SEO Copywriting: 6 Tips for Better Content and Rankings
The goal of copywriting is to help your audience or readers move down your sales funnel, whether to make them more aware of your brand or turn them into customers.
On the other hand, SEO has a different objective: to help rank your created content on search engine result pages (SERPs) for your target keyword. By ranking on top of SERPs, you can generate more website traffic, thus helping you get more customers and clients.
Combining both, you can create content that achieves both goals. This way, you can maximize your content’s ROI and help grow your site’s revenue.
This post discusses tips you should apply in your SEO copywriting to break the bank with the content you produce.
#1 – Research for the Right Keywords
Targeting the right keyword is the foundation of every successful SEO campaign, starting with content. Once you’ve determined the keyword you must use, implementing the best copywriting tips should be much easier now that you have a more precise direction of what to write about.
When researching for keywords, Google search will be your best friend. A quick look at SERPs should provide you with keyword ideas to optimize for the topic.
The autocomplete section gives you a list of related keywords about your initial search query that you can write about. The suggestions here come in handy, especially if your initial search query is too broad.
On SERPs, the People Also Ask (PAA) section shows you the questions you must answer about the topic. You can use the keywords here as subheadings for the article you’ll write using the keyword you typed on the search box. You can also optimize them in a separate article to help form your topic cluster (more on this later).
Once you’ve exhausted the keywords using Google search, you can move on to using Google Keyword Planner.
The tool will provide more keyword ideas and suggestions, complete with the number of searches each receives in a month. Use this data to ensure that you write content optimized for a keyword people search for.
For advanced users, you’d want to use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush that not only provides you with the difficulty score of each keyword (the higher the score, the more difficult it is to rank for it) but also research the keywords your competitors are ranking for.
Researching for keywords is one of the most important SEO tasks you can afford to get wrong. Following the steps above should help you find many keywords to optimize over a period. However, you can automate the process by hiring an SEO expert who will do the dirty work for you to focus on writing excellent copy and content.
#2 – Understand the Keyword’s Search Intent
Not all keywords are the same in value, and we’re not just talking about metrics like search volume and keyword difficulty. We want to know the search intent of the keyword you want to optimize.
If you want to make the most out of your content, you need to develop a B2B sales funnel that will help you make sense of the website traffic you’re receiving. The goal of the sales funnel is to help you attract the right audience to your site and bring them closer to converting as customers.
The sales funnel also acknowledges that not everybody is ready to become a customer right now. Some are just learning about your brand, while others are still deciding whether to become one.
Applying SEO to this concept, you must target keywords that will help you fill out the different stages of your funnel, from awareness down to the evaluation and purchase stages.
There are three types of search intent you must keep in mind to help you identify which keywords belong to which stage of the funnel:
- Informational – Provides solutions to problems, ex. how to write a great blog post
- Navigational – Locates the location of a page on a specific website, ex. Bloggingpro how to create blog guide
- Transaction – Helps users in the purchasing or decision process, ex. Best blogging platforms
You can categorize the three according to their appropriate stages in the sales funnel. Keywords with informational and navigational search intents should go in the awareness stage, and transaction keywords are best placed in the consideration and evaluation stages.
Navigational keywords can also go in the lower part of the funnel where your audience is close to converting, i.e., pricing pages (Ahrefs pricing), product landing pages (Copyhackers copywriting courses).
#3 – Optimize for Your Keyword
Once you’ve found the keywords, it’s time to optimize for each one.
For starters, you must include your keyword on the content’s SEO title and page title (or H1 title). In most cases, the SEO and H1 title are the same.
But if you’re using a tool like the WordPress plugin Yoast SEO that allows you to write a unique SEO title and page title, including the keyword in each is a must. Both are highly regarded ranking factors—by placing your target keyword in them, you already have optimized half of your content or copy.
Another way to optimize your target keyword is by including it in the page’s URL. Considered as one of the most technical SEO factors, adding your keyword on the URL is simple, especially if you’re using a content management system like WordPress.
Next, you need to worry about writing an optimized piece of copy or content. Going back to tools like Yoast SEO, you can measure your content’s optimization by referring to its Content Analysis feature. It works like a checklist where you need to include certain factors about your content to increase its score.
If you’re not using WordPress, there’s a web version of the tool that you can use to review your content before publishing.
The goal is to observe all the suggestions provided by the tool as much as possible. The more greens you see, the more optimized it is for your target keyword, the better!
#4 – Write an Engaging Introduction
The beauty of doing SEO copywriting is you don’t need tons of resources to get the job done. An excellent laptop for remote work and some elbow grease are all you’ll need to create copy and ranks and converts.
However, that doesn’t mean the job is easy. One of the most challenging things you have to do as SEO and copywriting is to engage your audience when they come across your content.
Most visitors leave almost immediately once they don’t like what they see in the first few seconds of glancing at your content.
To rectify this issue, you want to have a solid introduction for readers to fall hook, line, and sinker. An introduction framework like P-A-S (pain, agitation, and solution) will help address the majority of it.
The first step of the P-A-S framework requires identifying the hardships people have about a topic (pain). Next, you must double down on the problem by fleshing out additional issues that could emerge from it (agitation). Finally, you can solve all of this with the tips and ideas you have written in the article (solution).
Here’s the P-A-S framework in action using the keyword “how to write a great blog post:”
- Problem – There are lots of blog posts published online. (Provide a stat showing the number of blog posts in a period.)
- Agitation – Due to the volume of posts published, it’s much harder to get the attention of your target audience to view your content.
- Solution – People don’t like just any blog post—they want a great one. This post will help you learn how to do it.
You can expand on the idea above or make a much better version. Either way, using this framework for your intros will help set the stage for the content to shine. By addressing the initial issues readers have about the topic head-on, you already have their attention to read the entire post.
#5 – Link to Related Pages in Your Site
Linking to contextually related pages to your post increases your blog’s topic relevance. You can achieve this by creating topic clusters as part of your blog’s SEO strategy. These are groups of posts and pages interlinked together and cover the same topic.
Content silos are essential because they help redirect readers to different pages on your site that provide supplementary information about the content’s topic. At the same time, they allow search spiders to acknowledge your site as an authority about a particular topic. As a result, you could expect not only the page you just wrote to rank for their respective target keywords but also the entire silo.
Creating content silos means you must add links to related site pages, old and new.
To help you keep track of the changes for all your pages, use a web page defacement monitoring tool.
Site owners typically use this to identify unauthorized changes made on your site. But for this purpose, you want to check the links you’ve added on the different pages of your site. This way, you can see which pages are linking to which ones to identify the different content silos in your website.
#6 – Always Include a Call to Action
When writing blog copy to rank and convert, you are assuming the role of a T-shaped marketer. You are mainly responsible for your site’s success by wearing many hats. This can be a good thing because it gives you full control and mastery of your website’s different parts at work.
To help you achieve complete control of your website’s copy and overall performance, you need to identify the best call to action (CTA) for your content.
Below are tips you can follow to ensure that your CTAs will produce the most clicks:
- Use action words to prime readers into action.
- Use power words to evoke the necessary emotion to inspire readers to perform your desired action.
- Lay down the benefits of why they should do what you’re asking them to do.
- If your CTA is a button, make it big and hard to miss.
- Create a sense of urgency, ex. Buy now before this deal expires, Available only in 24 hours, etc., to compel readers to action.
To make sure that your CTAs are achieving their desired results, you must track and monitor the performance of each. Referring to SEO reports allows you to not only view the organic traffic your content received but also view how many visitors clicked to the respective CTAs of your page. From here, you can make the necessary adjustments to improve the results over time.
Conclusion
The tips above are just some of the other SEO copywriting tips you need to consider when drafting your content.
Whether you’re writing content to be published on your blog or submitted as a guest post for a site that publishes using a WordPress guest blogging plugin, taking heed of the tips above should help you produce content guaranteed to rank and convert.
Related posts:
Technical SEO for Copywriters and Content Marketers: How to Optimize Your Content
This article was originally published by www.bloggingpro.com . Read the original article here.
