SEO copywriting is a key element in every SEO strategy. As search engines crawl web pages, the content of your website should be fine-tuned to the ever-changing algorithms of search engines. In addition to that, your content should be clear so that your audience both enjoys and understands your website as readability ranks.
This guide to SEO copywriting will take you through the process of keyword research as well as the stages of the writing process and help you understand how and why you need readable and SEO-friendly articles on your website.
SEO copywriting and organic SEO
At Two Lizards, we practise what we call ‘organic SEO’. This means that our primary goal is to build and maintain the best possible website without paying for Google Ads. Google Ads, AKA Google AdWords, is Google’s advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. Since advertisers have to pay for these clicks, this is how Google makes money from searches.
Ranking in Google will come automatically if your website content is high quality and you add good content regularly. The reason for that: Google wants to serve its customers with what they want.
In addition to this, Google wants to make money, but they have to show people the results they are looking for – otherwise, they will stop using Google. So, if your website is the best in your niche market, Google will rank it high up in the page results.
Organic SEO
Organic SEO should be part of your marketing strategy aimed at making the best website in a specific niche market. In order to do so, the technical design of your website should be excellent and all security aspects covered. However, most importantly, the content of your website should be well-written and targeted at the audience your website serves. This approach requires experienced SEO content writing skills.
Writing good SEO copy
To make sure your website is the best in your sector, the text on your website should be easy to read. Without making any concessions to the quality of your content, you should tweak and fine-tune your text to the specific demands of the search engines. The process of SEO copywriting is very much like the process of writing anything else, it requires work.
Before writing website content: always start with keyword research
The very first step of SEO copywriting has little to do with writing. Initially, you need to decide what you’re going to write about and which topics you want to be found for?
You’ll need to use the keywords you want to rank for in your copy, so the first step of SEO copywriting is keyword research. Keyword research provides a list of the keywords and key phrases which you want your website to rank for.
Keyword research consists of these three steps:
1. Formulate a mission statement
Before starting the actual keyword research, think about your mission statement. It’s what makes you stand out from the crowd. While formulating your mission statement, you should consider questions such as: who you are and what your blog is going to be about? What makes it unique?
2. Make a list of relevant keywords
Once you have formulated a clear mission statement, you can start making a list of all the search terms (keywords) you want your website to be found for. In order to come up with good terms, you really have to get inside the heads of your audience. How are they most likely to find you? What would they search for on Google? By using Google Adwords keyword planner and looking at the search terms that your direct competitors use, will give you direction in the most popular search terms in use.
At the end of your keyword research, you should have a list of all the relevant search terms people might use. Also, think of combinations and variations of these terms.
3. Create an overview
Eventually, you should have a useful overview, which will be a great help in your SEO copywriting process helping you create a table of keywords to summarize the information. Try to come up with combinations of keywords as well and then put them in some kind of priority order. Which of these keywords are particularly important to rank for and closest to your mission statement, and which ones are less so?
When choosing which keywords to tackle first, you should also consider how likely it is that your pages will rank for that specific keyword. In many cases, focusing on less popular and less competitive keywords can be a good strategy to begin with.
4. Create landing pages for searchers
The final step of keyword research is to create great posts or pages for the keywords you want to be found for. This content strategy should be tailored to draw in visitors who have found your blog or education page through a specific keyword. This could be a dedicated page or a blog post optimized for that keyword. Make sure your visitors can navigate your blog or page from there, through the menu or internal links.
At Two Lizards we understand that finding the time to work on your business whilst working in it can be difficult and sometimes impossible. That’s why we provide many of our clients with an SEO content writing strategy that works from the ground up, creating good, optimised copy content for their website and then adding regular content in the form of blogs and education pages. We work closely with our clients to create interesting, relevant and optimised content which gets results. Call us on 01306 621001 or email us and we’ll be happy to chat about getting your business out there!
The content of this article is based on a blog by Yoast SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/complete-guide-seo-copywriting/