What is 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 that 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 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 one or the other independently. SEO copywriting means we're writing our copy with an SEO strategy in place at each step.

What is the first step to SEO copywriting?

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 based on our business goals, and a big goal for any business with an SEO strategy is to rank for more keywords.

We think about the keywords that 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.

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.

What's next with SEO copywriting?

You started by identifying keywords you want to rank for. 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.

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.

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

Step 3 in SEO copywriting is to start writing that copy.

Keep your keyword in mind and write your website copy or blog post. Answer your potential customer's 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 wants to deliver high-quality, relevant content to its 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 engine. 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 piece, link to it so it's easy for them to find more information.

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

Step 4, it's time to optimize your content.

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 file names that are optimized too. Use your keyword! For specific training on how to name 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 on this page and see where I've used SEO copywriting or what is SEO copywriting in some of my header tags (the bigger font text on the page).

Step 5, publish your SEO content and check your keyword ranking right now.

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

My Quick Start Guide has an SEO checklist on the last page that you can use over and over to make sure you've done everything you need for SEO on 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.

I hope you found this training on SEO copywriting helpful. If you're ready to learn more about SEO and how to do this for your website, check out my SimpleSEO program. It's designed to teach you SEO in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step manner. I'd love to have you join me in class.