What is small business SEO copywriting?

You may have heard people (or me) talk about how SEO and content go together like peanut butter and jelly (I had to do it, sorry) and wonder why. PB&J is a classic, and SEO & Content should be. It's a classic combo because I know you need both to succeed, and I'm hoping you know it, too. What is SEO copywriting, and why is it so important to your small business?

 

SEO Copywriting is copy that has a strategy at its core

 

When we combine our copywriting with SEO, we get better results than when we do either independently. SEO copywriting means we write our copy with an SEO strategy at each step. This is especially important for small business owners because we want to make sure we're creating content that our ideal customers are searching for online and making it easy for them to find when they search. Knowing both what to write and how to optimize it for discovery is the key to creating a small business SEO strategy that brings the right people into your world. 

 

What is the first step to SEO copywriting for your small business?

 

When we write and use SEO to guide our content development, we focus on finding keyword opportunities for our website or blog. Rather than developing topics on whatever we feel like, we strategize around our business goals, and a key goal for any business with an SEO strategy is to rank for more keywords and be more visible in AI-based search. As small business owners, creating the right content for our customers and ensuring it's visible in both traditional and AI-based search is key to growing our online visibility, leads, and revenue. 

 

We think about the keywords we could rank for and look for content development opportunities to support those keywords. Maybe we have keywords that aren't ranking on page 1, and we want them to move up. Well, creating excellent copy that's optimized can help them jump up to page 1. Maybe we haven't targeted keywords yet, but we've identified some as an opportunity for our business, and we want to go after them, so we create a new page or blog post to help us be more visible when people search for information related to our business.

 

The best way to increase your website's SEO (free) traffic is to get more keywords to rank. You get more keywords to rank by creating more optimized content or optimizing the content you already have on the site. Historically, we only cared about ranking on Google, but now with AI-based search, we also want to make sure we're visible in the answer engines, and it's SEO copywriting that will help us with this, too. What we've done for Google for years works for AI-based search, too, thank goodness. You will want to continue to think about your ideal customer, answer their questions on your website or blog, and be helpful to them at the core of everything you do. You'll also then want to make sure you're using their words and the keywords they search for in your copy to help them find you, whether they search on Google or with AI. 

 

 

What's next with SEO copywriting?

 

You started by identifying keywords you want to rank for and questions your ideal customer is likely searching for on Google or AI search. Now it's time to do a bit of keyword research and choose the ones you're going to target based on your website's ranking ability. Not all websites can rank for the same keywords. Sometimes, you have to check out a few of them before you find the best opportunity for you. Don't get stuck on the search volume alone; there are other factors to consider, and your website's ability to rank for the keyword is #1. Keywords are important for Google SEO, but they don't matter for AI-based SEO, AEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it. For AI-based search, we want to focus more on answering the right questions. This is why you want to really understand your ideal customer so you know what content to create to help them. 

 

Choose a keyword you want to rank for and test it to see if it looks like you can. Go to Google and enter the keyword you're considering using. See what websites come up on page 1. Are they like you, or are they a lot bigger? You want to find websites that are similar to you on page 1. The more similar they are to you, the better chance you'll have of ranking with them. There are over 200 factors that go into Google's ranking algorithm, but this is a quick and easy way to get a good idea as to whether or not you've chosen a word your website can rank on page 1 for. And you need to rank on page 1 to get the traffic. 99% of searchers don't go on to page 2.

Then you want to think about the questions your ideal customer will likely ask about this subject to figure out what to include for AI search. There are some tools that can help you with this if you decide to focus on SEO for your small business; they'll be very helpful. I teach my students about them and how to use them in Simple SEO Content, and it makes the process easier and faster for them. 

  

Now that you've researched the keyword you want to rank for and determined which questions you'll answer, it's time to write some copy.

  

Start writing your copy

 

 Keep your keyword and questions in mind and write your website copy or blog post. Answer your potential customers' questions and help them better understand the topic. Provide value to them above all, and you'll have a better chance of seeing results. Google and AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others want to deliver high-quality, relevant content to their searchers. You can help them do this by creating high-quality, relevant content on your website. 

 

Write your copy for your customer, not the search engines. Tell them a story, share the information they need, and give them facts to help them make a decision. If you reference a product or service in your content, link to it so it's easy for readers to find more information. Don't just tell them you have more information; make it easy for them to find that info on your site. 

  

If you have an opt-in that would help them right now, be sure to offer it in your blog post or on your website. When developing SEO content, you want to focus on providing helpful information and value more than anything.

 

Optimize your content for Google and AI search

 

Since you've created your content with SEO in mind, you already know your keyword, so go ahead and write a Title Tag and Meta Description that follows best practices and helps Google better understand what your page or post is all about. 

 

Create an image for your blog post or website page. I recommend one picture for every 500 words. It helps break things up for the reader. Save those images with optimized file names, too. Use your keyword! For specific training on naming your photos for SEO, check out this post.

 

If you've used headers (paragraph separators), add your keyword to them, if possible. You want to make sure that it still sounds natural, but try to incorporate it where you can. For example, look at this page and see where I've used SEO copywriting or what SEO copywriting is in some of my header tags (the bigger font text on the page). This is also an important place for your AI SEO, AEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it. AI-based search engines will skim the content on your page to understand what it's about, and they're looking for the answer to the searcher's questions, so having the answers to the questions your ideal customer asks will help you potentially be cited in the results. 

 

Publish your SEO content and check your keyword ranking

 

Once your copy is SEO-friendly, optimized, and ready to go, you can hit publish.

 

My Beginner's SEO Guide has an SEO checklist on the last page that you can use repeatedly to ensure that you've done everything you need to optimize your page.

 

Next, check the keyword rank for the term you optimized for today. You can use Small SEO Tools to do this for free. Get the search volume for your website and write it down somewhere. This is your baseline rank for the term. You'll want to check it monthly to see when it starts to work. Your keyword should move up in the rankings after you optimize it (if you've chosen one you can rank for), and once it moves up to page 1, you should start to see more traffic come in from your rankings.

 

You'll want to check your Organic or Search Traffic in Google Analytics to see if the traffic is increasing. If you're going to see if the page or blog post you created is getting more SEO traffic, go to GA, and in the pages report, look for the URL for the page you optimized and see how many Entrances there are – this tells us how many people came directly to that page, and typically, that's from SEO.

You should also watch for traffic from AI search engines like Perplexity, Claude, and ChatGPT if you've done AI SEO on your content too. You'll want to look for this in the referring traffic section on Google Analytics or in AI search in Clicky (it's an easier-to-use analytics tool that I like for small business owners). 

If you want help crafting the right SEO content strategy for your small business, either join me in Simple SEO Content, my group program, or work with me 1:1, and I'll show you what content to create and how to optimize it so that new customers find you when they're searching online.