Let’s face it, SEO can be confusing for a lot of people. Many people don’t know what to do when writing for SEO. Part of this results from the fact that Google’s algorithms are continually changing.
But the fundamentals of SEO do not change, and if you understand them, you’ll be swimming in SEO gold! The following are six of the best SEO copywriting tricks that you should always use if you hope to get the best out of your copy.
1. Maximise All Things Keywords
Keywords, keyword intent, and ancillary keywords all deserve to be treated separately because of how crucial they are, but we’ll talk about them together here.
Whatever you do, don’t mess up your keywords strategy. It’s the starting point of search engine optimisation, and it’s at the heart of it. When gathering your keywords, look for and use keywords that match users’ search intent. It’s not enough to just put in any keywords you can find. The keywords must have an intent that matches the search intent of your users.
There are three types of keyword intent you must understand and match. They are:
- Informational Intent: This is expressed when users are seeking for information about something. It can be a product, a person, and so on. Product reviews also fall into this category. While the person seeking the review may want to buy, the reason for the review search is that he wants to get information on the product. Examples include ‘impact of the second world war’ and ‘who was Isaac Newton?’
- Navigational Intent: Occurs when users’ search terms show they want to visit a website. Example: ‘1800 flowers’
- Commercial Intent: Is expressed when users want to buy something. Example: ‘Buy work shoes for women’
Understanding and matching your content with the particular user or keyword intent is critical. Google considers it before displaying results to users.
Your keyword strategy can also include more than one keyword for the same copy, and actually, it should. Use Google’s Keyword Planner or other free or paid keywords tools to research keywords. After you pick your main keyword for the article, get a few more that are related and relevant to your copy and users’ search intent.
For example, if your primary keyword is ‘SEO for beginners’, you can also target and optimise your copy for ‘SEO fundamentals’ and ‘SEO basics’. This way, if your target audience enters any of these three keywords, your copy will be displayed.
Be careful and avoid stuffing your content with keywords in the name of optimisation. You’ll get the opposite effect instead. Google is smart enough to know that’s what you’re doing and will penalise you for it.
2. Use Killer Intros
Make your introductions memorable. You don’t always have to be dramatic, but remember that you’re not writing a novel. So, even though your audience may read books meticulously from start to finish, they usually skim through online content.
Knowing this, aim to capture and hold your reader’s attention from the outset. Also, ensure that they know what they will gain from consuming your content. Start delivering value from the intro. Your introduction should be Captivating, Relevant, and Concise (known as the CRC rule).
Lastly, as it relates to your introduction, ensure your keyword appears in it. The goal here is to shoot for your main keyword to occur early in your copy. This is important for Google and your readers. Both of them need to see the search term early enough to determine relevance.
3. Optimise Headlines And Meta Tags
Since users get to your copy from search engines, you need to optimise what they see there. Users make ‘click or no-click’ decisions based on what they see. In other words, they start categorising your content as relevant or not relevant from what Google displays to them. Your SEO content strategy must include optimising what users see on Google.
What do you see displayed in search results? They are the headlines and meta tags, and you must ensure these are optimised with the readers in mind. As with the intros, use killer headlines.
The CRC rule applies here, too. Your headline is the first thing they encounter. If it’s not captivating and relevant, most users will not bother clicking. And if it’s not concise, Google might truncate it, which means that your audience may not get to see the whole thing and make sense of what your content is about. For headlines, concise means 60 characters or fewer.
While it is true that not everyone reads the description, you shouldn’t take chances. Those who read them are important too, so optimise it for them. The same CRC rule applies again – captivating, relevant, and concise. Give them a reason to click and come to your site.
4. Speak Your Audience’s Language
How do you know the language your audience uses? Several tools can help you, but the place to start is Google itself – look at the related searches section.
After typing in your subject or keyword into the search, hit Enter. When the search results show up, scroll down to the related searches section, and you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Those related search terms are the exact terms that your audience is using. Speaking their language is as simple as incorporating some of those terms into your copy. You don’t have to modify whichever ones you choose; use them as is.
Another aspect of speaking their language is writing at their level. If your audience comprises professionals, by all means, use industry jargon. For a general audience, write in simple, easy-to-read language.
5. Aim To Appear On The Featured Snippet
The featured snippet is the little box that sometimes appears on top of the SERPs when you search for something. It typically contains small but relevant information on what was searched for. Appearing there is fantastic for both brand exposure and organic clicks.
Not all searches on Google results in clicks. So, even if users don’t click through to any page, the result in the featured snippets gets brand exposure.
How do you get to be featured in that snippet? Whenever you’re addressing a question that you can answer in a few sentences, ensure you include those few sentences within your content. Doing so increases your chances of being in the featured snippet.
6. Optimise For Voice Search
Whether or not you have started using voice search, understand that many people now do. So you should optimise some of your content for voice as much as you can.
Statistics indicate that about two-thirds of people in the 25–49-year-old age bracket speak to their voice-enabled devices once a day at the very least. And around 4 in 10 people who use voice-activated speakers, according to Google, talk to their phones as if they are humans.
What this translates into is that search terms are framed as questions rather than traditional keywords. Whatever you do, don’t miss out on this crowd by not optimising for voice search.
Employ these six tricks when writing your next SEO copy and you are sure to rise through the ranks on the search engines. That’s not to say that optimising your copy for SEO is easy. As you might have noticed from the article, you will have to do a lot of research using different tools; some are paid-for, some are free – but it is achievable.
If you feel like it is too much work or that you might not be able to cope with staying on track with the other parts of SEO that are always changing, you can get an excellent SEO copywriting agency to handle all your SEO copywriting. Good luck!