Home » SEO » Intelligent copywriting

An important element in your SEO strategy should be management of your site content and how it’s presented. What often gets overlooked is the quality of content. Instead of just dropping content on your site and hoping people will be enticed by it and search engines will use it to rank, next time step back and think about what you’re trying to achieve in-depth a little more before you start bashing that keyboard. Here’s a top five to help you out:

1. Who is your audience?

First things first, even though you want to rank well for your related terms in the search engines, the purpose of your site is still to turn people on to your product or service. So find the right tone of voice and keep it consistent throughout your site. Consider using language variations and where appropriate industry terms to connect more with your audience on their level. But always be careful of being over-friendly or patronising!

2. What action do you want to achieve?

Why do you want people to come to your site; research? buying goods? sign up to an RSS feed? It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Make your copy persuasive by using attention grabbing headlines and utilising your USP’s immediately. Follow this up with a teaser paragraph or bullets, to find out more in-depth information in the relevant section of your site. Once there you can offer the user richer content to convince them they have made the right choice along with an easy route to sign up or buy. Most of all your site should be built around your content to enhance your copy and not to over-shadow it. There’s a useful no-nonsense article to help over at adcopywriting.com to get you started.

3. Writing for search engine rankings (before you start writing!)

First think about the terms you want to rank for then check out the competition to assess the feasibility of getting any kind of decent rankings. For example, the more generic term you target along with a high search volume, the more difficult it is going to be to achieve what you want. Use the Google search volume estimator we talked about in the previous post to help you choose your targeted terms. Look further down the keyword tail to start with, so instead of ‘Sofa’ try writing for ‘Large leather sofa’ and by working your copy and page structure to match the products more closely you have more chance of picking up the traffic you want. Ultimately this should also help in the user conversion process as they will land on a more targeted and relevant search page. If you’re used to running PPC campaigns, you’ll recognise the same principles.

4. Start writing! But look after your keyword density carefully…..

Do you know what the most popular words on your site are right now? There’s lots of ways to check but i particularly like Wordle. It’s a nice tag cloud visualisation tool, that works as long as you have an RSS feed setup. So you need to get your keyword density right for the terms you want to target. Blocks of text around 300-500 characters with around a 4% density of your chosen keyword(s) across the whole page still work well both for ease of reading for the user and search engines.

5. Stay Fresh. Never stop copywriting.

Search engines love fresh content. After all the hard work, don’t sit back and let your content become stale, you need to always be thinking of ideas of enhancing what’s already there. This is best done by using seasonal messages and really targeting your content to relate to current events that cross over into your area of business. A nice example right now is using the British success at the Olympics to encourage people to sign up to health club memberships, personal trainers, or be more specific with spinning or cycling classes.

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