SEO Copywriting is both exciting and challenging as writing copy for the web involves writing for both search engines and users. There is a lot of controversy about what makes good SEO Copy so I decided to share my insights in this post. Following these principles will send a high volume of targeted traffic to your website.
- Focus on phrases instead of words : Candidates looking for a ‘job” are unlikely to type the keyword ‘job’ or ‘jobs’ in the search engine. They are more likely to make specific searches like ‘engineering jobs melbourne’, ‘engineering jobs sydney’ etc. Moreover coming up for these terms will drive targeted traffic to your website which will increase your conversion rate
- Use Headlines and Subheadlines : These elements are a vital ingredient in making your page attractive to both users and search engines. For example, if you are a luxury holiday resort in goldcoast, your heading could be : Luxury holiday Resort in Goldcoast and your subheading could be ‘Enjoy Goldcoast in the lap of luxury’
- Think about your target audience : If your luxury holiday resort in Goldcoast targets families, then talk about family friendly facilities while weaving your content, and if it targets singles, talk about the nightclubs in its vicinity!
- Keyword density is important but any good copywriter knows that mindlessly stuffing keywords into your content will impact user experience and result in penalties from the search engines. Getting a decent keyword density (approx 4%) into a page is an art. For example, if my keyphrases are ‘life insurance quotes’ , ‘life insurance online’ and ‘free life insurance’. I can have a call to action like ‘Get free life insurance quotes online’ which includes all the keywords simultaneously. Just repeating ‘life insurance online’ many times will impact the usability.
- Google not only looks for the words or phrases to rank a website, it also sees that semantic relationship between different words and phrases. This is called ‘latent semantic indexing’. For example if you are in the business of selling personal computers, you can use the word PC and computers interchangeably or swap between laptop and notebook in different parts of the page. It makes your content look natural while reinforcing the keyword by using it’s synonym or even a similar word
- Keyword Stemming is the process of taking a keyword and creating different versions of it e.g plural, suffix or prefix. This enables you to be found even if people type different variants of the search term which you are targeting and enable you to bring up the keyword denisty without letting your content look artificial.
- Provide Navigation pathways throughout your content using inner linking. This will help your users to travel between the different pages of your website or within the page. This will engage your target audience and reduce your bounce rate. As people travel to different pages of your website, they will discover more about your offering.
- Use Web 2.0 to bolster your SEO copywriting. Wherever possible, create opportunities for users to contribute to the website by way of feedback, comments or participating in discussion threads. This will result in ongoing fresh content which will result in your website being found for myriads of search terms which are ‘user speak’ and not ‘geek speak’
