There was once, a time long ago, when SEO was all about stuffing as many keywords into your website copywriting to rank as high as possible in search results. Big search engines then figured out that website visitors and search engine users are looking for informative, educational copy and content that follows them along the buyer’s journey.
These days, optimizing content means carefully crafting copy to stay relevant, rank high, and ultimately, give customers the content they’re looking for to support their purchase decisions — but how can that be achieved synchronously? Try these tips.
Keep Keywords Natural
Above all, your content needs to be user friendly to be SEO friendly. Yes, keywords are important, but they need to be included organically in the company and integrated seamlessly. Longer, long-tail phrases (like restaurants in San Diego) can be broken up or used in various combinations. The key here is to avoid making the keywords the main focus and making things read as natural-sounding. Although ranking high means including keywords relevant to what searchers type into the engine, you also need to make sure your content elicits engagement and conversions from customers.
Keep Keywords Strategic
As you’re deciding on which keywords to include in your copy, don’t just think about what your business sells or the services it offers. Those are great and all, but they could be far different than what your customers are actually looking for. Make sure to match the keyword to the best types of content to boost SEO for your copy. For example, if the popular keywords are location-based, they may not be right in blog copy. On the other hand, product- or service-specific keywords would be ideal for a blog post detailing how to use those products or the benefits of those services.
Don’t Skip Snippets
Featured snippets are a great SEO tool; they are the content boxes that appear at the top of website search results and give quick, clear explanations of search terms. The snippets are small portions of your copy, so ensure that you’re answering common questions and defining keywords succinctly and clearly. Simply put: “Google’s algorithms search through countless sites to find the content that will best answer a user’s questions. When the crawlers find it, they display the content in the form of a featured snippet, which makes it easier for people to locate the information they’re looking for.”
Properly Format Content
How do you feel about reading walls of text on websites? Probably not great, and your customers feel the same way. You don’t want your copy to scare customers into clicking off of your website and finding a competitor that gives them the copy they need to answer their questions; that’s a huge SEO mistake to make. Break up your copy with headlines and subheads that include keywords, formatting like bulleted lists or indented italicised quotes, and relevant, eye-catching images with optimized captions and tags that also include keywords.
Include Internal Links
Don’t assume that website visitors find your home page in a search before any of the other pages on your website. If you’re optimizing your content and copy for SEO, it’s likely that your blog posts may show up first in results. When that’s the case, you’ll want to include internal links throughout your copy to redirect visitors to other pages that help convert visitors into customers. That said, those internal links need to be relevant to the copy you’re writing and not just thrown in haphazardly. An added bonus to including internal links: It helps improve crawlability by search engines and can ultimately improve search rankings.
Customize Copy Based On Content
SEO-friendly copy isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Writing a blog post is easy; there’s generally much more room to tell a story and include several keywords, but 750+ words on an “About Us” page would never fly. Product and services pages are also a bit challenging when it comes to including keywords as you’re limited by the attention span of your visitors, so adjust your copy format to fit. Think about user experience: Why are visitors on the page? What are they looking for based on the purpose of the page? How are you going to give them exactly what they want?
The bottom line is that SEO-friendly copy needs to keep the customers at the core. Working with a team of marketing pros can help take your content from okay to great, generating more leads and increasing conversions from website visitor to loyal customer. At D3FY we understand that you’re a business owner who would rather spend time leading your business instead of keeping up with SEO, website edits and social media management. That’s why we offer a convenient, affordable package that elevates your digital marketing so more people can find you online.
