Dominate search engine rankings.
All of our websites are custom designed and built.
Design is the silent ambassador for your brand.
Find out who makes the magic happen…
Join the world of Sherbz – check out our latest openings.
We’re proud of our achievements so far.
Writing content that's appealing to readers and search engines alike is one of the main issues faced by bloggers and content marketers. You'll need to become more strategic with your material if you want to grow your blog's readership. The main strategy for doing this is strong SEO copywriting.
Writing content that’s appealing to readers and search engines alike is one of the main issues faced by bloggers and content marketers.
You’ll need to become more strategic with your material if you want to grow your blog’s readership. The main strategy for doing this is strong SEO copywriting.
Even while SEO may seem difficult and complex to understand, it’s simpler than you may expect, especially if you realise that writing for readers rather than search engines is a great practise.
First off, let’s cover a few of the basics:
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is essentially the practice of optimising a website so that search engines (mainly Google, with over 90% of the population using that as their search engine of choice) will “like” it and rank it as highly as possible.
There’s a saying that the best place to hide a dead body is on page two of Google! And there’s a good reason people say this. The majority of users will actually change their search terms rather than scrolling further than the first page of Google. This is why it’s so important to be on the prime real estate that is page one of the Google search results.
SEO copywriting is essentially the practice of writing content for your website that is going to be picked up by Google. As Google is focused on user experience, your content needs to be user friendly, answering common questions or queries in a natural way that puts your audience first.
o This depends on a number of factors, including the industry that your business operates in and how well your SEO content is written. The location of your SEO content on your site can also have an impact, as can a number of other factors –copywriting isn’t the only SEO factor that contributes to rankings. If page one is what you’re looking to achieve, then you might be best looking at SEO copywriting services or an agency that can help you achieve this sooner rather than later.
o Well, we don’t like to toot our own horn or anything – but by the time you’ve read this article, you should be ready to make a start on content writing for SEO. It’s also important to note, though, that SEO is an ever-evolving monster – so if this is something you want to keep doing on your own rather than employing an SEO copywriting agency, then it might be worth at least connecting with a few SEO specialists on LinkedIn.
This depends on what you’ve got on you pages already. It might be a case that a full rewrite is required, or you may be able to get away with going through your existing content and making minor tweaks.
Search intent is basically the reason why your target audience entered a particular query into their search engine of their choice. We can use this knowledge to reverse engineer your SEO content writing. If you are looking to target a particular niche or industry, then it’s important to know what they are searching to find the services that you are trying to offer them.
While formulating a strategy, you will want to look at the search volume of keywords. This is particularly useful because if you come across low-difficulty search terms that have thousands of visits per month, then you can prioritise targeting these over search terms that will only bring you a nominal audience.
It’s also useful to know the user intent – is the reason “why” they’re searching this term. A search could be motivated by informative, transactional, navigational or entertainment purposes. Having this extra knowledge can help to structure your content and determine the tone of what you write, in addition to helping you to pinpoint where you put it on your website.
Content type and target refer to the format and audience of the content that you create. Different formats will appeal to – and reach – different audiences and, ultimately, achieve different marketing goals. By considering content type and target when developing your content marketing strategy, you can create more effective content that is more likely to engage and be shared amongst your audience.
Content type is how you choose to present your content. There are numerous different content types such as blog posts, video, infographics, social media updates. What’s more, you don’t have to stick to just one type of content. You can have a blog that includes infographics or assistive imagery (rather like this one). You could use infographics within a video as well. Even better is when you include your content across multiple platforms as different types.
This is the audience that you are looking to target with your content and will play a factor in how you present it. Once you start looking at the demographics of your audience, you will have a better idea as to how you should be presenting your content.
Formatting plays an important role in SEO copywriting as it helps search engines, as well as users, to understand the structure of the content on the website.
When content is properly formatted for SEO, it is easier for search engines to crawl and index the your website, which will help with SEO results. In addition, in order to optimise for search engines, it’s important to use keywords naturally – don’t try to stuff keywords in where they don’t read properly, using relevant alt tags, meta tags, meta descriptions and internal linking instead.
From a user point of view, properly formatted pages are easier to navigate and can improve user experience, as readers are able to find what they are looking for easily and quickly. This will increase the likelihood of your site being shared and also linked to. Good formatting practices include using headings, subheadings, bullet points and/or numbered lists. All of this should be presented in clear, concise language.
Users don’t want to be left with a question left half answered or, even worse, unanswered – and the likes of Google won’t rank you well if don’t adequately cover the topic that you’re writing about. Create a main article that covers the majority of the information required but don’t leave it there. Support that article with subtopics and assistive articles, so if any users want to know more on a subject, you are providing them with that information.
Covering a topic in full is an important part of SEO copywriting because it helps to establish the website as a comprehensive and an authoritative resource on the topic that you’re writing about. Furthermore, when you thoroughly cover a topic, your webpage will naturally include a wide range of long-tail keywords that may be less competitive than more general keywords.
The above approach can prove effective in terms of attracting a large number of relevant visitors to your webpage, which, in turn, can help to improve your site’s visibility in search results. What’s more, providing detailed and complete information on a topic can help your website to be seen as a trusted source by both search engines and users alike. This can help to increase its authority and credibility, subsequently leading to more organic traffic, good quality and relevant backlinks and shares – all of which contribute positively towards SEO.
You know your business inside and out but visitors to your website don’t – and you can’t expect them to. So, make it as easy as possible for them and break things down for them.
You’ll notice at the start of this article that we addressed what we consider “the basics”. Of course, terms far more technical than “SEO” are thrown around the office on a daily basis. However, if you were to stop any layperson in the street and ask them what SEO stands for, the chances are they couldn’t tell you. It’s no use rambling on about SEO without explaining what it is first. You need to apply the same logic to your business. You may think that throwing technical terms around makes you sound like an expert but, ultimately, that’s useless if your website users have no idea what you’re talking about.
This may sound like technical jargon, however, it’s actually quite simple to apply a schema mark up to your FAQs – and it’s highly beneficial. The way you will go about it will depend on the website platform that you use. However, there are plenty of YouTube tutorials if you’re unsure. If/when you apply this to the FAQs on your website, then Google will recognise these as questions and answers and this will benefit your website.You can experiment various tools for schema mark up such as: https://technicalseo.com/tools/schema-markup-generator/
The aim of your website is to do the majority of the work for you. However, you will still get queries. Even if the query seems absurd or blatantly obvious, you will need to respond to it in a professional manner.
Reading should always be as easy as possible for both the reader and for search engines. We have a special formula to make this happen.
ASMR is a handy way to remember to include/do all the following when content writing for SEO purposes. It stands for:
A. Annotations – This is when you add notes or commentary or even visual imagery to the content. Doing this can provide information, clarification or context for the content in question, in addition to making the content more easily searchable and accessible.
S. Short sentences (and paragraphs) are definitely preferred when writing content for SEO, as this helps to break the content up and make it more readable for the user. The more users that read it, the higher it’ll rank.
M. Multimedia (like videos, images and GIFS) are another great way to break up content and make articles more engaging. People are engaged by engaging imagery, so ensure you include this in your content.
R. Read your copy out loud. This is rather self-explanatory, however, often overlooked. Read what you’ve written out loud so you can be sure that you’ve captured the tone correctly and that it all flows and reads nicely.
So many SEO content articles will come across as super formal. They’ll be written in the third person and include buzzwords and/or jargon. Your website users just aren’t interested in this.
The majority of people will be familiar with K.I.S.S. If you’re not, it stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. Use layman’s terms and write as if you were talking to someone who doesn’t work in the industry that you work in and has zero understanding of it.
Writing about business can make people feel that they have to be overly formal. Their content comes across as stiff and uptight. What you have to remember is that even if your customer base is other businesses, the decision makers are still just people, too. If your content comes across as too rigid or disjointed, then you’ll lose users from your website – so loosen up!
Here are some tips for SEO copywriting. If you’re just starting out and have no prior experience, then these suggestions will help to improve your SEO copywriting skills and knowledge of writing in a different format.
Using an index or Table of Contents helps to break things up for the user and also make any particular topic easy to find and access.
If you include a Table of Contents (ToC) or index at the start of your article and someone were to land on this article with the intent of finding out more about the importance of using a ToC in SEO copywriting, they wouldn’t have to scroll through all the content included in this blog in search of that particular part, potentially scrolling past, then scrolling back, before finding what they’re looking for (if they haven’t lost interest by then). Instead, they could literally tap on the part of the ToC that they’re interested in and it would bring them straight to this section.
As you can see, a Table of Contents is incredibly important from an SEO point of view. Including headings and subheadings makes user navigation much easier and is also a great tool to help search engines easily identify the main topics covered on the webpage and how it is all organised.
Don’t panic, this isn’t anything overly complicated or complex that is going to leave you bamboozled. This is a tool you’ll want to keep in mind when you’re doing any kind of SEO copywriting.
P. Problem- The first step is to identify the problem that your users are facing – or most likely facing – so that they can recognise it and relate to it.
A. Agitate- This step is to show your customers how the aforementioned problem is causing unnecessary pain, frustration, negative effects or any other pain points. This makes the problem more pressing and increase’s the audience’s desire for a solution.
S. Solution- Now that you have pointed out the problem to the customer and made them realise how pressing it is to get a solution, that is exactly what you offer them. This gives your website users a clear way forward and reassures them that their problems can be solved.
This is actually another tool commonly used in copywriting to help you write the best SEO content possible.
Using this formula along with persuasive language, you can create a sense of urgency for your users and persuade them to complete the Call To Action (CTA) that you want them to carry out.
Anyone who has done content writing for SEO in the past will be well aware of “keyword stuffing” or “keyword density” – essentially overusing keywords without considering context or a text that reads naturally. However, times have changed.
A few years ago, depending on the keyword difficulty, SEO content writers were encouraged/told by SEO team members that they needed to get X amount of a certain keyword into a paragraph or article. This led to articles reading in a really disjointed – and sometimes quite random – way. This practice is dead now. As we said, that was a few years ago and there have probably been about 200 Google updates since then.
Within the many Google updates that have been released since then, Google has learnt to recognise when an article is stuffed with keywords and whether or not it reads naturally. If it’s simply stuffed with keywords, Google won’t rank it and may even penalise the site. Your site is much more likely to rank if it actually has meaningful content. Sure, use keywords – but only as and when applicable and don’t try to force them into your content.
We appreciate that this has been a lot to take in, however, hope that it has been helpful. Writing content for SEO is much more involved than churning out a basic message. However, with properly planned content, the process can prove really rewarding – especially when you see it starting to help your SEO rankings.
Share this post
How Off-Page SEO Can Take Your Website to the Top of Search Engine Rankings
Off-page SEO refers to the techniques used to improve a website's position on in search engine results pages (SERPs) by increasing the number and quality of inbound links to the site. Off-page SEO strategies can include link building, social media marketing, and content marketing – to name just a few solutions.
The Importance of SEO for Business Growth in 2023
Businesses face a unique set of challenges when it comes to digital marketing. However, in today's increasingly digital world, having a strong online presence is crucial for business growth and success. This is where SEO comes in. SEO, or search engine optimisation, is a cost-effective and efficient way for small businesses to improve their online visibility, attract more traffic, and ultimately, grow their business.
Not tech savvy? You don’t need to be! We’re here to help.Let’s get your project started…
