You must have heard about SEO or Search Engine Optimization, but what does it mean, and how can you use it to your advantage? SEO means optimizing your content. This is done either in-house, or by hiring affordable copywriting services to make your page more visible to search engines. Ranking top on search engines requires you to work smarter. A famous quote goes, “Write for people, not search engines.” While this sounds sensible because search engines use NLP (Natural Language Processing) and semantics, it is not entirely true.

This quote means that while you create top-quality content that resonates with readers, you should also follow SEO best practices. It would be best if you, therefore, wrote for both the writers and the search engines. To drive traffic to your site, here are some of the tips you should follow.

SEO Copywriting

SEO copywriting refers to writing engaging and compelling content that follows SEO principles. SEO writing requires the writer to have keyword research expertise, conversion rate optimization, and on-page SEO. A copywriter's focus is to write content with keywords that improve your page’s search engine ranking ability, improving your organic traffic and conversions. If your website is properly optimized, your off-site SEO has more impact.

SEO copywriting is crucial since Google’s search engine is more intuitive and can discern meanings without matching keywords. Google ranks SEO content because readers prefer SEO content relevant to their queries, is more aligned, and more actionable.

SEO Best Practices

Here are some tips, best practices, and SEO copywriting tips that will propel your content to better search engine rankings.

1.     Study the Personas of Your Customers

Writing perfectly optimized SEO copy happens when you understand your target audience and their needs. You have to develop, therefore, a buyer persona that resonates with your customers. You have to overlook the demographics and consider their psychographic profiles. Psychographics refers to studying customers based on their interests, opinions, and activities.

Good content marketing means understanding how your target audience thinks, what attracts them and what puts them off. You need to know the buyers' needs, objectives, frustrations, etc. Know what tone and voice resonate with them, and write your content along these lines. The copywriter needs to capture this to perfection.

2.     Hire a professional

You may not be competent to do this, so hiring an SEO copywriter to work either in-house or a freelancer is in order. You can use affordable copywriting services to help you reach your SEO goals and turn clicks into conversions.

3.     Perform a Keyword Research

Performing keyword research allows you to know how your target audience thinks and their questions in their customer journey. Depending on your site, the copywriter may want to concentrate on pain points, questions, actions, or products.

The writers need a seed list of keywords and use a keyword research tool to lengthen the list and settle for high-impact variants. When doing keyword research, they should not only go for terms with the highest volumes but also consider the search intent.

4.     Perform a Comprehensive Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis helps you to check out any competition within the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages). Also, look at your business competitors and not just competitors in SEO. Even if a competitor is not ranking top on one term, you need to craft high-quality content writing that will be stronger than your competitors.

5.     Craft Excellent Content

SEO copywriting can feel confusing at times. Some SEO experts insist on inserting the keywords as they craft their content. Others prefer to do a draft and optimize the content later. Whichever way you do it, whether in-house or freelance, the bottom line is creating excellent content. The copywriter should insert the keyword into the introduction paragraph, preferably in the first sentence. This helps to reinforce the content relevance by topic to your readers. Here are some tips on how great content looks like:

• Concise language
• Short sentences and paragraphs
• Text is visually pleasing and the reader can skim easily
• Text blocks broken with videos, images CTAs, pull quotes, etc.
• No technical language
• Use of numbers, bullet points, H2s, H3s, and bold text
• Use of sidebars for long text blocks
• Addition of relevant internal links
• Tell the reader what steps to take and make it easier for them to take the recommended action

6.     Optimize the Content

Your content is not SEO copywriting until it's optimized. Your copywriters have already gone the extra mile and done keyword research, crafted a compelling piece, and now it’s time to ensure all the SEO practices are set in motion by:

·       A catchy title, meta description, and heading

The title, meta, and H1 heading must be keyword optimized. They also need to catch the reader’s attention to improve your CTR (click-through-rate)

·       Mind your keyword density

The keyword needs to appears naturally in your post, and there should be enough use of long-tail keyword variations. The post should go for an optimal keyword density that aligns with the top tanking content for the same search term.

·       Use of semantic keywords

The use of long-tail keywords allows for coverage breadth. Google determines your page relevance for particular keywords and does not only track exact-matching mentions. When the copywriter breaks the keyword, they need to use a semantic variant. They can also pluralize it to add crucial context and reinforce the fit of the keyword.

·       Use of internal links

Add relevant and useful internal links to your post to assist Google in searching and help users to get related content. Don’t add too many links, and ensure they fit naturally while using descriptive anchor texts that convey your message on the linked page.

·       Use of Calls to Action (CTAs)

When adding CTAs, they need to be compelling and different every time. The copywriter has to think about the CTA’s function and language, where they fit, and what they say, and figure out at what point the reader will be ready for a CTA. Testing various CTAs and the use of different behavioral intelligence tools tests what will catch the readers’ attention. The use of various colors, words, and sizes allows the copywriter to achieve the perfect CTAs.

7.     Use of SEO Tools

SEO tools cannot replace the human eye, but on-page optimization tools like Clearscope and Yoast can easily streamline your copywriter’s content review process. It becomes very difficult for SEO metrics to gauge qualitative values such as writing. These tools grade the content quite well to improve your page rankings.

Conclusion

You cannot separate SEO and copywriting, although they are just s piece of the SEO puzzle. To get a more organic search, you need to know the inner workings of SEO copywriting and how to rank top in Google and other search engine searches. Hiring a professional copywriter spares you all the technicalities and allows you to focus on your core business.