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.
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• seo copywriting tips
One thing that always seems to work, year in year out, is to make a list and call it something like, “10 ways to do this and that” or “7 things that bloggers tend to forget”. People usually want lists that simplify things, that narrow big complicated scenarios down.
Excellent tips..
Definitely headline should be catchy,it should grab the user attention then only they will spend some time to read a post….if the title itself not good means then they won’t listen the article…we must try to use keyword along with title its bit advantage…
Thanks for sharing a useful stuff..
Hi Tom,
I’m actually surprised just how much changing the title of your blog to include a keyword could make so much difference in terms of visits!
Thanks so much for the tip! 🙂
Pri
I recently looked back at some of my earlier blog posts and the copy is terrible, my writing has definitely improved. I still get traffic to those pages so I am slowly updating them so visitors will engage a bit more and hopefully I’ll get a few extra sales too.
I have just one little issue with the article, I feel that your focus is far too heavy on the Google aspect. The real goal of SEO is to eventually transition into SEM or CRO; basically ROI-focused.
Humans can tell when you’ve just spammed an entire article with keywords, even if you use synonyms. Optimize for people, let the traffic dictate how google indexes you.
except for the optimized and interesting content, a big factor in getting readers was the captivating titles of the the post. It should get the attention of the reader, usage of images and videos are also great.
I have to admit I find copywriting the hardest part of doing business online. I like the tip to use synonyms for keywords though. I also think it’s important to find your own unique style or tone and then be consistent. Something I’m still working on.
Hi Shane,
I am totally agree with you Mr. Handsome, because you need to perfect the words that really links to the keyword.. Its not just about editing and adding additional thoughts, rather, figure out all the factors and expand your dictionary…
awesome tips, but what can we do after panda trashing our business badly and drop-down our site Pr6 to Pr1. its so sad to say 2011 is too much bad for beginner and intermediate class blogger
Hi, Tom!
Your SEO copywriting tips are excellent and more than welcome.
The advice of using short sentences is an ideal way to get the thing done without being messy. Also, using synonyms is an excellent method of not being recognized as spam.
I am quite a beginner in all these, so this sort of information is always very valuable to me.
No doubt, copy writing skill is key for any blogger who wants to retain traffic gotten through effective SEO. It is akin to the saying “You can take a horse to the river but you cannot force it to drink”. Traffic will quickly disappear never to reappear again if you have sloppy content on your blog/website.
It may still be worthwhile to get a professional copy writer to help you churn out a good sales page but for blog posts, you have to learn to do your own copy writing as it is not economical to hire a copy writer for all your blog posts.