A Copywriting Principle that’s Becoming Vital for SEO

June 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment

For a while now, I’ve been using this blog as a pulpit for preaching to anyone who’ll listen on the benefits of great content.

Building traffic to your website is one thing. But you still have to consider what you’re going to do when visitors arrive.

Are you merely going to offer them the same self congratulatory copy they’ll find in your brochure? Or offer them useful content that answers their questions, demonstrates your expertise and builds trust in your business?

Well, thankfully my clarion call for investing in great content is now being taken up by the SEO brigade. No longer is SEO merely about keywords and begging for back links.

Now having content that people find useful and want to share is becoming vital if you want to improve your search engine ranking.

Focus on the reader, rather than where to place keywords

Last week I posted about some of the changes taking place in how Google ranks sites, and why human behaviour is becoming a key factor in its algorithm.

Increasingly, it appears as though it’s websites with sticky content, that engages readers for longer, gets bookmarked and shared on social media sites, that are experiencing a boost to their search ranking.

So to improve your exposure, your website needs content that assists people’s buying decisions or helps solve a problem. Luckily, this is something copywriters are adept at providing.

A key principle of copywriting is that it should focus on the needs, desires and pains of the reader, rather than praising yourself.

If Google is grading sites based on how people engage with their content then copy focused on the needs of the reader, rather than your own, is becoming vital for improving your position in the search results.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under Blog, Content marketing, Copywriting, Search Engine Optimisation 

What Copywriters Need to Know About the Changes in SEO

June 2, 2009 | 3 Comments

There was a time when I ranked on page one of Google for my trophy keyword (copywriter), but then thought it wise to change my domain name and lose my hard won ranking in the process.

Despite implementing redirects, an assortment of WordPress plugins and anything else that might make Google happy, my website continues to languish in banishment (for UK listings anyway) until Google sees fit to forgive my stupidity and allow me back in from the cold.

So, in the meantime I’ve been scouting for SEO tips, and discovered a few things on the Conversation Marketing blog which copywriters ought to know:

1. Write enticing description and title tags – it appears that Google is counting how many clicks organic search results receive. So the more regularly your website’s description entices in a visitor the higher up Google will promote it. Simple.

2. Sticky content becoming more important – evidence suggests that websites able to improve how long they can keep visitors engaged are enjoying improvements to their search results in only a matter of months. So sticky content helps build trust in your business and with the search engines at the same time.

3. Social bookmarking carrying more weight – whenever your posts get Stumbled, Dugg or bookmarked in Delicious they’re being given the thumbs up by real people. So it’s practical and sensible for Google to incorporate these human endorsements into its search results.

4. Getting harder to fake it – bookmarking your own content or forming groups to game the system obviously has a limited shelf life when Google can track IP addresses. So to build sustainable rankings, websites must provide real value that gets naturally bookmarked and keeps visitors engaged for longer.

All these points reinforce the fact that SEO is about more than keywords and back links, or as Google’s Matt Cutts said in an interview last year, "SEOs are starting to embrace the fact that they are marketers. It’s a broader spectrum. You have to think about how you build buzz, how do you get loyal customers, how do you optimize your ROI.”

SEO (the white coloured variety anyway) now requires skills in analytics, page conversion and being able to write great content. Most copywriter’s should have at least two of these hats in their locker already. So maybe it’s worth completing the set now that SEO firms are emerging as website marketing companies.

More on this next week (or this week if the sun stops beckoning me into the garden).

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under Blog, Copywriting, Search Engine Optimisation