A Ridiculously Simple Guide to SEO Copywriting

SEO copywriting simply means including the words (keywords) people use to find you and the service or product you're offering through search engines. It can help improve your website rankings big time.

How important is SEO copy?

Actually, the number and quality of the links coming in to your site are more crucial to your search ranking than the number of keywords per page. That's one reason why great web copy is so important, it's a powerful tool for encouraging lots of inbound links.

Nevertheless, sprinkling keywords throughout your site is still essential for getting higher rankings in all major search engines.

Here are a few simple tips for SEO copywriting:

1. The golden rule

This is vital - your site visitor is more important than your search ranking. If you're offering a service or selling a product, your website and your web copy should always seek to serve your visitor's needs first and foremost. Randomly stuffing keywords into your text is a big turn off, just read this:

Cheap car hire is available with top companies across the world through this site. By booking your cheap car hire here you get amazing discounts. As well as cheap car hire we can also help you with booking cheap hotels and cheap flights. To arrange cheap car hire, click here;.

Yuck.

I made that up, but there are plenty of SEO copywriters producing copy like that and it just doesn't work.

2. The right keywords

It's a good idea to hire an SEO consultant to advise you on the best keywords but you can search for the most popular ones related to your website using numerous freeware tools or sites like wordtracker.

A good way to choose keywords is to think about who is visiting your site and what they would naturally type into a search engine to find you. By including those words in your copy you'll make it genuinely useful for this key audience as well as increase your site's relevancy in the search engines for those phrases.

3. Titles and headings

For SEO purposes, the most important places your top keywords should appear is in the title tag of the page and in the headlines and sub-headings (make sure to use H1 and H2 heading tags) throughout the page.

Headlines are also the most important copy on your entire page. Research suggests somewhere between 70% and 90% of people will only read the headline, so it needs to grab their attention.

4. First paragraph

Search engines place importance on the first few sentences of your page so it's a good idea to include your most important keyword here. This is also some of the most critical copy for site visitors, so always be sure to include the keyword in a relevant way. If you can't, just leave it out (or hire a good SEO copywriter!).

5. SEO copywriting throughout your site

For SEO copywriting you need at least 150-200 words on every page. Each keyword should appear at least once, as long as you can include them without ruining the flow or style of what you're writing. You might find you naturally include other words and descriptions relevant to the keyword, that's great too as they will also work well for search.

6. Calls to action

We all want our site visitors to take action. Do you want them to contact you? Buy something? Subscribe to your newsletter? You have to prompt them to take action in your copy so, if the keywords fit in naturally, slot them in here too.

In a nutshell...

The most important thing about SEO copywriting is to create content that integrates keywords without ruining the flow of copy or alienating the person trying to read it! In fact, great SEO copywriting is not obvious at all, it feels relevant to you, it flows well and gives you exactly what you came looking for. This article was optimised. Did it work for you? Let me know, anna@inkspiller.co.uk

P.S. One final tip...

Find a brutally honest person to read your copy for you and see whether they can tell if you've optimised it or not. And rewrite and rewrite and rewrite until they can't.