Nowadays, the online space is one of the main tools to reach customers and drive sales. It’s increasingly vital for a website to have, on the one hand, a creative, emotional and selling text, and on the other – this text must be unique and original and comply with specific technological requirements to rank in top positions in search engines. As a result, SEO copywriting was created.
SEO copywriting deals with writing texts for websites such as blog articles, category descriptions, product descriptions, landing pages, and “About Us” pages that are optimized. Implementing SEO copywriting can be the perfect solution if you want to make your online business more successful. SEO is crucial because it makes your website more likely to be seen, which means more traffic and opportunities to convert visitors into actual customers.
In this article, you’ll learn more about copywriting and SEO copywriting. We’ll also offer some helpful practices for successful SEO copywriting that you can apply to your business.
What is Copywriting
Copywriting is one of the most important elements in marketing. You may come across it daily in TV, radio, newspaper or magazine advertisements. Nowadays, it can also be found everywhere in the digital world – from short social media posts to text on a homepage, landing page or a long email offering you to buy a service or product.
Copywriting is the art of writing engaging, persuasive and informative short or long texts that prompt people to take a specific action.
The goals of copywriting can be different:
- Raising awareness for a specific brand;
- Positioning a business or organization as an authority;
- Selling a product or service;
- Introducing a new brand.
There are many types of copywriting, but at the heart of all is learning about a specific audience and understanding their needs, pains and desires. The copywriter then strategizes to find the best way to connect with that audience. To make her feel, think and respond to his written copy to show her that her problem is understood and there is a solution.
Good copywriting manages to make the audience accept the solution presented by the copywriter. That’s why it’s so important to know who your target audience is. To properly define it, several target personas are created. This involves detailed research to determine what groups of people use your product and what they have in common. Although fictional, these personas best represent your real customers. This way, it’s easier to create a copywriting strategy tailored to their needs and expectations that they are more likely to respond positively to. A copywriting strategy also includes an attention-grabbing copy.
Copywriting Tips a Copywriter Should Follow to Create an Attention-grabbing Copy
Here are some valuable tips for successful copywriting that helps create compelling content that gets results.
1.Write an attention-grabbing headline
It all starts with the headline. Conversely, everything can also end with it. According to industry pioneer David Ogilvy, out of every five people who read a headline, only one reads the body copy. While this may seem like a grim statistic, it speaks of the importance of creating a powerful and grabbing headline. The headline is where a copywriter should invest 70% of their time.
2.Short, precise and clear
One of the most important aspects of effective copywriting is to keep content short, accurate and clear, with no ’empty talk’. You have a few seconds to convince a website visitor that it’s worth staying – you’ll struggle to achieve this if your text is too long and complex. Use short and simple sentences so that your message is easily and quickly understood.
3.Focus on the benefits
When writing text, focus on the benefits of your product or service. Tell readers how your offer can help them solve their problems. Make sure you use language that is persuasive and evocative.
4.Include facts
Including facts and figures in your text increases the likelihood that your target audience will trust and choose you over the competition. Facts are persuasive, but be careful – you should use them to aid effective copy, not to be the main message. Too many facts will make your copy sound dry.
5.Test and revise
It’s rare for a copy to get it right the first time. The copy must often be edited and rewritten several times before it’s perfect. Test different versions and measure their effectiveness to ensure your copy is compelling. This process will help you determine what copy works best and what needs to be changed.
SEO Copywriting Specifics
SEO copywriting is the process of creating high-quality content that is, on the one hand, interesting for people to read. On the other hand, it incorporates SEO best practices for good search engine rankings. It harnesses the power of SEO through keywords and phrases to help your content rank and be found quickly right on the first page.
In a previous article on the CreateX blog, we gave you an in-depth look at SEO, how it’s done, why it’s so important, and how you can optimize a website so that it’s more easily indexed by Google and comes out on top of the results pages. You can find the article here if you haven’t read it yet.
SEO copywriting is an essential part of a website’s SEO strategy. Without quality content, the traffic the client wants to receive cannot be reached.
A very important feature is that copywriting for the web is designed for real readers and search engines, which have their requirements and algorithms to accept and display a text. Therefore, SEO copywriting has to maintain a delicate balance between interesting and informative content that meets the technological requirements of different search engines.
This is achieved by creating informative, useful and relevant content for readers. It must also be well-optimized with carefully chosen keywords to reach the right audience and fulfil its purpose. This could be establishing the brand as an authority in a particular niche or prompting a product or service purchase.
SEO copywriting techniques include:
- Keyword research;
- optimizing page titles and subheadings in the text;
- other methods such as LSI (latent semantic indexing);
- Use of keywords in subheadings and in the text itself in reasonable proportion to other words;
- Use of calls to action (CTAs).
Some of the most important elements of SEO copywriting are titles, subtitles and keywords. Experts advise that headlines should be between 20 and 65 characters or about 3 to 5 words. It’s a good practice to include the keywords that are most important for the purpose of the text. In addition to the main heading, marked H1, keywords should also be present in subheadings (H2-H6). We’ve mentioned keywords many times and it’s time to look at their role in SEO copywriting in more detail.
Keywords – What is Their Role
Keywords are words or combinations of words that users type into search engines to find specific information or a product.
As mentioned, a characteristic feature of SEO copywriting is using keywords in the texts, which specialists carefully select to match the user search. This way, when someone searches for a keyword or phrase in a search engine, the page optimized with that particular word or phrase will likely be among the first results.
When writing texts, it’s necessary to use keywords relevant to our topic but also diverse to reach a larger audience. It’s also advisable to display creative writing to compete with other original and interesting content. This makes it much more likely that search engines will rank our page higher in search results.
Experts recommend considering the frequency and saturation of keywords in a web text. Depending on the type and length of the text, they can range from 4-6 to 10-12 repetitions, and it is essential to use the primary keyword or phrase in the first paragraph of the text. The recommended keyword saturation for the entire text is around 3%; otherwise, the content may be perceived as spam and not rank on the first search page.
Tips and Practices for Successful SEO Copywriting
These valuable tips for successful SEO copywriting help create compelling content that meets the goals set by the experts and delivers the results the client wants.
1. Find the right keywords
The job of SEO copywriting is to target keywords relevant to the business and create content that will rank in search engines to grab users’ attention. It’s recommended that keywords are present not only in the main content text but also in the URL, titles, subtitles and meta descriptions.
2. Discover questions that users are asking
Search engines’ top priority is to give users the information they are looking for, which is also helpful. That’s why Google is developing more SERP features that help searchers find what they need faster. One of these features is the “People Ask Too” section. This section offers users additional questions (also called “snippets”) related to their search. If you can create helpful and well-optimized content that gives searchers a quick solution, it could end up in this section and on the first page of a search engine.
Another option is to use special online tools that help you analyze popular questions, titles, and keywords to help you navigate what valuable content to create that will benefit your website.
3. Optimize titles, subtitles and meta descriptions
One of the first things users look at when a page comes up in search results is its title and the short text below it called the meta description. These should accurately and clearly describe the content of your website. It’s recommended that titles appearing in search engines should be at most 90 characters.
A meta description is an HTML element that provides users with brief information about a page’s content. It’s recommended to be up to 156 characters, to contain the primary and secondary keywords for the page and be written in a way that attracts attention.
Well-written titles and meta descriptions increase the likelihood that Google will display your content and rank it better. This means you need to optimize them as best as possible because they influence users’ decision to click on your result.
4. Create well-organized and easy-to-read content
A well-designed text structure helps readers navigate the content faster and go to the most helpful part. That’s why it’s important to have well-formatted and readable text, with headings, subheadings and bullets included to look orderly, coherent and logically connected to visitors. Make sure paragraphs are short and start with the leading and most important information, then continue with arguments, facts and examples. This method is also known as the journalistic ‘inverted pyramid’.
5. Include visual elements
One of the reasons to use visual elements such as photos, videos, graphics and infographics is that they are more likely to keep users on your website longer. Visuals are like a “break” from long text content. They are quickly perceived and help users easily understand the information you’re presenting.
Visuals can also prompt users to share your content on social networks. It is advisable to follow some good SEO practices for images. Each of them should have alt text, also known as alt attribute or alt description (alt tag), which helps, on the one hand, in case of a technical problem to visualize information about what is depicted in the picture, and on the other, search engine bots to “understand” and therefore index the page faster. For example, adding a keyword in the alt text would help rank the image and display it in relevant search results.
6.Include calls to action (CTA)
One of the main goals of SEO copywriting is to bring users closer to conversion. Conversion can be anything – buying a product or service, filling out a form, starting a free trial, signing up for a newsletter, etc. Adding calls-to-action (CTAs) motivates users to take the next step and get closer to the conversion you set.
Don’t include the CTA only at the end of the content, but place it in several important places in the text, as readers may not read the entire page. Be sure to include these calls to action purposefully to avoid the feeling that you are spamming. For example, if you mention a specific product, you can add a related CTA so that if the reader is interested and wants to learn more, they can easily and quickly reach the product page.
7. Use a table of contents
Using a table of contents shows readers exactly what they can find on the page. That’s why it’s important to have headings that clearly describe what the text below them contains, so you can guide visitors where to find the information they came for.
In this article, we’ve told you what copywriting and SEO copywriting are and why quality content is vital for a business. You can reach the results you want with quality content, adequately executed SEO copywriting techniques, and SEO.
And if you need professional help and a team with experience in creating quality interesting content for websites and social networks, we at CreateX are here to help.
