What is SEO Copywriting & Why Does Your Online Business Need It?

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Published: Nov 01, 2019
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By all accounts, you're doing everything right. You've created a comprehensive business plan and a marketing strategy that you're confident will dominate.

And yet you still can't seem to drive traffic to your online business' website. It's an issue that plenty of websites struggle with. In fact, around 91% of web content receives zero traffic from Google.

As frustrating as the situation may be, it's far from hopeless. Your best bet is to turn to search engine optimization, or SEO, and utilize it in your site's copywriting.

Ready to find out more about SEO copywriting? Keep reading—we'll outline the key points you need to know about this important marketing component and provide tips you can use to boost your site's ranking.

What is SEO copywriting?

This probably isn't the first time you've heard the term “SEO.” You may have come across it while researching marketing strategies or reading up on the latest business news.

With that said, it can be a confusing term and it's important to have a strong grasp on the fundamentals of SEO before assessing its importance in your copywriting.

In short, SEO, which stands for “search engine optimization,” is the process of using a highly targeted strategy to increase your site's ranking on search engine results. The most popular search engine is Google, which currently holds 88.47% of the market share.

Why does SEO copywriting matter?

SEO copywriting helps to identify content that matches user’s queries, based on search intent, to search engines.

How does this work? Search engines deploy web crawlers to interpret data across sites when a user inputs a query. These crawlers look for readability, relevance, and authority to ensure users get the best results.

Note that SEO copywriting covers a number of areas including:

  • Navigation
  • Your blog
  • Your landing pages
  • Any aspect of your website containing text

There's a lot to it, to be sure, but SEO copywriting can make a major difference in helping your business attract eyes.

Does my business need it?

Your business absolutely needs to utilize optimized copywriting.

So few websites generate traffic as it is, and new sites pop up every day, which can further take attention from your website. That competition only becomes fiercer.

What's more, the competition may already use copywriting techniques to improve their search rankings, thus giving them a leg up. Hiring an SEO copywriter can help even the odds, so to speak.

Ready to take the next step in optimizing your content? Get in touch with us to learn about how our content writing services can help.

Best Practices for SEO Copywriting

Well-written, optimized content isn't just nice-to-have. As discussed above, it's essential for boosting and maintaining your ranking on search engine results. Below are five best practices for improving your website’s SEO copywriting.

1. Identify relevant keywords

Keywords are the exact phrases and queries users enter into Google. There are endless amounts of search phrase permutations—but some keywords are used more frequently than others.

These commonly searched keywords are those that you want to target—provided that they're relevant to your business.

After all, the point of SEO copywriting is to get more viewers to your website by way of organic search—and by identifying relevant keywords, you’ll be more informed about the kind of content that your target audience wants.

There are plenty of online tools, both free and paid-for, that you can use for identifying keywords, including Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and SEMrush. In fact, you can even use Google itself to identify common keyword phrases users search for.

Google Halloween example search

2. Write content that matches your target keywords’ search intent

Search intent refers to a user’s overarching goal and purpose when they enter a query into a search engine. Broadly speaking, there are four types:

  1. Navigational (“youtube” and “gmail”)
  2. Informational (“what is seo” and “dog breeds”)
  3. Transactional (“car wash coupon” and “buy used laptop”)
  4. Commercial investigation (“cheapest android phones” and “t-shirt printing services”)

Understand the differences between these types so that you can better ascertain the intent behind your target keywords. Only then can you create highly relevant content for readers, which helps to improve its chances of ranking for its target keyword.

Content that does not align with a particular phrase’s intent does not perform well in search results. For instance, a blog post intended to target the keyword phrase “DIY shelves” should be about shelf-building tutorials and ideas rather than a list of the best discounted shelves currently on the market.

3. Choose a catchy but relevant title

An SEO-friendly title includes your target keyword naturally, and is written to attract users. If your blog title is dry or boring, after all, why would a user click?

That said, avoid using clickbait or inaccurate information in your titles. Tricking users into clicking on your site is not only deceptive; it may prompt Google to penalize your site by demoting its rank or removing it from search results altogether.

4. Make your content readable

SEO copywriting doesn’t only concern what you write—it also involves how it’s written.

Optimized content is easy to read and digest. In this way, readability is closely tied to your website’s design and appearance.

For more readable content, follow these best practices:

  • Choose legible font faces that are neither too small nor too large.
  • Pick an appropriate color for your font—that is, with enough contrast to distinguish it from your website background but not overwhelm users (e.g., fluorescent yellow text).
  • Use an ample amount of line breaks and white space to break up long blocks of text.
  • Bold, underline, or italicize key pieces of information.
  • Incorporate relevant images, videos, and other forms of multimedia to complement your writing.
  • Use bulleted and numbered lists where relevant to break text into more digestible points.

5. Write compelling meta titles and descriptions

SEO copywriting should also be incorporated into the meta titles and descriptions for each web page.

These are the pieces of information that appear on search engine results pages—indicating to users what exactly your content is about.

Google meta description types of elephants example

Since they provide previews of your content to readers, you’ll need to make them compelling in order to stand out from other results. Of course, as with your page title, these meta tags should not be misleading or deceitful. Also be sure to naturally insert your target keyword—this is another opportunity to show that your content is relevant to a particular search phrase.

<div class="tip">For more detailed do’s and don’ts in SEO copywriting, check out our guide on how to write SEO content.</div>

Conclusion

To summarize, copywriting plays a crucial role in the way you think about your marketing. Catchy words and phrases are great, but they don't always translate to search queries.

However, SEO-friendly copywriting can help solve that problem—and ultimately get your website in front of a larger audience.

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