SEO content and copy is both art and science combined to entice readers, together with the understanding of Google Search Results. While you have to keep your readers engrossed with your words, the content of your website should be tweaked to the algorithms of search engines. That’s just hard, right?
Our guide to seo content and copy walks you through the process of writing articles that are enjoyable, readable, and SEO-friendly.
What is SEO Writing?
SEO writing is simply writing for search engine algorithms. This is achieved by smartly applying keywords or search terms to your article without stuffing too much of it. However, in seo writing, there’s what we know as content writing and copywriting. What does that mean? Each area has distinctive features in which seo can help enhance the readability and discoverability of the article.
Content Writing vs. Copy Writing
As mentioned, there’s a huge difference between the two, especially on their purpose on how to engage the audience. Here, we’ve placed varying contrast on each area and how they help users find you with seo.
Content Writing
Content writing is creating articles or multimedia for specific purposes such as attracting and educating potential customers about a brand’s products and services. They do this in the form of blogs, articles, or infographics. Content writing is more of soft-selling a brand by creating informative or lifestyle articles about the product, service, or industry.
Copywriting
Copywriting is content created at selling or pitching your brand and business. This is an area of expertise that is more of hard-selling an idea, whereas content writing helps prospects understand your brand and entice them. Today, copywriting is changing its feats and incorporate emotive storytelling techniques to engage the audience effectively.
What are SEO content and copy?
Whatever the article may be, seo content and copy has two essential aspects: (1) The context is useful to readers, and (2) It’s search-engine friendly. Here’s how we define it.
SEO content and copy refer to written aspects designed to rank high in search engines and engage audiences at the same time. What’s more, the text on your website should be easy to read without ruining the quality of your article. Overall, seo writing is very much like anything else, but with more tweaking for search engines.
How to write SEO content and copy?
When thinking about your copy or content, the very first thing you need to decide is the topic you’re going to write about. What’s the subject you need to discuss what your users want to read? Afterward, you’ll need to research the keywords you want to rank for.
Know your niche and audience
What’s your niche, brand experience, or audience type? When making content, be sure to align your text with your niche – that includes the choice of words, tone, and brand experience of the users.
Here are some things you need to think about before creating content for the audience.
- Align your brand to the right audience (tone, experience, design)
- Know where your audience is (social media usage, hangouts, purchase location
- What your audience wants (easy shopping, information, entertainment)
- Tone of the content (funny, motivational, serious)
- What you want to offer to the audience (impart knowledge, sell a product, avail of services)
Create a statement
After knowing your niche and audience, build a brand statement that reflects your goals, mission, blog points, or unique selling position (USP). While formulating your text statement you should consider these following questions:
- What makes you unique?
- Tell us about your website.
- What can you offer to customers that make it worthwhile?
Take time to form your identity, brand experience, and offers!
Research important keywords
You should start making a list of all keywords you want your website to include in search engine pages once you’ve finished your brand statement. Such terms and words should apply to your niche market, locality, and brand message.
What’s more, it should be basic terms or common keywords your prospects should look into Google. You should have a list of all common search words for your keyword analysis. Also, think about variants or synonyms for these words they might want to look up to.
Tools to find your keywords:
- Google Adwords
- SEM Rush
- Wordstream
- Yoast
- Google SERPS
Write your copy or article
Writing seems a daunting task for a lot of individuals and people often have difficulty creating the first sentence or first paragraph. The trick is to simply put down a few words about the subject matter until you keep on writing. Never mind the grammar and awkward sentences you made – just keep going until your ideas fleshed out to words.
Tips to write your first draft:
- Make an outline of what you want to write (helpful for blog posts).
- Write shorter sentences – consider 20 words in one sentence.
- Keep your paragraphs to two sentences only. Three is the maximum.
- Create a head-turner headline.
- Use headline and bulleted lists for readability
Edit your work
Your content and copy should be grammatically correct -including punctuations, spelling, and use of prepositions among many others. You ought to be critical of your edits after writing the piece.
If you’ve created a 2,000 -3,000-word blog post, you can start breaking the text by editing it line by line -ensuring that a single sentence is correct. Ensure that the text is grammatically correct and readable. Moreover, your sentences should not be too lengthy.
Writing for search engines
Website owners often use third-part programs to make their articles SEO-friendly. For instance, Yoast seo is the most popular one used in WordPress sites to ensure the content fits into the schema. Each application or software has a set of lists you should complete to mark your website as SEO-friendly.
While writing seo content and copy is mostly onsite SEO tactic, you can further boost your reach with offsite methods such as backlinks, social media sharing, and directory listing.
Creating SEO-friendly articles will help reach audiences organically. Its success doesn’t happen overnight but will help grow your business in the long run. What you need is to pull an effort, a holistic digital marketing experience, for customers to find you.
