Bootstrap Your Website: SEO Copywriting Tips & More

SEO copywriting, in the simplest terms, is writing quality content. This means that your content does not just serve the target audience, but will also meet Google’s standards enabling your content to compete on the search engine. It should:

• Have keywords– These are the words that someone types into the search box to get the desired results.
• Enable content to be ranked highly by Google
• Drive a reasonable amount of traffic to your website.

The main difference between traditional copywriting and SEO copywriting is the use of keywords. However, this is not to say that keywords form the bulk of what this is all about. Unless your content is interesting and informative then you still have far to go.  Google wants to see content that is driven by the desire to provide answers to the questions asked by users.

Care should be taken to avoid overusing keywords. This is referred to as ‘’keyword stuffing.’’ Doing this will not give you a high ranking by Google, which is normally the desire of all copywriters. A good user experience is as important as ranking scores.

Google has two main factors that are used to give a good ranking; direct and indirect.

Direct ranking factors

Direct ranking factors are the best practices that are used at page level. They include:

• Headings and subheadings

Here, headings are defined in order of priority and importance by HTML or heading tags. H1 represents the most important heading followed by H2, H3 and so on. The H1 heading should, therefore, be as related to the query searched as possible. It is important to include your keyword in this heading.

• Density of keywords

As earlier stated, avoid ‘’keyword stuffing’’ at all costs. Ensure that you have content that is relevant to the topic while remembering that when they are ranking Google considers all topics equally. Related keywords should be used in headings and also throughout the article.

• Outbound links

Only link to authoritative and quality sites. Within an article, it will help to include charts, statistics, data, and graphs, with backup to links on an authoritative website. Linking within your niche can improve your ranking. When you link to outside sources you are in essence showing your appreciation for what others have written. Apart from building relationships, this will make your article more legitimate. But, do not overdo it.

• Use URL slugs

While they do not carry a big ranking factor, they are important to include in your article. Just make them short, readable, memorable and maybe contain a keyword.

• Title tags

Perhaps the most important factor, after content, to consider in on-page ranking are title tags, these are essential tools and should contain the main target keyword. They should be about 50-60 characters and should be clickable.

Indirect factors

These include:

• Engagement factors

This is the main reason why users interact with your site, spend time on it and continue to click to the other pages. These reasons are determined by the length of the content, its quality, how it has been formatted, how rich the media used is and importantly, if the article is answering the question. The main point is to grant a great user experience and increase the overall dwell time.

So what should you do here?

• Have great formatting
• Make sure that you are answering the question
• Use rich and quality media
• The secret is a conversational tone
• Use short sentences
• The article should be reasonably long
• Headlines

Headlines are essential in helping the user to decide whether they will actually click on your article or not. They shouldn’t be ambiguous but should have the ‘grip’ effect, making the user curious and want to know more, especially for random searches. Use numbers, how-to headlines or questions.

• Meta descriptions

While they are not mandatory, they are easy to create  and won’t do your article any harm. Make them relevant to the intent of the content, if need be, use emotional phrases and make sure they fit within the space provided.

Performance metrics for SEO writing

It is important to develop a key measure of performance to determine if you are on the right track as far as this is concerned. The two main metrics are

• Word per hour
• Content quality

Words per hour

Regardless of the quality of the content you churn out, words per hour remains the topmost matrix for measuring your performance. The more words you can write per hour the more you will improve your productivity and performance. Do not despair if you are not so fast to begin with. Constant practice and writing will improve your typing speed and  boost the number of words that you can write.

The Quality of the Content

Content quality is very important for an article to achieve a high ranking. While this is subjective, you need to ensure that within the content you have answered the question. You should also be adding more information than the other websites about any given topic. Spelling and grammar shouldn’t be in question either. In short, just have a solid, clear and concise post that’s interesting to read, writing that you are happy with.

Summarily, do not be scared that you have to come up with off the chart excellent copy. The key here is to get traffic. No need to be insecure that your article isn’t outstanding enough. No need to be a perfectionist. Bootstrapping a website that is authoritative is pegged on efficiency and not perfectionism. Lastly, grammar, syntax, and punctuation shouldn’t be compromised. Experience and practise are all.