Mastering the Art of SEO Copywriting

Team Script shares some tips on how to employ an effective SEO copywriting strategy.

In our previous blog posts, we discussed at length the importance of copywriting to your business, and why outsourcing content to a team of content creation professionals can help you quickly scale your business growth. Now, we from Team Script would like to elaborate on another equally important aspect of content marketing: SEO Copywriting.

Follow our guide below to learn how to create online copy that can help improve your online presence and generate better sales for your digital content!

The Nitty-Gritty of SEO Copywriting

SEO copywriting is a relatively new term in the copywriting realm, although it quickly has risen to prominence thanks to the growing importance of digital marketing to business.  The term simply refers to an emerging trend that combines the strengths of digital marketing and effective copywriting. SEO copywriting, therefore, has increasingly played a vital role in business, corroborated by the fact that 88% of consumers conduct online research first prior to making a purchase either online or in-store.

Essentially, SEO copywriting is a form of online content creation that aims to both improve your website rank on search engines and generate online traffic convertible into actual sales. To achieve this, SEO copywriting does not just solely focus on bringing high-quality content. Likewise, it places emphasis on the use of specific key phrases that are indexable via search engines to cater your content to your target market. This is because search engines employ web crawlers across the internet to store contents they come across into a databank. In addition, crawlers are programmed to store internal and external links to the website and will access the stored links to navigate through other websites. Through this process, the web crawlers record and index every website that has a link to at least one external source.

Furthermore, the types of contents that crawlers collect are not limited to texts. They also include videos, images, and even locations on the map. The search engines will then sort these contents based on the corresponding key phrases where the web crawlers obtain them. When a user enters a key phrase, the search engine will then compile a list of results based on their degree of relevance to it.

How to Employ Effective SEO Copywriting

Understanding the mechanism of web crawlers, albeit useful, is insufficient to help you create optimized copy for an online platform. You also need to know how search engines like Google rank contents on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Besides the content’s relevance to users, search engines also look into the following three things in your content:

1. The Frequency and Placement of Keywords and Phrases across Your Webpage

How you utilize keywords and phrases in your content significantly determines your website’s position on the SERP. In principle, you need to strategically employ your chosen keywords to help the search engine recognize that your content is, indeed, relevant to the topics your target audience is searching for. While other avenues to disseminate your content exist, such as social media, a good keyword ranking on the SERP makes your content discoverable easily by potential customers who primarily browse the internet for information.

In fact, a study on Google’s indexing has shown that the click-through-rate (CTR) of a website is in direct proportion to its SERP on a search engine. The study indicates that only the top ten results from the first page draw in significant organic clicks, with the first result dominating at 31.8%. A huge drop-off in traffic ensues from the second page and beyond, with less than one percent of internet users actually accessing the search results from the second page.

More importantly, however, the placements of these keywords are not confined to the body of your writing. You need to incorporate them into the meta tag and slug of your page as well. A meta tag refers to a snippet of text that lets readers preview your content on the search engine. Meanwhile, a slug is an editable part of a URL that identifies a particular page of a website. Modifying URL slugs with keywords can improve your website’s SEO since users are more likely to click customized URLs than the ones generated by the website’s algorithm. For example, let’s take a look at the meta tag and keyword slug that we used for this blog post below:

Having a clear meta tag and a modified URL slug increases your chances of attracting readers to your webpage.

2. The Number of Outbound Links to Your Content

Search engines look at the number of links from other pages that connect back to your page. As explained earlier, web crawlers can navigate through the internet via external links on websites. Consequently, a search engine will index your webpage higher on the list if it receives more outbound links from other places. This is one aspect from SEO copywriting that requires you to balance the clever use of SEO-friendly keywords and creating engaging content that resonates well with customers.

Unlike in the past, cluttering your page with irrelevant keywords to improve your page rank score can no longer work. Search engines have now developed an ingenious way to detect and flag down websites that practice keyword stuffing. They also remove websites that are simply devoid of any real content from the search results. Rather than improving your website’s discoverability, squeezing keywords unnaturally in your content can potentially hurt the number of incoming traffic.

This is, then, where good SEO copywriting comes into the picture. It allows you to write content with enough key phrases that web crawlers can quickly identify and store. By the same token, it enables you to engage your readers with information-rich content. Remember, the key to a good SEO strategy is all about producing authoritative, original content to drive organic traffic through clicks. This has been the case since Google and other search engines have been significantly revamped to meet such a need.

3. The History and Age of Your Domain

Search engines also look at the ownership and past activities of a domain when ranking their SERPs. The reasoning behind this is quite simple. A website with established history has accumulated a significant amount of past activities stored by web crawlers in the databank. In comparison, a new website has fewer to no contents at all, making it longer for web crawlers to index.

Moreover, it is important to remember that search engines are indexing countless websites almost daily. In fact, it is estimated that 380 new websites are created every minute. Meanwhile, only a small portion of them are still operable after a while. Hence, web crawlers perform better in indexing for websites with established track records than the newer ones. But don’t worry, you can still level the playing field by consistently creating SEO-friendly contents relevant to your industry specializations.

High-Quality Content is Key to Effective SEO Copywriting

While SEO copywriting differs in some aspects from conventional copywriting, they both still serve the same purpose. Both copywriting strategies essentially seek to turn your content into an authoritative source of information that your target audience can utilize to solve their pain points. The only fundamental difference between the two lies in the medium. SEO copywriting requires unique approaches in its implementation as its medium is highly competitive. In other words, it expects you to deliver reader-friendly content that can also be interpreted by a machine.

Don’t take our words for it, however! A study conducted by SerpIQ has found that a long-form article can generate better leads and conversions. The study has found that the top 10 results on search engines are exclusively dominated by contents with the word count ranging from 2,000 to 2,400.

The study conducted by SerpIQ has shown that long-form articles dominate the top 10 of online search results.

Moreover, Hubspot explains that this phenomenon occurs because long-form contents benefit from high-quality backlinks and a higher number of social media shares. It further posits that long-form contents give the readers longer visiting time as it provides more comprehensive information. In addition, long-form articles also get easily discovered by search engines’ advanced algorithms, such as Google RankBrain as they have an edge in user satisfaction over their short-form counterparts.

SEO Copywriting is All about Conversions!

So you’ve got your content ready, and you’ve employed enough key phrases to boost your organic rank on the SERP. But all those efforts would not yield any conversions and sales without the help of call-to-action (CTA) buttons and phrases. The CTAs you can incorporate into your content can include a registration form, downloadable collaterals, and a portal to online store. This is to ensure the audience on your webpage take tangible actions that translate to sales for you. After all, good SEO copywriting serves more than just a port of information. It also seeks to gratify your audience with products and services that you provide to meet their needs.

Are you currently looking for a professional copywriting service that knows how to marry good SEO tactics with good copywriting? If yes, then you are in luck because Script Consultants can help you create diverse copy across all media platforms. Book your free consultation by emailing us at enquiry@script.com.sg!