You’ve likely heard a lot about “SEO” in the last decade. An acronym that stands for “search engine optimization,” SEO is the process of improving a website so that search engines like Google, Bing and others rank it highly on their results pages, thereby improving its visibility.
With better visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) when people search for products or services related to your business, your website is more likely to garner the attention that results in increased site traffic and higher-quality opportunities to attract prospective and existing customers. The business benefits of an effective SEO strategy are obvious, but how can you be sure your content improves your SEO and helps your site rank highly? With SEO copywriting.
What is SEO Copywriting?
Just as it sounds, SEO copywriting combines the process of optimizing your website content for search engines with writing for the purpose of increasing brand awareness and ultimately persuading audiences to take a particular action. SEO copywriting is the creation of website content that leans on the actual words in the written parts of your content to deliver information about your products and services to search engine users.
With search often being the primary source of digital traffic for brands and a complement to their other marketing channels, SEO has evolved into a fundamental element of modern digital marketing. People conduct trillions of searches every year, and greater visibility and ranking higher in SERPs than your competition can make a substantial difference to your business’s bottom line.
But SEO copywriting involves more than just writing content and assuming it will all work out. Many organizations believe that if they keep writing content, awesome search traffic will eventually come. While that is true in a sense, most companies don’t have the time it will take for that success to come naturally. Consequently, a plan is needed to start seeing success with SEO sooner. These three SEO copywriting tips can help you bring more high-quality traffic to your website.
Three SEO Copywriting Tips to Rank Higher and Drive Traffic
1) Understand Your Keywords — and Be Intentional
Keyword intent is essential to SEO success, and there are generally three types:
- Informational: User wants more information.
- Navigational: User wants to navigate to a specific website or page.
- Buyer-intent: User wants to buy a product or service.
The Google search algorithm is quite sophisticated, and it pulls information from your content to determine what your content is actually about. And since Google aims to deliver the highest-quality, most relevant search results to its users, matching your keyword intent is critical.
As an example, if we tried to target the keyword “Denver Broncos” with our blog post announcing our Public Relations Agency of the Year honor, it is highly unlikely that our blog post would perform well in the organic search results. Why? Because the intent of our keyword fails to actually match the content — despite the fact that the post does indeed mention the Denver Broncos.
Think about the keywords you want to try to rank for. If you focus on tailoring your content to match the keyword intent, you’ll see success much more quickly.
2) Consider What Your Specific Audience Wants — and Give It to Them
The best way to drive more traffic to your site is to focus on the right audiences so that you get the right traffic. If you aren’t connecting with your audience and converting your traffic into paying customers or loyal fans, what’s the value of the traffic your website is getting?
Your written website content can best serve your specific audience or customer base when you’re able to identify a group of keywords and search queries that are most in line with what your audience wants and needs. By focusing on specific niches and demographics that are most appropriate to your brand, you minimize the competition of other businesses battling for the same search traffic.
Consider Comprise as an example. We are a full-service PR and digital marketing agency based in Boulder, Colorado, that wants to promote our services by using online search. It’s unlikely that we’ll see any success targeting a super broad keyword like “PR and digital marketing” since the keyword will likely be incredibly competitive and the audience not specific enough.
However, by narrowing our focus to our region, “Rocky Mountain,” for example, we’re immediately eliminating millions of irrelevant searchers seeking PR and digital marketing agencies on either coast, in the Midwest or in the South. Taking it one step further and focusing on “Boulder PR and digital marketing” would enable us to appeal directly to the folks in the city in which our headquarters are located who are seeking PR and digital marketing assistance.
With this approach, you can gain more — and more quality — traffic, build a better (more relevant) audience and ultimately boost your bottom line.
3) Target Longer-Tail Keywords
Unfortunately, not all keywords deliver the same amount of SEO value to your brand. Some keywords are much more competitive — and therefore harder to rank for than others. If you think going after those crazy competitive keywords makes the most sense for your brand, consider targeting longer-tail keywords or phrases to get more traffic with SEO.
Imagine we’re promoting a social media strategy and management webinar online. Obviously, “social media webinar” would be an important keyword, but the competition for such a general keyword would likely be ruthless. Actually winning search volume for such a keyword is possible, but the time and effort required would significantly minimize our ROI.
So, instead of targeting incredibly competitive keywords like “social media webinar” or “online social media course,” consider drafting an informative article about “how to write effective social media copy.” Long-tail keywords typically see less search volume but ranking highly for such terms empowers you to establish your brand as a thought leader in the industry, thereby boosting your expertise, authority and trustworthiness, extremely important factors Google uses to judge website and content.
This approach enables you to slowly, and systemically earn an increasing amount of relevant search traffic.
Conclusion
All things considered, SEO copywriting is essential to ensuring your content and your website can be found by people searching for products and services online. While Google is constantly tweaking its search algorithm, the fundamentals of SEO copywriting haven’t changed. Employing these three SEO copywriting tips will help you along the path to seeing more — and more relevant — search traffic to your website. And if you still need help improving your site to increase its visibility on SERPs, give us a shout! We’re happy to help you gain attention and attract prospective and existing customers with our SEO copywriting prowess.
