Tag Archives: Content Writing for SEO

The Importance Of SEO Copywriting In Search Engine Marketing

How does SEO copywriting help you in SEM? Why is it important?

As mentioned above, how you define search engine marketing depends on your strategy.

You may want to completely depend on improving your organic search engine rankings.

You may not want to spend a lot of money and effort on high quality content, but you quickly want to increase your search engine visibility and you’re ready to pay for every click that you get.

Normally this happens when people are not aware of the benefits of improving their organic search engine rankings through strategic SEO copywriting and instead, they want to go for a quick fix.

Paid advertising is costly. You are paying for every click.

The search engine users know that since you cannot improve your rankings naturally, you are paying to increase your visibility.

Hence, trust factor is lower compared to organic SEO.

I’m not saying that you should refrain from paid search engine marketing altogether.

In fact, you can make strategic use of it.

But you shouldn’t make it into a major search engine marketing strategy.

The ultimate goal is to improve your SEO organically, and this is where SEO copywriting can help you.

Below I am listing a few reasons why SEO copywriting is important for your search engine marketing strategy whether you want to pay for your visibility you want to improve your SEO organically.

SEO copywriting reduces your PPC costs

When you pay Google for your search engine placements, you have a PPC arrangement.

There are also other modes of advertising, but this is the most prevalent one.

You pay for every click.

Your listing appears in the “sponsored” section.

Google declares it openly that you are paying for the placement and your content is not appearing in the search results because of its inherent quality and relevance.

This happens with every search engine. I’m using the name of Google because it is one of the most used search engines in the world with more than 97% market share.

So how does effective SEO copywriting reduce your PPC costs?

In two ways:

Through actual reduction in the amount of money you pay per click.
Through improving your ROI – you generate more business per click.

It is in Google’s interest that more people click your sponsored link because you are paying for every click.

But then, after a while, it will be counter-productive because paying for every click will prove to be so expensive that you may have to deactivate your campaign for a while.

Google doesn’t want to kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

Hence, it rewards you by reducing your PPC rate if your placement generates more clicks.

The amount of money that you pay is inversely proportional to the number of clicks you can generate.

Through efficient copywriting, you can make more people click your paid placements and as a result, end up paying less to Google.

Suppose, initially you pay $ 0.5 per click for your current placement.

The copy of your ad is really good and it encourages more people to click your advertisement.

After a while, Google begins to charge you $ 0.45 per click for the same position.

This way, Google will go on decreasing your PPC if more people click your ad.

This is one way copywriting brings down your search engine marketing costs if you are paying for your placements.

The other way is by increasing your ROI.

In a PPC campaign, you use aMr landing page.

If you get 100 clicks from Google, you expect to make at least 5 sales.

If your SEO copywriting is not convincing, you may make 2-3 sales per 100 clicks, or even less.

If your copywriting is convincing, you may make even 10 sales per 100 clicks.

Hence, the success of your PPC campaigns depends on how convincing and well written the copy on your landing page is.

SEO copywriting organically improves your rankings for your main keywords

You need to resort to paid advertising on Google because you don’t have good organic search engine rankings for your main keywords.

If your links naturally appear in the SERPs, then there is no need for you to pay for the placements.

Just imagine – if you go for paid placements, you are paying for every click.

Referring to the above example, if you are paying $ 0.5 per click, for 100 clicks, you will be paying $ 50. For 1000 clicks, you will be paying $ 500. And so on.

But what happens if you organically improve your search engine rankings?

People can find your links among the top results and when they click your links, you don’t pay for those clicks.

Hence, whether you get 100 clicks or 10,000 clicks, your cost doesn’t increase.

In fact, it is free traffic.

Can you easily increase your rankings for your primary keywords?

Not if you have great competition.

For example, if I want to improve my search engine rankings for “SEO copywriting services”, it may be very difficult because top content writing and copywriting services are already ranking quite high compared to my website.

So, what do I do?

This brings us to the next topic…

SEO copywriting organically improves your rankings for longtail and related keywords

While you continue with your effort of improving your rankings for primary keywords, you should first focus on improving your rankings for longtail and related keywords.

Hence, instead of aiming for “SEO copywriting services”, I may aim for “The top 10 benefits of SEO copywriting”.

If you’re running a real estate business in Mumbai, instead of trying to just improve your rankings for “real estate business in Mumbai” you can write content around “Why it makes sense to work with a local real estate business in Mumbai”.

Longtail keywords may not directly bring your business, but they increase your visibility and then this visibility brings you business.

If you publish informative content covering your longtail keywords, other websites and blogs have a reason to link to your website or share your link on their social media timelines.

This brings you the much needed visibility.

When people link back to you, it also improve your search engine rankings for your primary keywords.

Effective SEO copywriting brings down your bounce rate

Your bounce rate has a direct impact on your search engine rankings.

Your bounce rate tells Google whether you have valuable content on your website or not.

If people immediately leave your website after finding your content in search results, it tells Google that people are unable to find what they’re looking for, for the keyword they are using and finding your content.

Here is a small video that explains the relationship between your bounce rate and search engine rankings:

Hence, your content begins to lose its current rankings for the keyword.

Again, I will give my own example.

If someone searches for “best SEO copywriting services in my area” and comes to my website and within a few seconds goes back to Google to carry on the same search, Google downgrades my current rankings for the search term “best SEO copywriting services in my area” because it assumes that my website doesn’t have relevant information for the topic.

On the other hand, for the same search term when someone finds my link and goes to my website and spends some time going through my web page and even explores other webpages for a few minutes, it tells Google that my website has relevant information and consequently, it upgrades my rankings for the same search term.

This is how your bounce rate affects your current search engine rankings.

Relevant SEO copywriting gets you more backlinks

Getting authoritative backlinks is an inalienable part of your SEM.

What motivates people to link to your content?

Relevance. Value. Engagement. Topicality. Authority.

All these attributes can be incorporated through relevant SEO copywriting practices.

Concluding remarks

SEO copywriting is a big part of your search engine marketing strategy.

It renders a direction to your SEM.

It brings down your costs.

It gives you lasting search engine visibility once you have been able to convince Google that your content is relevant for particular keywords and search terms.

Should you put all your SEO eggs in the Google basket when writing content?

SEO content writing while not getting influenced by Google’s whims

Frankly, there is no foolproof solution. The above Content Marketing Institute blog post concludes with

SEO becomes a long-term experiential development strategy, not a game of matching semantics. As content marketers we are ultimately NOT trying to simply understand how people search for content – and are served it via Google – but rather how people are finding and experiencing the solutions to challenges they may not even know they have.

What does it mean?

Provide value instead of writing content according to Google guidelines. Focus on people instead of SEO. Make it easier for people to access your content and it will be automatically accessed by Google and other search engines.

Remember that content is all about experience. You already know that every instance of purchase is an emotional decision. Hence, your content, whether you write that content or publish a video or audio recording, must invoke an emotional response.

Your content must be a part of a journey. A bigger customer journey that does not begin and stop at your search engine rankings.

Rankings matter, yes. Keywords also matter.

But, your content is more than that. Keywords are just a guideline. For example, when you read a book, let’s say “Jude the Obscure” by Thomas Hardy, you know that the theme centers around a character called “Jude” who is always making “obscure” decisions about his life and people around him.

So, when I create a web page about “best content writing services”, instead of repeating the phrase multiple times in my content, I must focus on explaining to you why my content writing services may be the best for your need.

Create the context. Weave a narrative. Deliver value. Touch people emotionally. Then you don’t need to constantly worry about your Google rankings. You content attracts people due to its own, inherent quality.

Content writing for humans means better SEO

What is the difference between content writing for humans and for machines?

Again, I’m not saying everyone does that (because there is a higher level of awareness regarding this now) but while trying to improve search engine rankings, people often forget why they are writing. All they are bothered about is, improving their search engine rankings for their preferred keywords and search terms.

This image gives you an example of how people try to “optimize” their content for better SEO

The image demonstrates text in which someone goes overboard with optimization

Going overboard with optimization

Source.

What does content writing for machines mean?

Content writing for machines means writing simply to improve your SEO. It may or may not work, but here, your primary focus is to weave your text in such a manner that the search engine algorithm finds your text appealing and consequently, ranks it well.

It involves repeating your keywords a couple of times in the title of the web page for the blog post and then copiously using various keywords as simple text as well as hypertext, mostly indiscriminately throughout the body text.

Does it work?

Personally, I’m not sure. Sometimes in the search results, I’ve seen this working, but personally, I have never been able to benefit from it. My content ranks well only when I write well.

It isn’t advisable and it is strongly discouraged by reputed search engine experts, but still, you may find many search results that are of no value but are full of keywords and ranking well.

Why isn’t content writing for machines advisable?

Why do you want search engine traffic? You want people to come to your website or blog. Why do you want that? You want them to do business with you.

Do you think they are going to do business with you just because they are on your website or do you think they need to be convinced?

Have you ever spent money on a website where you cannot make sense of what is written over there or somewhere you don’t feel convinced?

I don’t think so.

Similarly, if you are merely focusing on improving your SEO and in the process, neglecting the quality and the relevance of your content, although you may get traffic from search engines, this traffic is not going to convert.

This is where content writing for humans plays an important part.

What does content writing for humans mean?

When you write content for humans, you focus on the message, you focus on the quality and the relevance of what you are writing rather than obsessing over SEO.

When you are writing for humans, you don’t completely ignore the SEO part, but your primary concern is to make your content engaging and meaningful. You want to provide useful information to your visitors so that they can make up their mind about doing business with you.

You spend your effort on quality. You do lots of research. You pack as much useful information as possible.

Then what about SEO?

If you simply focus on the subject at hand, your search engine rankings are automatically improved.

People are constantly asking questions to search engines (something like, “looking for the best content writer for my business”) and the job of the search engines is to provide the best answers to people.

Search engine ranking algorithms are constantly being improved to achieve that. The mathematicians and computer scientists working on these algorithms don’t want to be tricked into believing that something is good when it is not.

But at the same time, they want their algorithm to be able to recognise text patterns and calculate how important that piece of content is for a keyword.

Balancing between writing content for humans and machines

This can be achieved by writing your content primarily for humans, but at the same time using the language that they use with search engines.

For example, if you are looking for a professional content writer and if I want you to be able to find my link on Google and then come to my link and after reading what I have published, you should consider doing business with me, I should focus on talking about my abilities as a content writer rather than advising you on how to become an author like Shakespeare.

Although, maybe I’m trying to convince you that I’m as good as Shakespeare and hence, you should hire me as your content writer, and there is nothing wrong in presenting my services from that angle, your primary focus is not someone who writes like Shakespeare, but someone who can write professional content for you that can help you grow your business.

The point is, if I want to generate traffic from people who are looking for a content writer, then obviously I should have lots of content talking about content writing, content writer, SEO writer, SEO content, content marketing, and such, because this is how Google figures out that I have lots of content for these terms.

But I shouldn’t obsess over these terms just for the heck of it. I should carefully choose topics that talk about these search terms in a manner that they convince you that I’m a better content writer than someone else.

Why there is a need to constantly write and publish such topics?

Compulsion.

Personally, I feel I have covered whatever I needed to help people decide whether they want to hire me as their content writer or not.

As new content emerges, old content is pushed down. If new content is not published on the website, it begins to lose its search engine rankings no matter how exceptional the content is. Search engines like Google prefer fresh content, and fresh content on an ongoing basis.

Hence, I try to publish new content every week. But, though, I need to publish content regularly, it doesn’t mean I do it with total disinterest just as a chore. I take full interest. I pay special attention to the fact that if you are reading this, you are learning something, you are benefiting from it and you are able to implement my advice on your own content writing if you want.

This is how I maintain a balance between writing content for humans and the machines.

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