SEO Copywriting: Your Definitive Guide in 2022

There are still controversies and debates over SEO copywriting services. Some argue that this is a job to be performed by search bots exclusively; others say that it can solely be done by people. Let’s talk about one of the components of professional SEO services - writing and exploring all the important things people should know about it.

What Is SEO Content?

In general, ‘content’ is information. SEO content is useful information of high quality that informs, entertains, educates, and solves problems for users.  What is SEO content writing goal? It is to create high-quality, keyword-focused content that ranks well in search engines to generate organic traffic to a website.

What Is SEO Copywriting?

First and foremost, we have to clarify the essence of SEO copywriting and its benefits for users. So, what are we going to talk about today?

Creating useful and interesting content based on keywords — that’s what SEO copywriting is mainly all about. Only a couple of years earlier, the content was created for search engines exclusively. It was sufficient to enhance texts with a maximum number of keys, and a website could quickly jump into the highest search engine results.

With the advent of new algorithms, the main requirements, as well as the writing style, began to change. Now, the primary goal of SEO writers is to target users, which means the texts must be informative and useful. Specialists shouldn’t forget about keywords either, but they need to get creative and use them wisely. It is recommended to use no more than 3% of “keys” for one text. If the article is “spammed,” then the content will most probably fall prey to search engines’ filters and disappear from the needed search results. To understand this more in-depth, let’s look closer into the goals and SEO copywriting text requirements.

Why Is SEO Copywriting Important

When it comes to SEO copywriting, what is important to mention is that meeting stringent requirements to accomplish the foremost goals of improving website visibility and usefulness to readers is crucial. Here are the requirements to follow:

• Uniqueness. The content should be exclusive since the first thing search engines look for is the text’s uniqueness. Search tools index and remember pages that have unique content. If it duplicates another website’s content, it’s almost certain that the client you’re writing for will be filtered out and lose visibility.
• Key phrases and words. Basically, these are requests of the TA you (or your client) are interested in. These are wording that potential clients look for and by which they find your website from the presented results. The task of a copywriter is to make unique and interesting texts using keywords smartly and with the necessary rate of recurrence.
  

Customers may specify the rate of recurrence (frequency) as well as the number of keys in percentage terms or specific numbers. The selected keys should be evenly distributed, match the content of the text, and look natural.

• Tag use and text-decoration. The content you create should be structured and logical— a tiny percentage of people will read the entire article from beginning to end. Therefore, a text has to contain headings and subheadings as these will help visitors quickly find answers to their questions. HTML markup tags are some of the core indicators of the professionalism of an expert in SEO copywriting; these symbols are used for hypertext markup of pages that turn copywritten text into website content.
• Content quality. Any article ought to provide answers to all user questions. Before writing, it is imperative to evaluate the wishes that probable customers might have. If a person enters a request into the search box, your content must deliver — the more detailed, the better.
• Amount of text. Some believe that the larger the article, the better. Their opponents are betting on short texts. Volume is not really important. The main thing to remember is that the article isn’t watery and contains only useful information. The optimal text size is 2,500-5,000 characters. If, however, you have rather exciting and valuable things to add, feel free to do so. Before writing texts, you also need to analyze competitors by looking at the top search results for specific queries and analyzing their materials’ volume.
• Literacy. Always scan the text for grammar and punctuation errors. Any misspelled word or missing comma can turn a prospect away. Errors can ruin a brand’s reputation.

What Exactly Does an SEO Copywriter Do?

SEO copywriting texts are placed on promoted websites. Accordingly, the goals of any SEO copywriter are:

• Online promotion using search engines for queries based on specific keywords. Well-chosen, correctly placed in meta tags, headlines, and text keywords with an optimal density are crucial to success. 
• The growth of conversion of website visitors into real customers. The effect will be achieved only in the case of complete and detailed reporting of information.
• High-quality delivery of information and ease of perception. Users often do not read the information in full but only slide their eyes over what is written. The copywriter’s task is to attract the reader’s attention to the essential information. For this, “keys” and main ideas are highlighted using headings and lists.

Simply put, the text placed on a website isn’t just necessary for entering keywords. The content is what becomes the “face” of an online resource. Therefore, creativeness and uniqueness are the points of contact with the target audience (TA). If a website contains useless, uninformative, unreadable texts, users won’t stay.

What Skills Do I Need?

Unlike ordinary copywriters, SEO writers create texts that are valuable and interesting for users, adapted for search tools such as Google. They know what SEO-friendly copywriting is and how to make readable texts both for people and robots. One of the primary tasks of an SEO writer is to place specific phrases in their text, so it remains natural and doesn’t lose its meaning.

What matters is whether the content helps a business achieve its goals. Ideally, such texts should cover the desires of different TAs and resolve their issues. If unsure about the customer’s needs, request a description from the client’s sales department.

SEO Copywriting and Holistic SEO

In marketing, holistic SEO is a type of strategy that aims to advance a website in an explicit niche. This implies that the technical make-up of a website must be faultless, the user experience must be impeccable, and all aspects of security must also be taken into account. The most significant factor, however, is nicely-written content that the TA enjoys. This method entails forward-thinking as well as skilled writing.

To become the best in your desired niche, the content has to be exciting and easy to read. Don’t make users think! Going easy on the quality is never acceptable – polish everything conferring to the exact requirements of the search engine(s) you’re using.

Where Should I Include SEO?

Let’s go by example: an online store launched a month ago, and they want a lot of sales. They tried context and SMM, but nothing helped, and now all hope is on SEO. They don’t have much of a budget. This is where you don’t include SEO. No budget = no SEO!

You should include SEO copywriting in two cases.

• A large budget is already available for testing the leading sales channels. In this case, it’s worth performing the initial optimization.
• Several sales channels are set up and ready, and the company is ready to invest in future development; this is a good time to start thinking about long-term SEO.

What Is the Difference Between SEO Writing and Copywriting?

Classic copywriting is creating written content for websites so they can sell a product/service faster, or they want to give the company name a better reputation. The same applies to other textual content, such as articles about products or services, mailing lists, or press-releases.

As you may have noticed, there’s nothing about website promotion in the previous paragraph. However, it makes up a significant part of copywriting. After all, texts written to sell a product must be read by potential customers. Here’s where SEO copywriting comes in, as its purpose is not only the sale of goods – it’s about the website’s promotion, too.

This goal can be achieved by the inclusion of pre-selected keywords in the texts. That is why SEO copywriting is extra expensive: copywriters have the difficult task of writing interesting and selling texts and introducing a particular set of specified words and phrases so that they remain useful and exciting. Moreover, the whole copywriting process changes: after coming up with an original text, copywriters have to use special programs to ensure the density of keywords (the number for a certain amount of content) fits into the frames specified by the optimizer (usually 3-5%).

How To Make Good SEO Copywriting

Keyword Research

A critical, paramount part of the SEO copywriting procedure is the research of keywords, as it assists in answering a central question: which queries do people type to find products or services? Your research should eventually determine the technique used to create an online resource. You also should understand keyword intent.

For the research to become more feasible, categorize, cluster, and filter keywords. A deep understanding of the category on which search engine behavior is based will make your analysis much more effective.

First of all, make a keyword list. Google Analytics, Wordtracker, Wordstream, and Mergewords.com will give you a great start.

Having received several thousand “keys,” calculate their search volume. You have several options, which go through Google’s keyword tool one at a time. Since you can find thousands of options, you may panic and revert to the old manual processing methods. However, it really will come as a surprise how quickly one can collect countless data about a keyword. Don’t neglect using long tail keywords that can drive you quality traffic and improve ranking in SEO copywriting.

When using Google Chrome, for instance, you can create a download folder full of CSV files, each of which includes a hundred keywords. When used wisely, you’ll quickly get all the insights needed for your analytics.

Text Structure

While each specialist has their own creative technique, the structure of the text is always the same. Use this list during SEO copywriting:

The straightforward text structure is crucial for SEO copywriting. Make sure you set up a clear plan before writing your draft. Otherwise, you may miss important points, disrupt text consistency, or destroy the balance between sections.

Want to add maximum benefit to SEO copywriting ? Follow these rules:

• Meet the user’s needs without being watery.
• Include complete and reliable information on the topic.
• A high-quality SEO text is a competent text without stylistic mistakes.
• Include a small number of key queries.
• Write structured and unique content.

Meta-Optimization

Of course, it’s important to use SEO copywriting to write to the audience’s interest, but this time it is more important the way you will do it. To attract more clients, you need to optimize header, meta title and meta description. Prioritize these points because they are the most important part of your website. They are the first thing the client sees when they are surfing the Internet. Wondering what is a meta description in seo? It is the brief description of the content that will attract more clients.

Meta title and description help SERP and client to understand the subject of your content and to rank your site higher.

Media Files

Use more media files on your page. Images, videos, charts and infographics will increase the user’s time on the page and make them share the links on social media. Don’t forget to add alt tags to boost ranking.

Write For Readers First

As mentioned above, texts after SEO copywriting  should be useful and understandable to readers. Write in your target audience’s language and try to give them as much helpful information as possible. When creating an ordinary text, present the material correctly: legible and attractive. When writing for SEO, you should also study a certain number of keywords and ensure uniqueness.

SEO texts are needed not only to improve website visibility. Search engine optimization copywriting is also targeted at making the text as useful as possible.

Continuous Optimization

This stage will help you to sure that the site in general and the search engine optimization copywriting are working as they should and that you satisfy the customer’s needs and wishes. During the continuous optimization our team will test all the functions of your site and choose the best variant of SEO copywriting which will attract people.

SEO Copywriting for International Websites

It’s not easy to write content for multinational websites (they are often aimed at readers with different mentalities). It is doable, however. Three ways to do it:

• Translate content;
• Create novel texts for another TA;
• Overlapping content: combine points 1 and 2.

Translating may seem the easiest way. Are you absolutely sure, though, that your translation exactly repeats the native text in another language and has the same focal point as the original text? It’s difficult to know if it’s not your mother tongue. Therefore: at all times, check with native speakers.

The creation of new content is the safest route to take when it comes to SEO copywriting, and the result will definitely be of the uppermost quality. This approach takes a long time, however, and limits you to use the creative content that already exists.

What is SEO creative copywriting in this case? It’s best to overlap: use present texts from your website as a sound foundation but rewrite it focusing on the local TA. Engage native speakers in creating and reviewing posts for you: they know the local market better.

Voice Search

According to data from ComScore, in 2020, 50% of searches will be made by voice. People are changing their search methods. We’re getting lazy, and it becomes too difficult to press the touch keys of tiny keyboards – which is why users increasingly turn to voice commands and everyday language to query PCs, smartphones, tablets, and smart assistants. You can find more information about this if you read the article on the right.

Two types of voice search exist:

Some SEO copywriting tips to help you make voice search successful:

• Answer the questions that people ask — the answer should appear on the 1st page (keys should be in the first paragraph / the first 30 words);
• Write as you speak — use understandable, everyday language; 
• Use titles and subheadings;
• Low-frequency queries are longer (5-7 words);
• Include requests in the URL;
• Write down <description> and use trigger wording (166-215 characters);
• The page should load in a maximum of 4 seconds;
• Install HTTPS certificates — secure your resource;
• Use micro-markup and structure the data so that the search tool knows what content is on each page.

Come to DLD for Reliable SEO Copywriting Services

SEO copywriting is complicated and works best when writers follow a specific plan. Your SEO efforts will bring positive results if you always strive for excellence and learn new things. Of course, not everyone is naturally gifted with a golden pen of freedom, but there’s always space for growth and improvement. Just remember: practice makes perfect.

We at DLD know this all too well. With years of experience in developing and creating SEO content, we have a team of talented writers ready to help you take your site to a whole new level. Get in touch today!