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How Do You Use a Copywriter for SEO?

I have been working on SEO projects since 2005.  The thing that freaks me out most about that (apart from the fact that I started so young…cough), is that nothing has changed.  OK, the keywords meta tag is not a thing anymore, and people care less about Yahoo! – but the golden rule is still the same:

To be successful, you should only optimise your website for the thing your website talks about.

Back in 2005, this meant don’t optimise your accountancy website for ‘Free iPod’, now it means, if you want to be found for a search term, you better have it on your website.  This is where a copywriter comes in.  So here are some particularly great reasons to use a copywriter for SEO:

1. Processing your Keywords Naturally

We’ve all been on websites which force the keywords into the text.  We call it ‘writing for Google’ rather than ‘writing for people’.  A good copywriter won’t sacrifice the purpose of the text for the sake of search engines.  They will write high quality copy that people will actually want to read and engage with, and it will feature your chosen search terms in the correct density without you even noticing.

2. Maintaining Brand Consistency

You may want to be found for ‘cheap cars Glasgow’ but is that consistent with your brand?  An SEO copywriter strikes a balance between the keywords you want to get found for, and the ones which marry with your brand.  This is especially helpful to reduce bounce rate on your web pages.  If the web page relates to the search terms it is optimised for, that’s great, but it needs to relate to the rest of the site too in order to get that second or third click.  Brand consistency promotes engagement and engagement leads to sales.

3. Creating Pages with a Single Mission

If pages are confusing or convoluted, people will leave.  The ‘instant result’ mentality of your average online browser means that your pages must draw them in and help them to take the next step that you are leading them to.  A great SEO copywriter can take an existing page and improve it to have a single mission and help your visitors to follow that path…which leads us nicely to…

4. Planning a Path for the Visitor

About once a week I will get a list of keywords, or a single keyword, from a client with a request to write copy for that keyword.  My reply is, and always will be, ‘why?’.  In order to create pages that convert, we need to know what you want the client to do once they reach your site so that we can direct them that way with our calls to action.  If you need help with that, I can help you work through the ‘why’ questions until we figure it out!

5. Write knowledgably about the Subject

In my training I love telling the story of a brand putting a new marketing intern in charge of their next bike related product launch.  She created web pages, a Facebook community, live Q&A sessions, and more, managing it all herself.  They asked me to audit their pages and see why the campaign just wasn’t converting.  A quick check showed that the poor intern had no clue about bikes.  She’d not ridden once since she was very small and her copy had no substance at all.  The morale of the story – don’t ask amateurs to talk to experts. 

What a good copywriter will do is research – a hell of a lot of research sometimes – so that they can talk knowledgably about a subject.  This helps hugely with SEO as people will share and link to the page if it’s useful and written by an expert.  If it adds value for your customers, the likelihood of it doing well in the search engines is much higher.

If you’d like to find out more about SEO Copywriting and how we can help you, please get in touch.

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