SEO Copywriting – Keep it Natural!

We are often asked to perform Search Engine Optimisation on sites that have little or no meaningful content, i.e. relevant text. Images are great but if you have a site and want to boost your natural rankings, you need to give the search engines a clue about your site’s purpose.

There’s much talk and spin about SEO copywriting but, for me personally, the very fact that ‘SEO’ and ‘copywriting’ get used in this context is a mistake.

If you are a website owner, you should focus on copywriting but not for SEO; you should create your content in the same way as any other marketing medium, i.e. for your visitors.

Having said that, here are a few pointers that you should consider when developing your web pages:

• Write naturally, i.e. the text should be created with the visitor in mind not SEO.
• Despite the reference to writing ‘naturally’, keywords that your page is about need to appear on the page. Sounds obvious? It is, but equally surprising how many times this has been over-looked.
• Use Header Tags, where appropriate. Break your paragraphs down with header tags which help with both your natural rankings and your visitors when they are reading the page.
• Internal linking helps with SEO, i.e. don’t use ‘Click Here’ or ‘More’ for internal hyperlinks. Try to use the title (or close variant) of the target page.

Content is essential for SEO. However that doesn’t strictly mean that copywriting can necessarily needs to be labelled as SEO. A more accurate term would probably be Website Copywriting in fact. Understanding your audience and writing in a style that will engage them and encourage them to investigate further will be far more beneficial than loading text with keywords.

The copy you write will be available for all to see, not just the search engines. In fact if you earn a decent search engine ranking and then leave your visitors disappointed with lifeless yet optimised copy, you are unlikely to see any benefit. When writing on a subject, keywords and their synonyms should naturally find a home in your content. A website copywriter will recognise this and intuitively include the terms as required.

So when you come to write copy for your site or explore SEO copywriting services, make sure you know exactly what it is that you’re looking for. A professional will often be able to provide their expert opinion and won’t compromise the quality of your site; however, where this isn’t an option, always ensure that you address your audience. You can always improve your site’s SEO without compromising its quality.

In summary, certainly think about the structure of your site and the way your content is developed but make sure you read it back. If it doesn’t flow naturally, consider changing. If you get tempted to ‘stuff’ keywords in to your copy, don’t!

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