Why good writing is essential for visibility in search engines

If you want to improve your company’s SEO and help it come to top of the Google searches, your website’s user experience must be a good one. And that includes the quality of your copy.

Google has got quite a few ‘demands’ about your website copy if you’re writing with SEO in mind, and they make comforting reading for writers, grammarians, and those who appreciate well-crafted words because good writing is essential to succeed in acquiring visitors from Google search.

Web content should be original

You know that lovely cut-and-paste function that’s generally so useful? Don’t use it! Google only responds to original content. You can look for inspiration from other websites, provide hyperlinks to them, and use short quotes from them, as long as you make sure they’re reputable sites that’s fine. What you mustn’t do is use what is known as ‘scraped content’, i.e. taking copy from another website and posting it on your own. The all-seeing Google knows when you’ve tried to cut corners, or found a nicely written paragraph on someone else’s website and decided to appropriate it for your own (which is also an unethical practice).

There are times when you want or need to use the same information on different pages of your website, but even though you’re using your own words on your own site, by not having original content on each page, you’re harming your chances of being found. However boring it is to rewrite the same thing five or six times (and believe me, I know only too well how painful that task can be!), if you want to be noticed by Google, then there’s no way around it – you’ve got to find lots of different ways of saying the same thing!

Website content should be relevant

There’s no point in writing about penguins if finance is your core business. Whilst you’ll engage your followers on social media by tweeting about, say, #NationalPenguinDay (25 April in case you’re interested!), if you’re trying to sell your bookkeeping skills on your website, you must write about bookkeeping so Google picks it up… and to make sure your potential clients know what you’re selling!

Content should be fresh so keep posting!

Google’s Search Index is constantly evolving to reflect the new content that’s being posted all the time. Therefore, in order to stay ahead of the game, you too have to constantly post new, original, readable content that people will easily understand and enjoy. No pressure then!

Don’t stuff your website content with keywords

Google’s webmaster guidelines state that searchable content should be written for the user, not for the search engine. Therefore, what they term ‘keyword stuffing’ (i.e. filling the page with too many keywords whether or not they fit in with the copy) is not acceptable. In my experience, not all keyword search terms are a natural fit when you’re writing an article. So your keywords may well be “digital marketing Hertford”, but try putting that into a sentence and make it sound seamless! Thankfully the latest Google rules have been kind to copywriters by lessening the reliance on keywords and phrases – the quality of the writing is now more important than repeating the keywords.

Hyperlinks can also be used less than they used to. It they’re a natural extension of the copy then fine, but writers no longer need to to invent reasons to include hyperlinks in the text just so they have the right number of them. This, again, is good news for copywriters who, with more opportunities to craft great copy can now make it readable as well as informative and relevant.

The main thing to remember about the rules of SEO is that they’re fluid and Google will change them all the time. So if you want to stay ahead of the game, you’ve always got to be aware of what Google is up to by checking the webmaster guidelines on a regular basis, or using a specialist digital marketing agency with content marketing specialists plus Google Partner status, like, ahem, Cariad!