Copywriting for search engine optimisation and your users

Good SEO copywriting is an important task and a big challenge in your SEO strategy. With over 2 million articles being published daily, standing out can be a problem. After having spent hours writing an article, researching content and gathering images it can be harrowing to publish your article and receive no likes, comments or shares. Sadly, there are no quick fixes for as to how your content can be seen. There is, however, an important step that you need to take. If you want to establish yourself apart from the crowd: employing search-friendly copywriting.

Step 1. Website target audience

Firstly you need to know and fully understand your target audience.

For example, you are the marketer for a children’s clothing brand. You already know that your products will be worn by young children between the ages of 2-10. You know that they are most likely interested in the latest children’s movies and television programmes.

They may also be fans of the most recent toy trends. Knowing all of this is great, however, we need to explore this further if we really want to understand our audience. Such as:

  • Who is your customer exactly? In many situations, your customer may differ from the end user. In the example above it is more likely you will be targeting adults with your online content.
  • What is currently being advertised on children’s television? This is a probable source of inspiration for young children.
  • What movies are popular at this current time? This may not just mean the latest releases – think Disney!

Building an ‘ideal customer’ profile is vital towards making your content fit your search engine optimisation strategy. If you don’t have a solid understanding of who your audience is, you won’t know where to start when thinking about the possible keywords they might type into the search bar.

Step 2. Target Keywords

Now that you are fully aware of your target audience you can start to create a list of keywords. These keywords should be a ‘living’ list and will need re-evaluating at regular intervals because the interests of your target audience will change and develop over time.

Your first draft will probably generate a number of single-word keywords related to your business, however, these may be extremely competitive search terms and you will have a difficult time getting your content even onto the first page.

A much better strategy would be to generate more specific keywords and phrases. Your SEO copywriting should contain keywords you think customers would likely use when searching for your products or services. You should assess which of these phrases are likely to drive the most traffic.

There are a number of online keyword research tools which can help with this. The ‘related searches’ section at the bottom of a Google search can be a good place to start.

These can then be ranked in the following order of importance:

  • Search volume
  • Relevance to your audience
  • The absence of site content

Don’t worry if many of the keywords have the same meanings, it is important that similar keywords are targeted individually to maximise traffic!

Step 3. Examine trends using your keyword data

Online tools such as BuzzSumo and Google Trends can help you to get a feel for what trends are popular with your audience. These tools will show you what kinds of articles are getting a lot of attention for your targeted keywords. They provide a range of measures such as the number of hits across social media platforms, interest by region/city and related topics/queries.

By knowing what’s ‘hot’ you have a better opportunity to write content with your target audience in mind. Do they prefer a more casual approach? Or are they more into technical details? Using the tools such as those mentioned above will give you a better idea of how to answer these questions. This will allow you to tweak your message to fit your target audience.

Another way that you can determine what’s trending is to subscribe to an ‘authority site’ within your line of business. Authority sites are very high-quality websites or publications that are respected by people within the industry and are known to contain quality content.

Step 4. Following an SEO copywriting formula.

These days readers rarely have the time to sit down and read intently, instead they skim read. One way to ensure that you stay focused on writing SEO-optimised content whilst also keeping your readers engaged is to use a copywriting formula as the basis of your writing. One of the most effective copywriting formulas is AIDA:

Awareness: create brand awareness or affiliation with your product or service.

Interest: generate interest in the benefits of your product or service and sufficient interest to encourage the buyer to start to research further. This could be achieved by sharing unique, and distinctive information about your product or service.

Desire: Share what makes your product or service different. Create an ‘emotional connection’ by showing your brand personality. Move the consumer from ‘liking’ it to ‘wanting it’.

Action: Get your readers to take action. Move them to interact with your company and take the next step i.e. downloading a brochure, making a phone call, joining your newsletter or engaging in live chat.

Step 5. To Link Or Not To Link

The last important part to writing SEO optimized content for your site is linking. There are two types of links to consider in both your content and on your pages.

Inbound links

Site navigation must be easy for your visitors and your important content needs to be easily accessible. A good way to reinforce this is to create inbound links within your content. This helps to keep users on your site for longer, engaging more with your content.

Outbound links

By linking your brand with the established authority sites that discussed earlier, you are associating your business with their reputation. This allows your visitors to identify your brand with those already well known in the industry.

Great copy is an art

In short, this is a very basic level of SEO copywriting. Knowing what your audience wants to read and giving it to them while remaining focused on keywords which produce a strong search volume. Creating search-friendly content is hard, but it’s definitely worth it. You also won’t be great at it your first time around. It’s something that you will get better at with time.

For more information about SEO copywriting and SEO in general and how Voodoo Agency can help you, please email us at support@voodooagency.com.