7 Advanced Techniques to Increase Your SEO Copywriting Game
One of the biggest challenges that copywriters and marketers face is writing content optimised for the search engines, yet still appealing to the readers. When we search online for the best SEO copywriting tips, we get answers like use a keyword tool, write quality and long-form content, create a meta description and so on. While these tips can help, they are meant for those who don’t know much about SEO. This post will give you more advanced SEO copywriting tips that successful digital marketers use to create quality, attractive content.
Take an Online Course
This idea is much too underrated, yet it is so helpful. An online course provides you with the tips and techniques you need to shape up your content. Companies such as UDemy and Alison offer courses featuring a wide variety of topics, including SEO copywriting. If you go to UDemy, for instance, you will find a lot of results related to SEO courses. Each result has a brief description of the courses on offer as well as a star rating and the amount charged for the course. You can pick two or three courses that have high ratings. Look into each one of them and slowly pick on small things as to why people are spending their money on them. Choose a course that has great and convincing reviews.
Use Content Pattern to Write Efficiently
A majority of copywriters do not understand what a content pattern is. In simple terms, a content pattern is a layout that repeats itself quite a number of times in a post. A typical example is a list-type post where every item has text and an image. These elements will repeat themselves in the same order and in the same formatting. A content pattern enables you to create blog posts in a structured manner and beat writer’s block.
A content pattern will also benefit your audience. It allows them to easily read your content however they want. If your audience wanted to skim through the post to read important items without missing any crucial information, they could easily do so. They could even just read the headlines and understand what the content is all about.
A good content pattern should help you create a blog post that has an introduction, body, and conclusion. The introduction is where you explain what your post is all about to the targeted audience and why it is worth reading. It basically highlights the benefits the reader will get from reading your content. The body is where you explain your ideas, provide step-by-step guidelines and outline your strategies. The conclusion is where you close off your posts. It is where you tell the readers what to do next. It also summarises the key ideas in the post.
LSI Keywords
LSI keywords, also known as Latent Semantix Index keywords, are a group of keywords that have a close link with the main keyword. Let’s take, for example, a keyword like “SEO copywriting tips.” Possible LSI keywords would be “digital marketing,” “content creation” or “blogging.”
But how do LSI keywords help you? Search engine web crawlers usually skim through your page looking for links, keywords and other things to get a rough idea of what your page is all about. The LSI keywords give the crawlers a magnifying glass, telling them where to look to get an idea of the primary purpose of your page. These keywords also make your post easier to read and increase the average time visitors spend on the page.
Trigger Emotions
Do not shy away from using emotional triggers in your content. Emotional triggers evoke reactions out of people, which will most likely lead to actions. Social triggers are especially useful when used in a headline. A phrase like “Tired of Being Lonely? Use These Tips to Get a Girlfriend/Boyfriend” will evoke reactions from your readers and make them curious about the article, decreasing your bounce rate in the process.
Communicate Your Points Well
Back in college, I used to write long essays talking about something that can be said in two or three sentences. I managed to get away with it because the professors back then were very patient, had long attention spans and were extremely knowledgeable. But in this age, in digital marketing, it’s hard to get readers to pay attention to lengthy content. People have become very impatient and rarely take more than five minutes to read the content. Many people do not have large vocabularies, making it difficult for them to read posts that contain jargon and complex words.
When writing, make sure your content can be read and understood by someone in 6th grade. To capture their attention quickly, you need to explain the key points of the post at the beginning and round it up with a call to action if applicable.
Choose Keywords Wisely
Most copywriters use Google Keyword Planner to help them find the right keyword combinations. However, when it comes to those golden keywords that can make your page rank highly in Google, you need to take a different approach. The first and most important approach is to use long tail keywords. For instance, if the main purpose of your page is to sell or help readers find football boots, don’t use “football boots” as the main keyword string. Instead, use “where is the best place to find football boots” or “where can I get football boots.” Customers nowadays use conversational keywords when looking for something online. You will most likely be left out if you don’t use long-tail and conversational keywords.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Though keywords are beneficial for your post, it is important you don’t go overboard when using them. Keyword stuffing was used by content creators a few years back to rank highly with Google, which forced them to introduce an algorithm that would penalise web pages that do it. When you are penalised because of keyword stuffing, it means you will have to start your content marketing strategy from scratch. This can be really frustrating, especially if you have invested a lot of resources and time on it. So, avoid keyword stuffing and try as much as possible to write naturally.
The tips discussed above are sure ways to improve your SEO copywriting skills. It doesn’t cost anything to adopt them, all you need is to be ready to learn and explore new tips and techniques.
