SEO Copywriting: Not All About Keywords

In the last five years, most webmasters have been focusing too much on keywords when creating web content. While it’s important to keep track of keyword trends in your niche and utilise them in your content strategy, you should not forget about your readers. When you focus too much on writing for machines, you are likely to end up with content that is not palatable and useful to readers.

The whole point of optimising your content with certain keywords is so that search engines can rank your pages favourably for more visitors to click through. But what is the point of getting visitors to your site if you can’t engage and convert them? By engage I mean give them answers to the queries they keyed in the search engine.

Overall Strategy

While you are attempting to answer their questions, you should keep your SEO copywriting simple, precise, accurate, relevant, interesting and engaging. If your content lacks the above-named qualities, your site will lose its authority and attractiveness; and your visitors will exit your site in a matter of seconds. When this happens, search engines such as Google take note and will likely classify your site as “Low Quality”. Above all, you will have lost the opportunity to convert those visitors into buyers, and they will probably never come back.

So the overall idea is that keywords are only meant to create a bridge between search engines and your site content. However, to maintain and engage readers on your site and have then take an action you are offering, you need more than keyword-optimised content. Below some of the SEO best practices beyond keywords that you should keep in mind when publishing your content.

1.Value and Usefulness

As earlier mentioned, after getting visitors to come to your site, you need to offer them useful and valuable content to keep them engaged. Your content should be unique and more useful than what is on your competitor’s sites, then Google will reward your efforts with higher rankings. The easiest way to create quality and useful content it to find great existing content, make it better and publish it on your site or distribute it to other blogs to get links. Here are some simple techniques for making your content better;

• Make it more in-depth: the internet is full of shallow content and cheap rewrites from content mills. Readers, on the other hand, are always looking for in-depth, valuable information. So you should try to go deeper and wider into the topic but without sounding too technical or overwhelming. Stand out and make your web content better by injecting a unique perspective, using existing data to substantiate your ideas or incorporating original research.
• Make it longer: it’s now emerging that the length of your content actually has an impact on your search engine rankings. Both readers and Google prefer long-form content full of value. Long content will give you a chance to naturally add in keywords and also keep your readers engaged for longer. While the length of your content will depend on the subject matter you’re discussing and the message you want to promote, always try to make your content longer than 1000 words. If you can make it 2000 words, even better.
• Make it actionable: instead of just telling the readers what to do, go ahead and tell them how to do it. Focus on step-by-step, tutorial-based articles that give the readers both the “what” and the “how” of your subject matter. If you need them to take action such as subscribe to a newsletter, redeem coupons, or sign up for an offer, detail precisely how this should be done.

2.Informative and Authoritative

The authority of your information gives your visitors the confidence and trust needed to take up your offers. Offer as much information about yourself as possible. If you are a content marketer offering your services online, for instance, you may want to list your bio, credentials, services, hours of operation and contact information. You will probably want to set up a blog to describe what you do in details and share some authoritative pieces of content while at it. Make sure that your content is high quality, factual and that your pages are useful enough to attract other users to link to your site. Here are some quick tips to help you make your content informative and authoritative:

• Expertise: Google’s human raters and readers can quickly tell whether or not the content was written from an authoritative standpoint. For this reason, have your content created by experienced professional writers with positive ratings.
• User experience: Avoid confusing navigation, long load times, and tons of ads/popups as this usually leads to poor user experience.
• Keep your content fresh: Google and other major search engines love up-to-date, fresh content. Keep your content fresh are all times and include current factual information.
• Link to authority sites: Google rewards sites that are linked to authoritative and credible sites with good rankings. You can do so by backing up your claims on your blog through linking to authoritative sources.

3. High quality

As mentioned in our introduction, your SEO copywriting should be unique, precise and high quality. Your main focus should be to give the reader the best value and experience possible. As far as quality is concerned, Google values expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness when ranking content. If you can demonstrate this, then you will receive a favourable ranking. Expertise is your knowledge of any given topic, and you can demonstrate this by sharing your awards and credentials. You can boost your authoritativeness and trustworthiness by guest posting on credible sites in your niche, this is another way to share your profile and get some quality backlinks.

4. Getting People to Act

If content is a major part of your online marketing strategy, chances are you would like your visitors to take a certain action on your page; it could be a signup, subscription, a purchase, share, comment, review, refer, etc. This means your copy should be persuasive (without being pushy) enough to drive your visitors to action. That is not difficult at all; just follow the following three tips:

• Use bullet points: the best way to keep your readers interested and eventually take an action is to highlight the key points addressed by your content in bullet points. You should do this before embarking on writing the content.
• Create enticing and valuable headlines: A headline is the most important element of your post. The headline should look attractive but also target your keyword.
• Have clarity of purpose: It’s important to be clear with your blog post and the message that it carries. Have a clear call to action, know exactly what you want to achieve, do relevant research, and target not more than 5 keywords per post.

Conclusion

By using the above simple strategies, you will be able to improve your search rankings, generate more traffic and improve the visibility of your brand.  As much as keywords play a major role in driving traffic to your websites it’s not all about keywords. So focus on making the overall quality of your SEO copywriting superb and unique at all times.