Digital Copywriter Tips for SEO
Being a digital copywriter involves a blend of skills to get the best results – especially if a key goal for the writing is to help a business improve its search engine ranking. Writing needs to meet all the usual criteria for a good read – capture interest, hold attention, inform, be grammatically correct and error-free. And to achieve SERP (search engine results page) success, a copywriter needs to understand at least the basics of SEO (search engine optimisation).
If you are doing your own writing, here are some digital copywriting tips that will serve you well.
1. Start with keyword research – there are many tools available, however, the free one from Google serves me well. Google Keyword planner is a tool within a Google Ads account. It is worth noting that you do not have to have an active Google Advertising campaign to access it – simply set up the account and you can find the planner by clicking on the ‘tools and settings’ tab along the top and selecting ‘keyword planner’ from the dropdown list. There are plenty of free tutorials online to help you use this tool.
2. Keep keywords top of mind – even though the goal is to include keywords as ‘naturally’ as possible throughout your copywriting, I always find it helpful to have the keywords visible while writing and therefore paste them into the top of the document I am working on.
As you write, check the keywords every now and then and see if you have written anything that can be re-organised to include those words. Google will punish you for using too many keywords together, so avoid strings and think about satisfying your reader’s appetite for a great read over and above trying to include a long list of keywords.
Choose a primary targeted keyword with 1-2 variations that you can include within the article. By focusing each article on a different targeted keyword, over time you will work your way through a long list and make steady progress.
3. Think about the online searcher’s mindset – this is important for trying to use keywords and phrases that match the terms searchers input into the search engine. For example, if you are providing a service (take ‘copywriting’ for example), it is highly likely someone looking for help with copywriting will use the type of occupation ‘copywriter’ as opposed to a generic term like ‘copywriting’.
People researching the subject of copywriting such as students or a business owner looking for information about how to write their own copy might be more inclined to use ‘copywriting’. If you combine the targeted search term with your location – e.g. Auckland copywriter, it is more likely that there will be a relevant match.
4. Avoid using irrelevant keywords – the point above leads nicely to this one about relevancy. If you use words that have nothing to do with the context of a search, then this will lead to a high bounce rate. In other words, searchers will land on your website, realise that the content is nothing to do with what they were trying to find and then quickly move on without exploring your site further.
A good example would be if you mention a highly topical ‘thing’ in a blog post and happen to get a large number of impressions for it because it is a very specific term that doesn’t have a lot of competition. Your business has nothing to do with that ‘thing’ and you were only mentioning it in passing because you felt it was a conversational, current affairs way of leading into an article! Similarly, if a keyword has different meanings across different industries – think about whether there is an alternative interpretation and how you can focus it further by adding a word either side of it (e.g. ‘marketing coach’ instead of ‘coach’).
5. Use keywords towards the start – it is not only best practice to use keywords towards the start of your meta descriptions, but it also makes sense to follow this throughout the rest of your writing. Search engines are not the only things that like to skim read by focusing on subheadings and the starts of sentences – humans also do this.
For headings and subheadings, try and place the keywords at the very start. For sentences, try and place keywords towards the start of the first paragraph under each subheading. They don’t have to be right at the start – in fact, anyone who has formally learnt to speed-read will have been taught to skip the first 3 words of sentences (usually because they are words that are not important for getting sufficient meaning out of the writing – such as articles and prepositions).
The tips above should not be taken as hard and fast rules, but rather a ‘bit of a guide’. As long as you have identified your target keywords, then you will achieve good search rankings over time by publishing content frequently and consistently. So, you only need to do most of the things mentioned in this article some of the time, because all your effort will be cumulated by search engines and contribute to your overall search performance.
If you need some hands-on help from a marketing copywriter, even if just to get you off to a good start with some keyword research, get in touch.