SEO Copywriting For Humans

When you start to work on an existing website or begin to create a new one, it is often the case that web design gets the first pass, while content is worked around the designer. While this is a simple statement, it understates the value of good SEO copywriting for your website, and how it can be the difference between selling your products and going under. Good copywriting starts with one simple understanding: you have to write for people. Many SEOs will balk at this, claiming that your most important task is impressing Google, and then worrying about any readers you get as a secondary concern. While this is appealing to our optimization-obsessed industry, what we often forget is that people still are reading this content. If you write a service page for a location, and someone finds your site based on that page, then that’s their landing page. That’s their first introduction to your site. If it’s written for Google, people will notice. Your website’s copywriting will be stiff plug and play nonsense that, while it might be entirely grammatically correct and not keyword-stuffed, still reads like a computer wrote it. If you want to avoid this fate and write copy that simultaneously hooks readers and boosts your conversion rate, follow the simple steps below.

Writing 101, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Process of SEO Copywriting

When you or your copywriter start writing content for your website, one of the first things you need to address is what the purpose of the content is. Are you trying to inform your clients of more information about a product? Are you trying to sell a product? Is it a blog post demonstrating your expertise and helping your clients better work on their own sites (that’s what this is). What you write and how you write will determine how you structure your content.

Winning SEO Copywriting for Technical Readers

Are you a:

• Technical company looking for good SEO copywriting?
• Company for whom brevity is the soul of wit?
• Company with many service offerings that include keywords?
• Company focused entirely on the product?

If so, consider using bullet points. People who are looking for technical details usually will skim over thicker paragraphs and look for highlighted or bulleted information. If you know that these folks are your target market, give them what they want! Write short, 300-word pages full of detailed bullet points about product specs and capabilities, and you’ll hook those types much faster than you would with long-winded paragraphs full of SAT words.

Creative Copywriting Ain’t Dead!

For other customers, however, bullet points just won’t do. These are the clients that want punchy, hard-hitting sales content for their copywriting. They don’t need as many bullet points or technical details, what they need is an engaging story and a reason to buy. Writing for these people involves the use of lots of action verbs and telling them why as often as telling them what. For these people, SEO copywriting is storytelling. What does your company do? How did it start? What are your values? Why are you different? Who are your employees? While the product is obviously important, just as important is why you do things and how you do them. This can be accomplished while still optimizing for Google by remembering to add keyword phrases in amongst your hard-hitting sentences, and writing a compelling story with a call to action to increase conversion rate, decrease bounce rate, and improve rankings by improving page statistics.

Sales and SEO Copywriting

The final major way that your SEO copywriting can help you is by encouraging sales. This tactic primarily involves leading people down the funnel to their purchase. This writing involves emphasizing the qualities of your product or service while leading your customer both consciously and unconsciously to the conclusion that they need your product. In this endeavor, you should coordinate with your sales team to choose the words for your copy that can be both SEO optimized and sales efficient. This is where you need to have the best understanding of your customer to work your SEO optimization magic into your content. What has made people convert in the past? Why do people want your product? What service entices them the most? Having accurate client personas and research helps this process out immeasurably because you can write for the people you know buy your products and services.

Google loves it when your SEO Copywriting is People Copywriting

At the end of the day, what we do is write to help people accomplish their goals. We write so we can sell products and services, but we also write so our customers can satisfy an unmet need of theirs with our products. We need to write so they can know that we are their best option. We can also obviously have fun with it! If you’re having fun with what you’re writing, it will come through in your work. People always find it much more fun to read something when someone had fun writing it. So, in the end, the secret to copywriting SEO is to write for people but remember to add your keywords, services, and story. If you do it right it works as both an engaging reading piece and as a valid avenue for SEO optimization. Write away! PS: ctrl+f “SEO Copywriting” on this page.

Tags: Digital Marketing • Search Engine Optimization