Be found and understood online
You’re doing some pretty great things. Does your online presence reflect that? Maybe people aren’t getting to your website at all because there’s not enough content there to bring in visitors. Or, maybe, when they get to your website, they can’t tell exactly what you do — or what you’ve done lately. I can help with that.
With roots in content marketing (or “inbound marketing”), I have experience creating and implementing successful content strategies. That means driving traffic to websites and converting visitors into regular readers — and ultimately into customers or clients. The first part of this strategy is making your website SEO-friendly through “Search Engine Optimization.” And a large part of SEO is about words — or, “copy.”
SEO Copywriting
As with creative copywriting, SEO Copywriting is writing high-quality, engaging copy — but with additional best practices that optimize copy to be indexed by search engines like Google. ANY copy written for the web should be written with SEO in mind.
SEO Copywriting is needed for:
- Website copy, including homepage copy
- Landing page copy for your sales or download pages
- Blog posts
- Ebooks and downloadable guides
- CTA (call-to-action) copy, including button copy and conversion forms
- Microcopy, including instructional copy and bonus copy
SEO guidelines exist to try to get as close as possible to a human assessment of the value of a website or page. That’s why writing great SEO copy is also writing better copy for humans — see my “SEO Copywriting Philosophy” below. 👇
SEO Copy Editing
Happy with the overall content on your website? I can edit the copy across your site to optimize for Google and other search engines.
SEO Copy Editing services include:
- Revising page titles and meta data to SEO best practices
- Incorporating thoughtful, keyword-rich headers (H1s, H2s, etc.)
- Editing all page copy to include keywords and break up content as necessary for maximum “scannability”
- Update to optimal SEO formatting for Q&A content, FAQs and other key indexable copy
- Advise on user experience for navigation, downloadable content, social sharing and mobile responsiveness (may recommend content strategy audit)
SEO Copywriting Philosophy
Q: Does writing for search engines mean you aren’t writing for humans?
A: Nope. It’s not an either/or thing — it’s a both/and thing.
SEO copywriting used to mean keyword-stuffing and “black hat” nonsense that tried to trick search engines into ranking rigged landing pages higher. So, it’s understandable if “SEO Copywriting” evokes stiff, jargon-y drivel. But it’s not like that anymore. Promise.
Search engines haven’t quite caught up to the way humans think, but they’re getting close. Modern SEO guidelines exist to prioritize sites with good user experience. They rank sites and pages higher if they’ve got good information organization or have proven helpful to many readers. Writing to SEO best practices, therefore, also means improving writing for humans.
That’s why I always keep up to speed on SEO best practices for copywriting. Because in a way, it’s really keeping up with how people consume info online.
I make sure to maintain enough straightforward language that search engines can effectively analyze the copy I write and serve it up in the appropriate results pages. Strong headlines, concise bullet points and smart paragraph lengths are all important tools to help your copy appeal to Google and Bing. Writing this way also ensures that content has maximum “scannability,” since that’s how people tend to peruse sites these days, too.
It’s a textbook win-win.