Relevancy

SEO Copywriting is challenging. Website owners get glassy-eyed quickly when they take on this task without the help of an SEO content professional. Balancing search engine demands and user readability is a delicate art.

To start, search engines read. It’s that simple. If there’s more content, they are more likely to understand what your site is about. If content is organized and thematic, they are even more inclined to understand your site and know it’s relevancy to their searchers.

So, the challenge is two-fold:

1. How do I edit and write with good keywords?
2. How do I organize existing and new content to support good keywords?

So, SEO copywriting requires a person who can appreciate the architecture of a website and organization of content just as well as the on-page edits needed for optimization.

Let’s look at the second challenge first. What I like to do is categorize keywords so I can manage my copy optimization process more efficiently. So, with a running list of keywords, I group them into categories that map to user search needs. For example, look at this breakdown:

• Brand / Company Name – “Furniture Store Extraordinaire”
• Business Type – “furniture store Pittsburgh”
• Products / Services – “eclectic dining room set”
• Best Practices – “choosing a good dining room set”
• Related topics – “throwing wild dinner parties”

I find clients receive more qualified referrals from search engines when we prioritize with keywords from the top categories. And this reality usually dictates copy optimization priorities. If the prior SEO assessment work reveals that the search engines favor competing sites with a lot of additional supporting content, we then can build out new content with the lower categories and keywords.

Back to the first challenge… there are some general formulas for how to edit and write optimized copy for pages. In general, I like to have a minimum of a couple of paragraphs on a page with a tight keyword focus.  The title, heading, body copy, and hyperlinks all dance with targeted keyword phrases.

The real art of my craft is blending in keywords without sounding too artificial. I am a writer by nature, so I favor good content that is user-focused. My tip here is to write for the target audience but for two different views – search results and the actual web page. I anticipate her search, her click, and her arrival. If I can keep this top of mind, I find that the search engines see the relevancy and reward my clients with higher listings.

One more tip… Content needs to be compelling and useful.  With Web 2.0, users are likely to link to good content with social media tools, providing much-needed inbound links. Link building (and baiting) is important for any SEO campaign.

I’ll touch on linking techniques and Web 2.0 strategies in another post.  Stay tuned!