SEO copywriting is about striking a careful balance between creating user-friendly, engaging content and ensuring this content ranks highly on Google for your target search terms. After all, there’s no point writing a brilliant blog post if no one can find it on Google! We’ve put together a comprehensive guide to becoming an expert SEO copywriter here.
Choose your target keywords carefully
If you want to be highly visible on Google, you need to target the specific keywords your target audience is searching for. Starting out, you will hopefully have a vague idea of the types of search terms you want to target. From here you can use a keyword research tool such as Ahrefs Keywords Explorer to build out a comprehensive list of target keywords based on search volume and keyword difficulty.
If you ever run out of keyword inspiration, take a look at what your competitors are up to!
Identify search intent
There are four different types of keyword search intent:
- Informational: The user wants to learn the answer to a question or learn more about something.
- Navigational: The user aims to visit a specific website.
- Commercial: The user is thinking about purchasing a product and wants to compare the different options.
- Transactional: The user intends to buy a specific product.
Choose the style of content you want to create based on the search intent of your keyword. If your keyword has an informational search intent, you should aim to write a ‘how to’ or ‘top tips’ blog post. If your keyword is transactional, Google is more likely to rank a specific product or service page.
Scope out the competition
Once you have chosen the keywords you would like to target for a particular blog article or webpage, type the keyword into Google and have a look at the top-three search results. This will show you the type of content that is working for your competitors on these specific keywords and will give you some ideas of how to rank highly (putting your own spin on the content of course!).
Good structure
Keep your content organised and easy to read. Make sure to use a heading and subheadings to group your text into different points. These headings will also help Google’s web crawlers to understand your content and the different sections within it. The H1 will show them what the main purpose of the article is, and H2s, H3s and H4s will break down the subtopics.
Use secondary keywords
Each page should have a primary keyword that is your main focus for that particular piece of content, but you should also choose secondary keywords that are related. You can include these keywords in your subheadings and within the text, while your primary keyword should always be mentioned in the header.
Optimise your title tag and meta description
Your page title and meta description should help both search engines and users determine what your content is about, so be sure to include your primary keyword in both. Occasionally, Google might change what shows up depending on the search, but as long as your page contains high-quality content, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Write for humans!
While focusing on all the technical aspects of SEO copywriting, it can be easy to forget that the content actually needs to be something people will enjoy reading! Prioritise quality and make sure you are providing your readers with engaging, informative content that matches their search query. Remember, Google is looking to rank relevant and authoritative content!
Avoid ‘keyword stuffing’
Avoid oversaturating or ‘stuffing’ content with target keywords. It might seem like a great way of cheating the system and ensuring your content ranks highly, but Google will actually penalise you for keyword stuffing. This is because text that uses a particular keyword an unnatural number of times will lead to a poor user experience. If the content doesn’t make sense, users are unlikely to stay on the page.
Include links
Don’t forget to include links to both external websites and other pages on your own website. When linking externally, be sure to choose trustworthy, authoritative websites. When you link to these websites, it improves the credibility of your website. The external links you add will assist Google in determining the quality of your website.
Linking to other pages on your site helps Google to create an accurate sitemap. It also helps your audience discover more of your content and get to know you as a reliable and credible source of information.
Make sure any links you add in are relevant to the content to stop it from looking unnatural or clunky.
Compress images
If you are adding images to your content (which you should!), make sure they are optimised and compressed. If you forget to do this, it will slow down the page-loading speed, which is never a good thing. Take a look at this blog to find out how to optimise your website images.
Overall, the most important things to remember are that your content needs to be user friendly and must target well-thought-out keywords. If you need any support in creating SEO-friendly content, why not get in touch for a chat?
