A Comprehensive Guide to SEO Copywriting – It’s Not Just About Keywords
You might think that getting people onto your website is the goal of online marketing, but that’s just the easy part. Keeping them there and convincing them to come back, again and again, is the real reason you work so hard.
SEO copywriting that works is the glue that makes sites sticky. It’s more than just throwing out a landing page or a few blog posts with some basic information and hoping someone likes them. If your goals include tons of traffic turning into repeat readers and customers (And what internet marketer doesn’t share those goals?) then you need to understand SEO copywriting and start creating content that aligns with its best practices.
Five Steps to Make SEO Copywriting Work
1 – Do You Know Your End Goal? – Writing content without a goal is like posting links on any old website that lets you. It is a waste of time and energy. Each website page, blog post, or social media snippet needs a goal.
2 – Choose and Use Keywords Like an Expert – You cannot attract attention with copy unless it includes keywords people actually search for. Use professional tools to find them, include long tail keyword phrases, and do not forget about latent semantic indexing (LSI).
3 – Capture Attention With Title Bait – Avoid the obvious clickbait titles you see on entertainment sites and focus on attracting attention the right way. What does your target audience want? Including words like “easy,” “free,” “ultimate,” numbers, questions, and something surprising helps draw the eye. Use the right headlines for on-site, blog, social media, and other content types.
4 – Keep Content Interesting and Accessible – Very few people search the internet for academic treatises or dry scientific reports. They want solutions to their problems that are easy to read and entertaining in some way. People will trust you if you speak to them directly, not fill their minds with vocab words and fancy sentence construction.
5 – An Eye for Page Architecture Helps – Structure matters when it comes to SEO copywriting. The most eager site visitor will click away immediately if they are met with a wall of text. Heading, subheadings, block quotes, and bold not only capture attention, but they also give you a powerful place to put keywords.
You know the basics. Now, do you want to make your SEO copywriting go from school paste to super glue?
You can call them hacks or super-secret tips or the rules set forth by some legendary internet marketing guru. These methods for making SEO copywriting super powerful are accessible to anyone. You do not have to use everyone in every post or page. Some work better with different types of content, business types, or niches. Implement one or more and see what it does for your site traffic and stickiness.
Can You Attract More Attention With a Question?
Well, did that one catches your eye? People are naturally drawn to puzzles and questions, and they always want to know the answer. Curiosity is a powerful force that sucks people into your sales funnel in the first place. People perform searches because they want to know something or solve a problem. If you promise to satisfy their curiosity, they will be drawn in.
If you don’t use a question in the title, use one in the introduction of the copy. If it aligns exactly with what the reader wants to know, you have won. If it’s something they never considered but are thinking about now, you have also won.
Bucket Brigades to Fuel the Fire, Not Put it Out
An attention-grabbing headline is a must. Interesting subheadings draw the eye too. Transitions lead the reader from one section to the next. Compelling conclusions push people toward a call to action they cannot ignore.
All of these elements are called bucket brigade or grease slide elements. They use emotive words and phrases that naturally influence a person’s psychology to stay on the page and stick with the SEO copywriting until the end.
Smart Linking Strategies Create Webs of Influence
Content is so much more than page copy and blog posts these days. Social media comments, videos, webinar text, guest articles, infographics, and anything else a person can read or see about your company fits. Whether you use graphics or video, copywriting still provides the oomph to make the piece powerful.
Each piece of content should be effective on its own, but what really fuels the machine is chain link content. that connects all the pieces together. This means people can come to your site through many different entryways: a Facebook status update, YouTube video, blog post, or any other type of content.
Perhaps the Most Important SEO Copywriting Rule of All
Know your audience.
Every piece of content you create for your business must have an ideal reader. If you do not know who the piece of writing is for, there is no way to tailor it to their specific needs, wants, and habits.
It is obvious to see that a 60-year-old woman looking for information about retirement plans, for example, will prefer a different type and structure of copywriting than a tech-savvy millennial looking for a leg up with app development. You can make assumptions, but research is much more effective. Keyword choices, writing structure, reading level, and where the content appears may be incredibly diverse. Identify who you want to read the copy and then tailor it to them specifically.
Online content writing comes in many forms: pages long or barely a sentence; rich with detailed content or mostly entertainment; merely introductory or created to stuff your sales funnel full of eager leads. The basics listed above are enough to get anyone started on the path to success. However, if you want to both attract readers and keep them coming back for more, learning more specific, in-depth techniques can give your SEO copywriting the boost you desire.
