Seven steps to successful SEO copywriting
Copywriting SEO copywriting writing for websites
A great website isn’t great until it’s been found by search engines.
You can have the most bee-u-ti-ful looking website in the world with lots of lovely copy telling the world all about your fantastic products, how they will change your life, make you richer, smarter, fitter, sexier, blah, blah , blah but if your site isn’t found by search engines then all that work has been in vain.
Carefully crafted SEO copywriting will boost your site’s ranking and maximise the chance of it reaching page one of Google.
To help your site get there, we follow a 7-step process to successful SEO copywriting which is kicked off by the customer filling out a comprehensive briefing document.
Using information from the brief, here are the steps we take to help propel your website into the virtual stratosphere:-
- Analyse your business. We develop a comprehensive understanding of the products and services your business provides. This helps us to write words and phrases that people would use to find you online. These can be benefit driven ie: cream to cure acne, or product driven ie: concrete supplier in Melbourne.
- Research. We look at what your competition is doing and how well their website is ranking. If they’re at the top of page one, there will be several reasons why. We check out their target keywords as well as descriptions, page titles, headers and alt tags, using this information as a useful reference point for when we start SEO copywriting for your website. We don’t just look at one site, we check out a few as they’ll all have a slightly different approach.
- Check out search volumes using Google’s Keyword Planner. This useful tool will give keyword ideas, show historical statistics and how your target keywords will perform. We look for keywords with a good search volume that aren’t highly competitive so you stand a good chance of being found. Another useful keyword research tool is Wordtracker.
- Identify target keywords and write a description that sums up what you do. The description needs to be accurate, compelling and tightly written as we only have up to 160 characters to play with. Here’s a description from the Capture Property Marketing website, one of our current clients:-
Quality real estate & aerial photography, videos & image tours, floorplans & copywriting for real estate across Melbourne. Great rates and prompt service (153 characters)
- Create a page title for each page on your website. It needs to incorporate target keywords relevant to your business and the content on that page. We aim to keep the length of each page title to within 60 characters so the entire page title is displayed within the SERP (search engine results page). If it’s longer, ellipsis will appear… Here’s an example of a page title from the Imageffect website which was recently re-designed with updated SEO copywriting:-
Business logo design and branding, graphic design, website design Melbourne
- Start writing your body copy, using target keywords in your headers (h1, h2, etc) and carefully placing them into the content, focussing on your opening paragraph. This is where us SEO copywriters need to get creative because your keywords have to be strategically placed within your content but can’t be repeated too many times. Overdoing it will mean the copy will look clumsy and won’t read naturally and search engines may regard it as spam. It is always important to write for your audience!
- Once all our hard work is done and the SEO copywriting is as good as it can possibly be, the cont
ent is ready to be plugged into your CMS (content management system). After your website has gone live, it will take time for the search engines to find you, particularly if your site is brand new. Be patient and remember to promote your website URL in all your correspondence to give people plenty of opportunities to look you up and check out what you do. Once your site is found and starts ranking well, make sure you check your Google Analytics regularly to see which pages visitors are looking at. Over a period of time you may have to make changes to pages that aren’t being visited often to help boost their profile. Remember that updating content is good for SEO as it shows you are keeping your site current. Installing a blog on your website is an ideal way to do this.
If you’re looking for help with SEO copywriting, we’d love to help. Just send us a message on the Contact page. We’ve achieved some great results for our clients – check out our portfolio page.