Beginner at SEO Copywriting? This Guide Will Help You!
If you own an online business, or you are handling one, then chances are you would have heard about SEO copywriting, or you might have done some research or consulted an expert about professional copywriting. However, if you are hearing about it for the first time and you are a beginner at SEO, do not fret. In this article, we will discuss a guide for beginners in the world of SEO copywriting. The first thing to understand is that search engines consider several factors when helping users to get the most relevant content to their search queries. So do not think of SEO as some sort of cheat code; instead, it is a search engine helper. Here is how to ace it as a beginner.
Write great content
If you want your business’ website to stand out, you need to master the art of producing great content. The content must be updated as frequently as possible. It is advisable that you upload at least one relevant article to your blog daily. All search engines have algorithms that are kept secret and are constantly changing. The algorithms are designed to sort out the most relevant content that keeps pace with what users are looking for. The content you are posting must be relevant in a way that it will have a long shelf life. Remember the idea is to appeal to your readers, if what you post is interesting they will keep coming and share your content on their social media accounts.
Harness the power of keywords
Before you start optimising your content, you must do a thorough research on the most relevant keywords in your niche. You can use the Google Keyword Planner; it is an effective tool that aggregates people’s search prompts and assigns a relevant value to them. The keyword that has the highest density is what most people are searching for. You can then use that keyword and optimise it for your website. Optimise more than ten keywords for your website or page content and search engines will start to direct traffic to your website.
Generate a sitemap
A sitemap is in layman’s language a map to your website. It is free to generate one or simply just use XML sitemap plugin. If you generate one, you need to add it to your root directory in order to inform the search engines crawlers that they can crawl your site and index it with ease. It is important since it helps the search engines algorithms when ranking your website.
Backlink your website from high authority websites
Contrary to what you might have heard about backlinks, they are still relevant and effective. A backlink is a hyperlink that connects your website to another high authority website. You have to do it manually if you are to remain in the good books of search engines. There are numerous websites on the internet which purport to offer backlinking service at a fee. Do not fall into that trap; you might end up having your website slapped by search engines which is like suicide. The safest way is to become a guest blogger and ask other bloggers to guest blog on your site.
Headings
When doing SEO copywriting, you are writing content for humans to read. You cannot write a block text; it will be too boring to read. Using headings or H1 title tags is similar to having headings in a book. The way you arrange them is very important if your content is to appeal to bots, it must follow the H1, H2, H3, and H4 order. There can only be one H1, but with numerous further headings, you can make many more points. Arranging your content in such an order increases its readability.
Use Meta Descriptions
Once you have written your content and it follows all the guidelines, use Meta descriptions before you publish. Meta helps to guide the search engines, and your searchers, to understand the topic you are writing about and the reason the targeted keywords appear in the content. In other words, a meta description is an attribute mostly in HTML that gives a concise explanation to bots and readers about your page content.
Site speed
You can have great content, but users will fail to read if your site takes too long to load. Understand that over 40% of your users will leave your page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. In fact, 47% of your visitors will expect a page to load within 2 seconds. Site speed is also a key factor that search engines use to rank websites. You need to increase your site speed to increase your user experience. It will also help increase the attention span of visitors to your website.
Responsiveness
Today search engines are paying more attention to websites that are not mobile friendly. They are in fact using it for ranking websites. Over half a billion people today access Facebook using their mobile phones, in fact, mobile internet usage has just surpassed desktop web access. Most themes today are mobile friendly, and if not you can use available tools such as plugins.
Get social
Remember you are generating content to drive traffic to your website. There is no better place to share your content than social media. You can link your website and your social media accounts, that way when you publish an article on your blog, it is instantly shared on your social accounts. In fact search engines often monitor the activity on your social accounts and the level of engagement you drive. It will help them to gauge your relevance in your niche.
Conclusion
If you are new to SEO copywriting, you need not worry; these few steps should guide you on what to do to get your website indexed and ranked. They will also help drive traffic to your site and hopefully increase your traffic. I hope to see you at the top.
