things in context, let’s say that I’m a wholesale jeweller in the UK, specialising in gold and silver jewellery. I’ve identified my primary customers as independent jewellery shops that cater mainly to a clientele earning over £60,000 a year. My secondary customers are savvy shoppers with a taste for fine jewellery who prefer to deal direct with wholesalers when purchasing their jewellery. I want to optimise my website for search so that my target primary and secondary customers can find me online. I’m UK-based, so I’ve decided to focus my research on UK-wide searches.

My first task is to write a list of possible keywords that I think my potential customers will use to search for a UK-based wholesale gold and silver jeweller. To even things out a bit, I’ve decided to include some phrases that people type in search engines, for example, ‘fine gold jeweller 22-carats UK’, which are also known as long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are specific phrases that people use to search online. They are more likely to drive traffic from search engines to your website because they are more specific, therefore better targeted. Also, it is more than likely that the people searching for those specific long-tail keywords want to buy the product, so their search could convert into a sale if they land on your website. Generic terms such as ‘gold jewellery’ are more competitive (more difficult to rank for in search engines), as they are so broad.

By the time I finish brainstorming my possible keywords and phrases, I have about 50 on my list. But this list is by no means definitive. Some companies have come up with hundreds of keywords in their brainstorming sessions. The idea is to be creative and find as many keywords or phrases as possible that are related to your products or services. Later, you can narrow them down as you progress further in your keyword research.

I’ve narrowed down my keywords and phrases to the ones below.

1. Wholesale gold and silver jeweller2. Gold jewellery UK3. Fine gold necklace jeweller UK4. Women’s gold jewellery5. Men’s gold jewellery UK6. Silver jewellery UK7. Gold and silver jewellery8. Women fine gold jeweller UK9. Indian gold jewellery wholesaler10. Fine gold jeweller 22-carats UK

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So, I now have a list of keywords to use for my SEO content. At this point, nothing is set in stone. I still need to conduct further keyword research to find out the search volumes for these ‘possible’ keywords. A low search volume means that I may have to do further research to find those high-volume, but non-competitive keywords that will form the basis of my SEO content and can also drive targeted customer traffic to my website.

For this, I’ll need the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to start the second stage of my keyword research.

In the left-hand column (see image below), under ‘Match Types’, I ticked the ‘Broad’, ‘Exact’ and ‘Phrase’ boxes because I wanted a better sense of how people searched for gold and silver jewellery. The include/exclude terms also helped narrow things down. I’ve asked Google Adwords to exclude ‘zircon’ and ‘cheap’ from its query results.

In the right-hand column, about a third of the way down the screen, I have set the location to United Kingdom, because I’m interested only in search volumes from the UK. In the same way, you can also adjust the filter to suit your research needs.

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Eliminating keywords as a result of your research

From the image above, you can see that the search volumes for ‘wholesale gold and silver jeweller’ or ‘wholesale jeweller uk’ are non-existent. This means that my potential customers are not searching for my gold and silver products using those search terms. So, I’m removing them from my list.

I can also see that my long-tail keyword ‘fine gold jeweller 22-carats UK’ does not generate any search volumes. So, I’m removing it from my list of potential long-tail keywords. It also means that I have to brainstorm other long-tail keywords or phrases that my target customers may use to search for my gold and silver products.

Keyword research is all about eliminating and examining search possibilities, so don’t be too worried if your keyword research has you eliminating and adding possible keywords in turn. It’s all part of the process!

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Creating a viable keyword list for your SEO content

From the image above, I can see that there were 14,800 monthly local searches for ‘[silver jewellery]’ using those exact search terms and 49,500 monthly local searches with some variant of ‘silver jewellery’ in their search terms.

The query results for the other keywords I used have also given an indication of how people search for my products.

I’ve focused on local monthly searches because I’m interested only in search volumes for the UK. However, the global searches also give me an indication of how to search for gold and silver jewellery on a global scale. If I wanted, I could also extend my research by going to Google Trends to find search patterns for my products over a set period. It is a useful tool to have when researching industry trends.

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In the meantime, Google’s keyword research tool has also given me other keyword ideas that I hadn’t thought of but which my potential customers use to search for my gold and silver products. For example, ‘925 silver’ and ‘buy gold jewellery online’.

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But that is not all. If I signed in to Google’s keyword tool, I would have a full set of group ideas for these matches, which might come in useful if I decided to run a Google AdWords campaign or restructure my website’s navigation.

So, what does this mean for my SEO content?The basic thinking behind keyword research and, ultimately, SEO is this: the higher the search volume for a keyword you want to rank for, the more chance you have of driving that traffic (or, at least, a slice of that traffic) to your website and converting those visitors into customers. However, here is another way of thinking about SEO: it is better to have a small but consistent percentage of traffic than to have a large percentage of no traffic.

For keyword research, this translates into having consistent traffic from targeted keywords that may not necessarily have large volumes of search traffic, but which will drive steady traffic to my website. As a result of this keyword analysis, as a gold and silver wholesale jeweller, I’ve decided use ‘handmade silver jewellery’, which has 1,900 local searches and ‘jewellery wholesale UK’, which has 1,000 variant searches, as my primary keywords, and ‘white gold jewellery’, which has a variant search of about 1,000, for my secondary keywords.

Assuming 10% of the combined search traffic for my primary keywords goes to my website, I’ll get 290 visitors per month, which may not sound like much. However, as a wholesaler, my target customers spend about £3,000 per order and I need about ten (£30,000) of these orders (that’s my business goal) a month to turn a healthy profit. So, if 10% of those 290 visitors are

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converted into customers, my jewellery business will turn in £87,000 a month for me.

This analysis is rather simplistic and does not cover potential areas of difficulty or scenarios that are outside the scope of this guide, but it does give you a sense of how careful keyword research can result in higher returns for your business.

If I decide to use high-search-volume keywords as my primary keywords, my website stands a much higher chance of not ranking at all in search engine results, which will result in no traffic to my website and, consequently, no visitor–customer conversions. Or, to put it in plain English: no sales. I also know that long-tail keywords tend to drive better-targeted traffic to websites, so I’ll need to do further research on that to ensure I capture the traffic that they can bring.

A summary of our keyword researchTo summarise, to feature in search engine results for your target customers, you have to know the search terms they use for your products or services. This means conducting keyword research using a keyword tool such as Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool.

The first stage of the keyword research is brainstorming possible keywords or phrases are associated with your product or service. It doesn’t matter how many you have at this point as they are only ‘possibilities’. You can narrow them down by a process of elimination when you start researching search volumes (the second stage) or choose to narrow it before starting the keyword research.

The second stage of keyword research is essentially a process of elimination. Here you research search volumes for the keyword ‘possibles’ on your list. Through careful consideration of your research results, you can eliminate some of the keywords on your list, come up with new ones and, finally, decide on the primary and secondary keywords to use for your website.

And that is the essence of basic keyword research.

A word of warning: the search volumes on Google keywords tools are meant to be a guide, not an accurate picture of actual search volume. Decisions about the keywords to use for your SEO content should not be based solely on Google’s keyword tool or other keyword research tools, but rather should be taken as part of an integrated SEO (content) strategy.

There are other keyword tools available, for example, Wordtracker, the free version and the premium version which has more features. Those are affiliate links and, yes, other keyword research tools are available, but I’m recommending Wordtracker, because I actually use theirs.

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Wordtracker has a great range of resources available for anyone interested in optimising their site for search. Its keyword research tool pulls in results from Google, as well the results from It’s own search tool. However, what I like about Wordtracker’s keyword research tool is its simplicity. The premium version can also help you come up with a fully optimised site structure that can help your website perform better in search engine results.

Keyword research can be a complex process. In the interests of simplicity and to keep within the confines of this guide, I’ve given you the steps to basic keyword research that you can immediately use for your website. However, you can deepen your keyword research skills by going on an SEO training course.

Now for the second step of SEO copywriting – writing the actual content for your website.

Step 2: Writing your SEO contentAfter keyword research, the second step to SEO copywriting is the actual writing of your content using the keywords that you’ve chosen for your website. However, before you start, there are a few things you need to know about writing for a web audience.

Identify and write for your target audienceYour web content should reflect the audience you’re writing for.

Having a clear idea of your target customers enables you to write quality web content that speaks to their needs and, at the same time, positions your products or services as the answer to those needs.

Time is of the essenceWebsite visitors are time-poor. In addition, people do not like reading from a screen, so try to limit the length of time they spend doing it. That’s why they scan web content. This gives you a very limited timeframe to capture their attention. Internet convention puts this at between 5 and 7 seconds. That’s why web writing is lean and focused – no fluff. Bear this in mind when you’re structuring your web content.

Your webpages should have a call to actionYour website content should have clear calls to action. This is what you want your website visitors to do as a result of reading your content. This could be embedded in the text as hyperlinks and also optimised for search. For example, ‘Find out more about our copywriting service’ (highlighted text is the link) or ‘Buy our white silver jewellery’.

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Your website is for your customers, not for youA user-centred website is one that puts the customer journey right at the heart of its design. This means having a simple site structure, easy navigation that makes it easy for your visitors to find their way round your website, contact details on every page (header or footer is fine) and SEO content that engages your customers and ranks well in search engines.

An all-singing and all-dancing website may look good but, if it’s inappropriate for your target customers or, even worse, takes ages to download and is hard to navigate, it will result in lost earnings for your business, as your impatient potential customers will go to a more functional website for their needs.

Readability mattersThe selling point of your SEO content should be readability. To that effect, I would advise you not only to focus on writing for search engines, but to think of the human element as well. After all, human beings use search engines, not the other way round.

You can do this by: ➲ Using plain English. If your potential visitors don’t understand your

content, then they cannot buy from you

➲ Not using three words when one will do

➲ Breaking up your web content with subheadings to make it easier to read and digest. Use the one-idea-per-paragraph rule

➲ Making your content work hard for your business by having a consistent message on each webpage. This helps to keep your content focused and your visitors less likely to be confused

➲ Checking your web content for typos and other grammatical errors. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. How would you feel if you went to a website that was full of spelling mistakes and poorly worded sentences? Your natural inclination is to think that they’re untrustworthy, so you’re not exactly going to whip out your credit card and start buying their products, are you? After all, who knows where your credit card details might end up?

By putting your target customers’ needs at the heart of your website, you have a much better chance of gaining traction to your brand and increasing your visitor–customer conversions.

Now that you’ve got the basics of writing for the web out of the way, you can focus on writing the SEO content for your website.

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The five key elements of SEO copywritingSEO copywriting combines good web copywriting skills with SEO techniques to raise your online profile in search engine results. There are several elements to good SEO copywriting but, in the interests of simplicity, I will focus on five key elements that you can apply immediately to your website and build on in future.

1. Have a content strategyContent strategy covers all aspects of your web business – from content planning and maintenance, to SEO, branding and marketing, and how to manage it effectively – to meet clearly defined business objectives. A content strategy makes your content work hard for you so you can get the results you want.

It’s distinct from content marketing, which is the process of giving away free and useful content to potential customers, to educate and, ultimately, turn them into enthusiastic and loyal customers of your brand.

An effective content strategy is a key element of your SEO copywriting because it can help your web business by:

➲➲ Saving time

➲➲ Saving money

➲➲ Creating quality content that customers like

➲➲ Increasing your conversion rates

Your content strategy need not be complex. Focus on these key areas and you should be well on your way:

➲➲ Your business goals: what do you want your website to achieve? (This can also be your visitor–customer conversion rate)

➲➲ Content: how will your content meet your business goals?

➲➲ Information architecture: how will you structure your content?

➲➲ Navigation: how will your visitors find their way around your website?

➲➲ SEO: how will search engines and people find your website?

With a content strategy in place, your web business has more chance of growing and succeeding online.

2. Page title and page descriptionEvery website page has a page title (also known as ‘title tags’) and page description and these are, arguably, the most important elements of your SEO content strategy.

The page title and description are what comes up in search engine results when people search for your products online.

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The page title also appears at the top of your browser.

You can see from the image that the page title and description have been structured to capture the keywords that people search for when looking for copywriting services.

Having done your keyword research and chosen the primary and secondary keywords for your website, you can also optimise your website for search by using those keywords in your page title and description.

For best-practice SEO, it is advisable to put your primary keywords at the beginning of the title tag, as it helps towards your ranking. In addition, your target customers are more likely to click through to your website the closer your keywords are to the front.

Why do page titles and descriptions matter?The page title and description are important because that’s what your potential customers will read when your website comes up in search results. They’re a critical factor in determining whether or not to click through to your website, so it’s worth spending time on them. Aim for the right combination of readability and searchability, and remember: practice makes perfect.

The page title should consist of no more than 70 characters, while the page description should have no more than 160 characters.Google is not keen on duplicate content (its Panda and Penguin updates were, to an extent, about this) or poor-quality content, so make sure that all your webpages have unique page titles, descriptions and content. For best-practice SEO, you should also have a dedicated page for the primary keywords that you want to rank for. Each webpage should have its own unique page title and description. If this sounds like too much work, you could outsource it to a specialist SEO copywriter, saving you precious time.

3. Well-structured SEO contentA third key element of SEO copywriting is engaging and well-structured content that is also optimised for search. Many studies have been dedicated to the fine art of keyword density (the percentage ratio of keywords to overall content) with some people in favour of it and others not.

I would recommend a keyword density of 3–5% for a 500-word webpage. A quick search on Google should throw up some keyword density tools that you should be able to use. Again, I would recommend readability over search engine ranking. Avoid littering your webpage with keywords in every sentence. It makes for a

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bad reading experience for your website visitors and is likely to get your website penalised by Google for keyword spamming – which you don’t want.

Here are few tips to structuring your SEO content for search and readability:

➲➲ Summarise your webpage content at the top, so your visitors immediately know what that webpage is about. You have about seven seconds to convince your visitors that their time on your website is worth their while, so write to catch their interest with a lean, focused summary – no fluff

➲➲ Page elements. If you have downloads or forms that you would like your visitors to fill in, place them at the top right-hand corner of every page of your website, where they are clearly visible. You’re bound to get more conversions that way

➲➲ Use header tags (also known as subheadings). These range from H1 (the headline) to H6 (insignificant headline). It is more than likely that you will use H2 and H3 headlines as your subheadings to break up your content. Your Content Management System (CMS) probably has them already inbuilt. Use keywords in your headlines where appropriate

➲➲ Use internal links. Links are a great way of linking your webpages – and services or products – together. Make sure your links are also optimised for search by using keywords. That way, they can still be picked up by search engines, as well directing your visitors to other areas of your website. For example, a webpage advertising white gold jewellery could direct visitors to other webpages by using linked text: Our latest collection of silver jewellery is also available (highlighted words is the linked text)

➲➲ Add descriptive ‘Alternative text’ (also known as ‘Alt text) to your images, so that it can be ‘read’ by users with impaired vision

➲➲ Make your content readable. Sell the benefits of your product or service, not the features. For example: Our expert gold-cleaning service will save you time and help you preserve your precious jewellery for future generations NOT Our gold-cleaning formula uses tetratoxyweirdsciencename, which makes the gold jewellery shine

➲➲ Make your content shareable. Make it easy for people to share your content, by having social networking buttons on every webpage

➲➲ Have a clear call to action. Make your content work hard for your business by having a clear call to action. This is what you want your visitors to do after reading the content. You can place these calls at appropriate places on your webpage. Ideally, they should also be the last sentence on that webpage. For example, Book your free consultation with our conveyance expert now!

When writing your SEO content, bear in mind the tips that were mentioned earlier when writing for a web audience.

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4. Link-building strategyLinks are a key element of your SEO content. They are the currency of the web and having inbound links to your website tells search engines that your website is trustworthy. The easiest way to do this is by having a link strategy.

You can start by commenting on high-ranking and credible industry blogs (with links back to your website), guest blogging on other people’s websites, using a news distribution service for example, PRNewswire and PRWeb to send out a paid press release (this goes out to journalists who have specified an interest in certain topics and industries) and writing articles for an article directory website such as Ezine, Hubpages and Technorati.

You could try also submitting your content to Google and uploading your sitemap to Google. You should also make it easy for people to share your content

The quality of your content says a lot about your company, so ensure you provide quality content that your potential customers will value and read – they are more likely to visit your website and buy from you when you do this. Your potential customers are also more likely to link to your website, resulting in more inbound links for you and better exposure for your company, if you create informative and engaging content that they actually want to read, instead of bland content that’s purely for SEO purposes. A good SEO copywriter can provide you with well-researched, professionally written and fully-optimised articles and blog posts that will appeal to your potential customers and also help you meet your business objectives.

All these things matter and build up to your having a credible and fully search-engine-optimised presence online.

5. Fresh contentSearch engines like quality content, preferably fresh. That’s why it’s a key element of SEO copywriting. The easiest and most cost-effective way to do this is by having a blog on your website.

There are quick benefits to doing this:

➲➲ It’s one of the best ways to interact direct with your customers. Your business blog is the human face of your company, so it makes your company more approachable and encourages customers to interact with you

➲➲ A business blog can push up your search engine rankings. A blog is a great way of generating fresh content, which search engines love. So, the more regularly you update your blog and, consequently, your website, the better your ranking can be

➲➲ A blog can help drive organic traffic to your site by pushing up your search engine rankings, which can increase your website’s visibility and, consequently, drive traffic to it. And, once visitors get on your website, they can engage with your quality content and, theoretically, be converted into customers

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➲➲ Having a regularly updated blog means that you’ll get repeat visitors to your website, as they’ll come back to read your latest posts

➲➲ With a business blog, you can present yourself as an expert in your field by writing authoritatively about the issues in your industry. This will establish you as a leading expert and also generate trust in your brand

➲➲ A blog is also a marketing tool – and an effective one. A blog can help you build an organic audience, which is the best kind of marketing. You can test new products and get instant feedback from your target customers

➲➲ It’s cost-effective. Having a blog does not cost the earth, just, perhaps, the services of a great SEO copywriter – if you would rather outsource the task. And the returns you get from your business far outweigh any initial copywriting costs. Call it your ‘investment return’

Step 3: Seeing results and maintaining your SEO contentThe third and final step of SEO copywriting is maintenance. To keep your SEO content working hard for your web business, here are some things you should do:

➲➲ Have measurable – and practical! – goals in place. For example, increase your visitor–customer conversion rate by x% by x months or get x visitors by x months. This gives you something to work towards and can also help you create focused content that is geared towards achieving those goals

➲➲ Track your website’s performance. You can do this by using a website-monitoring tool. A range of tools is available but I would recommend Google Analytics because it’s free, powerful and easy to use. With Google Analytics, you can see the most popular areas of your website and track your customers’ journey. This can help you identify which areas of your content strategy are working and which to discard

➲➲ Sign up to Google Webmasters. This is more of a diagnostic tool for your website, but every little helps

➲➲ Review your keywords as part of your content strategy. New keywords develop all the time as a result of changes in the marketplace. Building a keyword review into your content strategy will put you ahead of the game

Seeing results from your SEO contentIt takes time and effort and, on average, three months, before you can start seeing results from your SEO content. Be wary of ‘quick wins’ from SEO ‘professionals’ who promise to put your website on the front page of Google within two weeks. Your website and, ultimately, your brand will benefit from natural and organic growth in search engine rankings, rather than a quick growth stemming from black-hat SEO techniques (read: ‘bad’) that are more likely to get you penalised by Google.

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SEO Copywriting: How to Create Content that Search Engines Love

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SEOBook brings together all elements of the SEO techniques and tools needed (keyword suggestion tool, keyword list generator and a keyword density tool, among others) to create great SEO content. The link is an affiliate link, but the tools are free, easy to use and, most important, also deliver good service.

SEO copywriting – your next stepsThere are many elements to SEO copywriting. This guide has covered the basic elements and key techniques that you can quickly implement on your website to set your web business on the road to success. There is much more to cover as new techniques and ideas are being developed all the time, which is why many businesses prefer to use a professional SEO copywriter who understands their business needs and can provide the quality content that reads well and also performs well in search engine rankings for their target keywords. Ready Writer Copywriting provides such a service and, what’s more, we offer free consultation.

Give us a call on 0208 292 1402 and let’s get started on creating hardworking SEO content for your website

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Contact usReady Writer LtdCommunications House26 York StreetLondonW1U 6PZT: 0208 292 1402E: [email protected]: www.thereadywriter.co.uk