Search engine optimization, aka SEO, is gaining a lot of traction as a practice that is key to the success of a website. SEO involves practices that aim to improve the website’s quality and the quantity and kind of traffic it attracts. When a related search is done, SEO practices ensure that your website appears on the front pages of search engines such as Google, Bing, etc.
SEO comes under the umbrella of digital marketing, and based on its proven results, it’s considered one of the most effective strategies by organizations. Based on research, it’s been predicted that the market value of the SEO services and industry will reach around $77.6 billion by 2023. Today we’re going to talk about one such practice of SEO known as SEO copywriting.
SEO copywriting refers to the content of a page that is crafted keeping in mind SEO needs. It contains correctly placed relevant keywords that can help improve your position in the search engines, i.e., keyword ranking. Let’s move further and discuss the ten essential things your SEO copywriting must have for better SEO rankings and attracting the right traffic.
#1 Strong and relevant keywords
The proper selection of keywords is the key to improving your keyword ranking on search engines. Appropriate keyword selection relevant to your content’s topic is an essential practice to ensure that your copy is SEO friendly. Writers must ensure that they carry out proper keyword research pertinent to the subject of the copy.
There are a variety of keyword research tools available on the internet, such as ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, etc., that can help you find the right keywords based on your content.
#2 Strong meta description
The importance of meta tags as a critical parameter affecting Google’s search ranking fell as soon as Google removed meta tags from the list parameters to consider for ranking sites. Ironically this has not degraded or affected the importance of meta description in any way.
A meta description is a short paragraph you often see written below the topic or title of the articles on the SERP results. Its ideal length needs to be around 155-160 characters, and it needs to describe the focus of your content briefly. A perfect meta description should use the relevant keywords used in the copy to a considerable extent so that search engines and readers can get the fundamental idea of your content.
#3 Keyword integrated descriptive title
By saying keyword integrated descriptive title, I mean to say that your copy needs to have a title that ideally describes the topic of your content using the relevant keywords. A keyword-rich descriptive title makes it easy for search engines to figure out where to place your content in the SERP results. The stronger your keywords are, the better the ranking of your page.
I’m not saying that keywords are enough to put your page on top of the search results, but they play a considerable role in improving your chances. Moreover, keyword-rich descriptive titles make it easier for the reader to figure out the gist of your content.
#4 Audience addressed content
When you are writing something, you must know your audience, the ones you are addressing or writing for. For this, you should research the trending topics and keywords. Then it would be best if you wrote something about these topics, the top questions they are asking, and the solutions they are looking for.
In this process, you will come across specific keywords the audience uses more often. Great and audience-friendly content should cover these keywords to a limited extent that is enough for creating SEO optimized content and, at the same time, ensures that there is no keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing refers to inserting more and more keywords into the content by keeping in mind solely SEO needs which mostly end up annoying readers and degrading the quality of the content. Hence, excellent SEO copywriting must use keywords only where necessary and enough to meet SEO goals.
#5 Add quality backlinks
Backlinks are the links that are created when one page links an element or a part of its content to another website. It’s considered a best practice to add links of quality and trusted websites with high authority to your content. You can add statistics and other such information from quality websites relevant to your content and link certain parts to that website. This practice helps build trust and build the credibility of your content.
Adding several such quality backlinks to your content signals search engines that trusted websites vouch for your content. This consequently helps improve your ranking in SERP results to a significant extent.
#6 Passage-ranking-focused content
Passage ranking is one of the most recent updates made by Google in its ranking methods. Google rolled out this new update describing passage ranking as a method of ranking a particular passage of a page’s content based on the keywords used in it or specific sentences or questions that have been answered. According to Google, this ranking method will impact almost 7% of search queries.
For this, writers should answer some popular and common questions more often in particular passages relevant to the topic in their copies. This way, when that question is asked in search results, your passage is positioned in a better position in the SERP results.
#7 Add images, videos, and relevant alt tags
For great SEO copywriting, the content must be of excellent quality. Adding images, infographics, and videos to your content wherever possible is a good way of improving the comprehensibility of your content. One more way you can make your content more SEO friendly is by adding proper alt texts to each of the images and infographics using relevant keywords.
Adding alt texts helps in two ways; first, they help readers learn what the image is about when it fails to load due to connectivity issues. Second, it helps your content with the respective title appear in better position in SERP results when images with the used keywords are searched.
#8 Proper content structure
Your SEO copywriting can benefit if your copy follows a proper content structure. Add appropriate H2 and H3 heading in your article containing the right keywords. According to Semrush, 36% of articles with properly placed H2 and H3 tags perform better in terms of traffic, backlinks, and shares than those who don’t have them.
Well-structured articles allow search engines to effortlessly and smoothly go over your writing, making it easy to learn what it is about.
#9 Don’t forget to add a share button
Adding share buttons to your copy is a great way to generate traffic. You can add this button that links to various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, etc. When you press the button, you get redirected to the chosen platform where readers can share the link of the article with automatically generated short descriptions. This way, readers share your article, making it visible to more people and thus leading to more traffic towards your site.
#10 Constant updates
SEO copywriting consists of adding statistics from trusted websites to your content to enhance the credibility of your copy. To maintain the authenticity and freshness of your document, you must keep updating it from time to time. But stats keep changing, and to keep your copy fresh so that people can take reference from it for a longer time, you must keep altering the data more often.
Wrapping up
SEO copywriting is becoming increasingly popular and essential to top search engine results. In this post, we discussed ten of the most crucial things your SEO copies must have to perform better in SERP results. These points ensure that your copies are audience and SEO friendly. Keeping in mind these points while SEO copywriting can lead to quality content.
