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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I never measure keyword density when I write and I do not suggest it to others. It’s a poor substitute for critical thinking. Words are not uniform; they do not appear with the same frequency as each other. Also, keyword density cannot account for related words and other things one encounters in language.
I realize that some popular SEO writing tools use keyword density. They use it, not because it works, but because it is something they can measure and put on the screen (IMO). Even when most SEO experts used keyword density – back when the Google algorithm was a lot simpler – there was little agreement among professionals on what the best keyword density was.
Some can get a bit carried away with optimisation (me included). I read somewhere that content is king, if you get the content right, keywords should appear naturally without the need to force. I like the idea of bullet points, not everyone has the time to red an entire article, the use of word sin bold..
I always have a feeling that social media is just the future of the world.But I feel now that search engine is everlasting thing and it means the same to website as the heart to our body.
Good tips. I would add keep paragraphs short and double spacing between sentences, in addition to bullet lists helps readability. Also, using images/video can be more visually interesting and break things up.
Very true. You have to read books on copywriting at some point. It’s not that hard. You need a captivating headline, then a sub-headline. Then you should list the benefits of the product. There are great books out there that show you how to write this stuff with words that will make people buy.
Well-explained. I think anyone who is on copywriting must adhere on the basics as it helps them to write more content with “sense.” Many are still suffering with the status of their blogs because it simply sucks, and the number one reason is the content. The keywords are not being optimized, not genuine content and/or boring.
Yes TOMMCSHERRY !! these are the minor things about which most of the bloggers are not caring. But by spending some time with the actual writing we can hone our skills. As you said Headlines attract more visitors because it is the only thing which ignite the real thirst in the readers mind to grab the content in article.
Your tips are really helpful and I will work more on my skills to get more from writing..
Very good article Tom! All your tips were very practical and less common 🙂 SEO copywritting is very important for every blogger and it’s something that you work and experiment on as you said. Short sentences create a conversational style that stimulates the readers and are ideal for SEO friendly articles indeed!
Thank you for sharing your experience!
All of these points make your writing attractive. By writing short sentences it becomes easy to understand your post in depth.Heading with keywords are one of the main factor that get the attraction of search engines.
“You want to use a variety of sentence lengths to change-up the ‘rhythm’ of your copy”. I couldn’t agree more. Copy needs to have a natural ebb and flow. Short, stilted sentences or winding, run-ons defeat the purpose.