In this article, we're going to go over some basic concepts about how to create effective SEO copy. We'll also look at what makes a good piece of content and why you should always be writing original content.
SEO copywriting is the process of creating high quality, relevant and useful content for search engines. It's a very important part of your online marketing strategy because it will help you rank higher in Google results pages (SERPs).
In fact, if done correctly, you can even increase your organic traffic by as much as 50%. This means that every time someone searches for your target keyword on Google, they are more likely to find your website.
When you write an article, you need to think about three things:
The first question is easy enough. You just have to know who your target market is and what their needs are. The second part is a little more difficult. You should always ask yourself: "What pain points can I solve for my audience?" Or "What questions do they have that can be answered by my brand?"
Once you know what you want to achieve, you should focus on it and make sure everything else is secondary. For example, if your product is meant to relieve foot pain then every element of that article should be focused around solving foot pain in some way. The headline, the image, the text, the call-to-action and every other piece of content should address foot pain.
Now that we know who the article is for and what we want to tell them, we have to make sure that search engines can understand it as well. This means you should create an outline before you start writing.
The outline is very simple. You just number each point you want to make in the article and write a short sentence about what that point is. For example:
This is enough for a basic outline. The search engine understands that your article is about foot pain because you have literally written the word in the title and you keep talking about it in the content.
Yes, even experienced writers make mistakes when writing content. It is always important to learn from the mistakes of others so you don't have to make them yourself. Here are some of the most common SEO copywriting mistakes that people make and how you can avoid them:
01
Keyword stuffing was a popular trick in the early years of Internet marketing. The idea was to include your target keyword over and over again in order to trick the search engines into ranking you for that keyword. For example:
However, modern search engines are a lot smarter than they used to be and they quickly grew out of the keyword stuffing phase. You probably won't rank for a keyword you stuff in your content and you'll just end up with unattractive writing that readers will quickly get sick of.
Instead, you should focus on creating naturally flowing copy that is relevant to the topic you're covering.
02
Some people believe that poor spelling and grammar does not affect search engine rankings (and it doesn't) but it sure makes your content a pain to read! Readers will quickly move on to a more readable website if you don't take the time to spellcheck everything.
Also, Google and other search engines have advanced algorithms that can tell when content is poorly written. This means that your content won't get displayed in some of the more competitive searches because it looks like you are just copying and pasting others' work. To avoid this, you should always run your content through a spelling and grammar check before posting it online. You should also read through your content several times to catch any small errors.
03
This is a mistake that many people new to SEO make. You need to remember that your target audience isn't Google or Bing or any other search engine. Your target audience is actual people. If you try to game the search engines instead of writing for humans, it will be obvious to anyone who reads your content and you could end up losing readers rather than gaining them.
04
After you have completed your masterpiece, you're going to want to proofread it several times before you hit the publish button. However, many people don't and this can be a big mistake.
Several types of errors can creep into your content as you're writing it. These include simple spelling and grammar issues, but also potentially offensive or controversial remarks that can get you in trouble.
You have several options for proofreading your content before publishing it online. You can read it out loud to check for grammatical errors, you can ask a friend or family member to look over it, or you can use automated tools such as Grammarly, QueText.
05
If you don't know what keywords to use on your content then your efforts are wasted. You need to find out what people are actually searching for when they look for information on your topic.
The good news is, there are lots of keyword research tools available to help you identify the most searched keywords and phrases related to your topic. The bad news is, almost all of them will require that you sign up and pay a fee to use them. However, don't let that turn you off from investing a bit of time into this step as it is crucial to the success of your content.
Now that you know the 5 most common mistakes people make when writing their content, you need to know the 4 most important elements of SEO copywriting and how to incorporate them into your content.
Your content needs to be something that people find useful and is relevant to your topic. Otherwise, they won't share it and your SEO efforts will have been wasted.
Your keyword needs to appear in your content a certain number of times (but not too many) in order to rank for that keyword. The tricky part here is that if you stuff your content with the keyword, you'll look spammy.
Your content needs to engage your reader and keep them reading all the way through in order to be successful.
In order for your content to rank on relevant keywords, your pages also need to have quality internal links pointing to other relevant pages on your site.
Look at the search queries that are driving traffic to your site and see if any of them are good keywords for your business.
Make a list of keywords that you think your content could rank well for.
Find out how many times you would need to use each keyword in your content in order to rank. Aim to use the most often searched keywords the most and lesser searched keywords, less.
LSI keywords are "Latent Semantic Indexing" keywords. They are keywords that are synonyms to the ones you are targeting.
