While you or someone in your marketing department might fancy themselves as a word nerd, learning to master SEO copywriting is a whole other ball game.
When we think of copywriters, it’s not uncommon to envision the likes of Peggy Olson or Don Draper of “Mad Men” fame. In a bygone era, copywriters were responsible for brainstorming the snappy catch phrases or text features in print, radio or television advertising.
In today’s world, advancements in technology have seen the role of a copywriter evolve. Although the fundamentals of crafting strong and engaging pieces of text haven’t changed, the way it’s constructed certainly has.
In order to rank on the search engines and get seen online, SEO copywriting is a new age form of content creation that fuses the magic of the written word with a medley of technical inclusions. Like it or not, marketers need to meet both sets of criteria in order to succeed.
Five Tips For Mastering SEO Copywriting
Published content in the form of blogs, articles or even landing pages need to be “optimised” in a particular format to ensure that they meet the technical guidelines issued by the major search engines in order to rank as solutions to consumer search queries. This practice is referred to as SEO, or search engine optimization.
In the digital age, the positions of a copywriter and a content writer are often interchangeable, but it’s worth noting that they perform two very different functions. In marketing lingo, writing copy is all about the hard sell, whereas writing content is about adding value and educating.
When writing for SEO, copywriters will often be deployed for short forms of content that leaves little room for fluffy paragraphs. Common examples include paid advertising methods, such as crafting a piece of text for a Google Ads campaign or even a website’s product page.
In comparison, digital content writers are often responsible for writing SEO friendly blogs. Although this type of content is usually published as a means to rank for certain keywords and attract organic forms of traffic to a website, search engines will ignore articles that are poorly written for click bait purposes.
Either way, mastering SEO copywriting and content writing goes beyond having a way with words. These types of writers know their audience inside and out, and know which emotions to tap into while still crafting pieces of content that meets the technical criteria. To improve your skill set in this arena, consider the following.
Write Naturally – Although writing programs that use artificial intelligence are on the rise, the key to successful SEO copywriting is ensuring that you sound human. Stiff pieces of text alienate audiences, so aim to write as if you were having a direct conversation with them. Depending on the topic or brand guidelines, pay attention to your language.
The Right Keywords – If you had to boil all of your website’s content or social media down to just a handful of simple phrases or words – and this includes all of the images, videos and text copy – these should be your primary keywords. While certain keywords may have huge levels of traffic, these can be hard to write for and have way too many competitors.
Digestible Content – The harder your copy is to read, the less likely it is that you’ll achieve your ultimate goal of converting users. If they have to put in a significant amount of effort to understand what you have to offer, you’ll likely lose them along the way. Instead, write content that is in bite size portions, such as using lists or smaller paragraphs.
Add Value For Readers – SEO copywriting for short form content should include a clear call to action, or a tool that steers your readers to a destination such as a discount code or email newsletter sign up. For longer blogs or articles, aim to educate and solve the questions of your audience, and reward their time with valuable information.
Don’t Forget Links – While it may seem counterproductive to steer your hard earned web traffic to another source, the theory behind adding backlinks to your website, blog or content, is that Google and other major search engines consider them to be “votes” for a specific page. In addition, backlinking will also help to retain your reader’s attention and lower your bounce rate.
Needless to say, producing content that’s both user friendly and SEO friendly is hard. Even the most gifted of in-house marketers usually identify as either technical wizards, skilled visual gurus or natural born writers, but rarely ever is it all three. If your brand is struggling to produce top notch content that Google deems worthy enough to showcase, it might be time to consider outsourcing.
The Key To Good Marketing Is Great Content
Producing quality, consistent and on brand content takes time, effort, experience and resources, but avoiding these responsibilities altogether may actually be doing your brand a disservice. Thankfully, investing in a solid content marketing strategy has actually never been easier.
Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as blog articles, social media posts, videos and even animated Instagram stories. By using this model, we believe that it enables us to produce high quality content with faster delivery times.
If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book in a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.
