This is a guest post by Tom McSherry from Premium-Online-Writing.com
As bloggers and Internet marketers, we often have a tendency to focus on traffic. After all, if no one is visiting your website, you’re not going to make any money – it’s that simple. But don’t be one of those people who makes the mistake of spending all your time on traffic generation methods, without learning the tricks and techniques you’ll need to convert those visitors into customers once they arrive.
Whether you’re selling affiliate products, your own ebook or your services, you need to balance out search engine optimization against the need to actually convert people. If you understand both aspects – SEO, and copywriting – you can blend them together seamlessly.
You’ve no doubt heard boring advice like “Write for people first, search engines second,” a million times, so I’ll give you some less common tips.
Here are a few of my favorite copywriting techniques and how you can fuse them with SEO techniques.
Writing Captivating Headlines – With Keywords
In copywriting, one of your major goals is to write headlines that capture attention, draw the reader in a stir an emotional reaction. With SEO copywriting, you have an added challenge: you have to try to include your keyword phrases in your headlines.
Headlines are an important factor in on-page optimization, especially the first headline at the top of the page.
If you’re willing to be creative, you can turn this challenge into a blessing. If you’ve chosen your main keyword well, you can work it into your headline in a way that will immediately grab attention (because the searcher has come to your page after typing that term into the search engine, so their eyes will be drawn to it).
Don’t waste an opportunity to use a keyword in a headline, but never sacrifice the ‘smoothness’ of a headline to try to cram in keywords that don’t fit. Focus on the reader experience.
Use Short Sentences
Short sentences are ideal for online copy. You’re trying to express straightforward ideas in a simple style. But that doesn’t mean all your sentences should be short. You want to use a variety of sentence lengths to change-up the ‘rhythm’ of your copy.
Copy where every sentence is the same length will come across choppy and awkward. A good test is to read your copy out loud – you want your copywriting to read in a conversational way, so the best method to measure that is to actually read it out as if you were having a conversation.
If it doesn’t sound conversational, it’s probably because your sentence length and structure is awkward or you’re not choosing your words well.
Use Bullet Points
Bullet points are extremely handy for keeping your copy on-topic and simple. They let you split your copy up into neat little compartments – each compartment should contain one major benefit of whatever you’re trying to sell.
Remember: something your product has is a feature. Something your product does for the customer is a benefit. That’s an important difference.
Mix Up Your Word Choice with Synonyms
We all know repeating a key phrase too many times is considered ‘spam.’ But you can actually avoid going overboard on keyword density and enhance the optimization of your web page at the same time. All you have to do is use synonyms for your main keywords.
Not only does this help you avoid being flagged for spam, it will help your page get found for all sorts of different long tail keywords.
The golden rule of SEO copywriting is to always be testing. Keep experimenting with new techniques and test new copy against your ‘control’ copy. This is how you refine your copy and increase your conversion rate over time.
Top 10 Search Terms:
• seo copywriting tips
I have one word. “Balance”. Your blog should be a people’s stop to learning and inspiration. SEO is also important, but you have to really know what you’re doing. Competition is fierce out there! Create content for mostly people, and maybe some for Google.
I love these advice. First of all, I agree with them. Second of all, I try to do them myself. But most of all, they look easy enough but are actually REALLY hard.
Catchy headliner AND keywords? more than meets the eye, but so important.
Thanks for the great advice and an affirming article.
Traffic is the most thing any blogger want to get when building a blog, and traffic from Search Engines is the best traffic source that would get conversion to more sales, however, not all blogger knowing how to write to get high ranking on Search Engine and your post is the great post to guide them how to improve Search Engine result ranking through writing content. Thanks for the share.
You’re right, one has to have a right combination of the content from SEO point of view and the users point of view. As described by you, it is possible to blend the two appropriately.
Thanks so much for these tips! I have personally found that my headlines, breaking up paragraphs so they are not too long, using bold formatting to separate paragraphs, and of course bullet points/numbered lists when possible works wonders. There is truly no quicker way to get someone to immediately click away from your site than to write in long, never-ending blocky paragraphs.
I’ve been focusing more and more on copywriting rather than just simply traffic generation as I quickly learned it doesn’t matter how many hits you get if you can’t convert. These are some useful tips; especially the headline portion. Adjusting the headlines on my sites have both increased the average time on my sites as well as the conversion rates.
Tommy
seo is very important to our marketing business. I like your first tip alot “writing catchy headlines” the headline makes the first impression so we must make a compelling headline to get our visitors clicking and reading
Excellent advice Tom. i definitely make use of bullet points in most of my blog posts as i can see that people digest them easily this way.
M Mark
Great article, I think it’s more important than ever to have good content on your website, too many people overlook the importance of copy and then wonder why their search engine positioning is suffering or people aren’t staying on the site for very long. Thanks for sharing.
i agree with you. unique content with NEWS!! are really important for ranking. but you must write first for people and than you need SEO for optimation your linkbilding and optimation “onpage”.
thanks for the interesting discussion.
This makes copywriting sound really easy. I always struggle with this part of SEO but this article definitely helps me simplify this aspect of SEO. I appreciate the advice, thanks