The most common issue that is holding people back from ranking well on search engines is onsite SEO. Good on-page SEO along with high-quality, niche-relevant backlinks are the backbone for what gets a site to rank on the first page of search engines. If you do SEO, you already know how important on-page SEO is. Search engines are getting smarter and smarter. It can detect garbage content from a mile away. Investing in high-quality, SEO-optimized content for your site is vital to even be relevant in the search engines today.
In this article, we’ll talk about the importance of SEO copywriting, how it differentiates from traditional copywriting, and how to implement it in your content. Now without further ado, let’s dive in.
All About SEO Content Writing
Most SEO people make the mistake of simply optimizing their website for search engines. That is a big no-no because helping humans are the ones using and interacting with the search engines. Whether you need SEO-optimized content for a new site or a freshly built site— spend the time to structure the article to land relevant keywords. Make sure the content on your page follows the best SEO practices and avoid receiving any over-optimization penalty.
What Makes SEO Copywriting Different?
Copywriting is writing text for the purpose of advertising. SEO copywriting makes your content focus on user intent contains the right keywords to attract your target audience. It helps you get higher ranking positions for the right terms.
According to SEO growth marketer, Brandon Leuangpaseuth, “SEO copywriting is a marriage between writing for humans and search engines.”
“Really, it’s an art. Include certain keywords to send signals to the search engine that your content is the best information to satisfy the search intent behind a query, but also make it readable to humans.”
Search engines are getting more and more complex. It can tell if you are stuffing keywords together or making content unnatural in order to manipulate the algorithm. Instead, just make everything flow and be insightful.
SEO copywriting is a bit more strategic. If you want your content to rank, you’ll need to come up with a plan to cover similar topics the pages on the search engine results pulls up.
Optimized for the right target keyword
Make sure the content on your page is optimized for the correct keyword you are trying to rank for. Ensure that the content you write will send the right signals to search engines for what your page is about.
There are a ton of tools to help you write for the search engines. Tools like Clearscope and Surfer SEO have spearheaded the on-page optimization for SEO copywriting. These tools scan the top 10-20 pages on the search engine results page (SERP) and give you a list of keywords mentioned. These tools can show you the averages of relevant keywords on the top pages of a SERP for a query. Optimizing your pages to reflect the SERP is key to ranking higher on the search engines.
Satisfies your user’s search intent
The days of placing a thousand words of content on your website pages with your keywords stuffed are over. Fulfilling search intent or making sure the content on your pages satisfies what your user is searching for is what is going to get your content ranked well on search engines. This means we are fully solving whatever problem your user faces when they are typing in keywords to the search query.
You could have the most stellar piece of content, but if it does not satisfy what the user is trying to solve, Google won’t care to rank you. And the thing is…the search intent behind a query can change as time goes on. Be sure to keep this in mind when you are writing. If you notice your rankings starting to drop, then you may need to revisit and update your older pages.
Google rolled out an algorithm update called Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) that pushes newer pages above the SERP in order to test if the search intent has changed. Google would reogranize and shake up the SERP in order to test if new pages would satisfy a search intent more than older pages.
Optimize your page for multiple keywords
Although you will be targetting one specific keyword for your page of content, you will also need to work some magic to optimize your written content for synonyms and other closely relevant keywords. In other words, help your pages cast a larger net to capture more keywords and more traffic to your other web pages.
For example, try to rank keywords with similar intents on one page. If a user is typing in multiple different search queries to solve the same problem, chances are, if your content is good enough, you can get the page for multiple keywords.
Keyword placement, density, LSI
Understand where to place your keywords on your page to where search engine crawlers to locate them and avoid overstuffing them on your page. If your content has five hundred words of content, having your keyword mentioned eighteen times does not make sense. By the way, also make sure to include latent semantic index keywords or topically relevant keywords in the content to really make it crystal clear for search engines for the page is about.
Again, you could use SEO tools to help you analyze the SERP and tell you how many times you should mention keywords in order to avoid over-optimization penalties.
It’s time to start writing!
SEO is important to your business. Don’t spoil your SEO efforts with poorly written, unoptimized content. You need to write for humans AND search engines. If you do not know what you are doing, you can risk getting your site penalized for over-optimizing the content. Don’t take that risk.
The bottom line is you need to write naturally while satisfying search intent and including relevant keywords surrounding a topic. That is, in essence, how you rank higher in the search engines.