How can copywriters help you boost search engine visibility?

With quite a long list of search engine optimisation (SEO) copywriters in Perth, it’s not that easy to find the best person to write for the web. Before you choose a copywriter, though, you should evaluate their basic SEO skills, knowledge and abilities. 

Web copywriters don’t need to be experts in optimisation. However, a copywriter who writes for SEO can give you more bang for your dollar.

Here’s how:

1. They’ll help people find your website

Web copy optimised for search engine is the key feature of any business website that you’re trying to rank higher. Your SEO copywriter would be writing compelling copy that search engine users would find useful.

This means your web pages and blog posts must answer your readers’ questions, tell them what they don’t know, confirm their suspicions or fears, and solve their problems.

The copy needs to be relevant to them. And it should make sense that your business is writing about the topic. For example, it won’t make much sense for a financial planner to write a blog post about the best colours to paint a camper van.

There are many types of copy your copywriter could help with for your website, including news articles, media releases and FAQs. Whatever it is, the copy should be optimised with your keywords so the pages appear in search engine results for people to find.

2. They’ll make it sound natural

There’s no need to repeat the same keywords multiple times when you want your web pages to show up in search engines.

If your copywriter insists that you stuff your web pages, blog posts and meta data with keywords, walk away.

If they suggest this after you’ve started working with them, then ask them to fix the copy they’ve provided and to place the keywords to appear natural. Your message should sound exactly how you would say it out loud.

Imagine saying this out loud:

“I love my family lawyer in Perth! My independent family lawyer witnessed my signature and then made a couple of copies of the form. Next, my affordable family lawyer posted the original on my behalf. She’s such a caring family lawyer!”

Stuffing keywords into your copy could also cause negative outcomes for your ranking. Instead of boosting your ranking, the major search engines like Google could penalise you. Your traffic could suddenly drop and you’d receive a special notification from Google in your Search Console account.

3. They’ll focus the copy on your niche

When there are thousands of people writing about your topic, the best thing to do is to optimise the copy to attract your ideal customer, not everyone under the sun.

So let’s say you’re an independent bookkeeper and you want to attract “crazy-busy prospects who want and can afford to outsource their bookkeeping to an independent bookkeeper”.

The freelance dad who is blogging about DIY Bookkeeping for Freelancers is NOT your competition. He’s targeting freelancers who want to do it themselves.

Your competition would be other established players in your niche who are targeting “crazy-busy prospects who want to outsource their bookkeeping”.

If your copywriter approaches SEO this way, they’ll help you to focus on the target audience that truly matters – the people who are looking to purchase from businesses like yours, not everyone who needs bookkeeping.

This way you, your writer will produce well-optimised authority copy customised for your niche.

4. They’ll use the best long-tail keywords

Whether you’re paying them to research your keywords or you’re supplying a list, a good SEO copywriter knows that long-tail keywords are vital for ranking, but that the best keywords are the lesser-known ones that would help to target your audience and reduce the stiff competition.

For example, you have a better chance to rank highly for “non-toxic paint for kids furniture” than for “non-toxic paint”.

So if the list you’ve provided isn’t strong enough, your copywriter would recommend some changes or insert the long-tail keywords that they believe you should be using.

A good copywriter always does a basic check before placing the keywords. There are many FREE keyword research tools such as:

• Discussion forums: People are discussing your topic in niche forums. Your copywriter could take a peek to determine which keywords people are using that could benefit your business.
• Google Trends: It shows whether people are searching for the keywords you’re targeting.
• Google Webmaster Tools: If you’re not familiar with this tool, your copywriter (or your web developer) can help you see the keywords you’re already ranking for so you can use them in your research.
• Google Suggest: This is Google’s auto-complete function that makes associated search terms appear in the search bar as you type your keywords or questions. The results are based on what other people have searched for previously.
• ÜberSuggest: It scrapes Google Suggest and adds every letter of the alphabet after your keyword to serve long-tail keywords. For example, “copywriting tips” would return “copywriting tips and tricks”.
• KeywordTool.io: Works like ÜberSuggest but adds the letter both before and after your keyword. E.g. “copywriting tips” could return “copywriting tips and tricks” and “commercial copywriting tips”.
• Google Correlate: A secret weapon not many SEO copywriters know about. Correlate allows you to use your own data or a keyword to find associated search trends.
• Google AdWords Keyword Planner: Great for identifying whether a keyword’s popularity is rising or dropping. Your copywriter can filter low-volume searches and to create combinations of keywords.

5. They’ll write SEO-friendly URLs

If a copywriter follows the guidelines for constructing URLs, they can help you to boost your SEO ranking.

Let’s say your exiting URLs contain gibberish such as:

www.examplesite.com/news/2015/news123456_32366.html
www.examplesite.com/library/images/custom-pages/part1/1234.jpg
www.examplesite.com/loans/homeloans/homeloans-loans-newloans

An SEO-savvy writer would keep your URLs simple and descriptive like:

www.examplesite.com/products/evaporative-air-conditioner

As you can see, they would avoid keyword stuffing the URLs.

This is important because just as you could get penalised for putting too many keywords within your copy, you could get penalised for stuffing your URLs.

6. They’ll optimise the titles and snippets

Your writer would know why it’s important to optimise your meta titles and meta descriptions and how to make sure they’re spot on.

Meta titles are the words that appear in the bar at the very top of your browser when you open your page or blog post.

Meta descriptions are the snippets that show up in search engine result pages for your pages or blog posts.

The title and description will help you to boost visibility and get people to click through to your website.

However, it’s often fine to leave out a meta description, especially if you’re using many long-tail keywords in your page or blog post.

When a search engine doesn’t detect a forced meta description, it pulls the section of your content that contains the same keywords the user has typed in their search bar.

Your SEO copywriter would know:

• the guidelines for lengths for both the meta title and meta description
• where to place the important keywords
• when and how to add your brand’s name in the title. For example, “ABC Company — Our SEO Services” versus “Our SEO Services — ABC Company”
• about the Yoast SEO plugin to help you insert titles and descriptions
• about tools like SERP Simulator to test your titles and descriptions without having to log into your dashboard
• how to quickly check the titles and descriptions that are already appearing in Google — type this in your search bar: “site:www.examplesite.com“.

Not all copywriters help their clients write these titles and descriptions properly, so make a note to ask when shopping around.

Looking for a copywriter who writes for SEO?

I write optimised copy that won’t annoy your web visitors. Send me an email to find out how you can benefit from my affordable SEO copywriting packages.