As we’ve always preached, content is king. Search engines love high quality content and every business, every website and every organisation should set it as standard that their online copy is written with care and attention. Embarassingly, this is not the case; but poor grammar and dreadful execution of the English language aside, bad copywriting will only have detrimental effects on your site’s rankings.
As the recent Panda Update illustrated to us all, Google doesn’t take mercy on anyone. Our expert copywriting team is made up of experts in their field and here we offer 10 simple tips to turn your content around. Engaging topics not only provide great value to your website visitors, but the best web content attracts the best links. Here’s how we do it...
10 SEO copywriting tips from WMG:
1. Basic grammar and spelling – there’s no point running before you can crawl because you will ultimately fall over. If you don’t have a basic grasp of English grammar and spelling, there’s your first hurdle. If you are not confident in your own writing skills, using a computer spell checking system or asking someone to edit your content is probably the best bet. Professional copywriting services are available for those who really struggle and the investment will pay off.
2. Write for your audience – before you even start writing, your first question is, “who am I writing to?” Establish your audience demographically and you will be able to get a better understanding of who you are communicating with.
3. Find the right tone – tone of voice is everything when it comes to website copy. In line with establishing your audience you need to decide whether your tone of voice is going to be light hearted and entertaining, personable and warm, polite and professional, or factual and concise. Your writing tone and style should represent your business and your brand.
4. Benefits before features – it’s human nature to relate to emotional attributes first and foremost and the rational attributes follow later. If you are trying to promote cloud hosting services, it would be more strategic to discuss the ‘benefits’ for the clients (cheaper utlility bills and better service reliability) and then expand into the product features later (efficient virtual hosting platform). The first thing that most readers will want to know is how they can benefit – what’s in it for them?
(Source: marketingmanagement.blogsome.com)
5. The WIIFM Factor – The WIFFM factor (What’s in it For Me?) should be applied to everything you write. You have just seconds to capture the attention of readers so your first sentence need to summarise all your points extremely well. Word such as ‘you’ and ‘your’ are extremely positive and trigger the right responses with readers. Making the article about your company and your achievements is not as effective as a customer-focused angle which discusses all the benefits they could have from doing business with you. There are many ways of promoting the USPs (Unique Selling Points) of your company without using the words ‘we’ or ‘us’. For instance, ‘Our company offers a wide selection of products’ should be ‘You will find a wide selection of products on our website’.
6. Promote your USPs – what makes your business stand out? Why are you different? If you have anything that makes you a better company than your competitors, make sure you write about it.
7. Conduct thorough keyword research – use keyword tools to find similar keywords to the ones you have in mind; you will be able to see important information on keyword competition and the number of searches per month. If you choose a highly competitive phrase, it could prove very difficult to rank for. A standard keyword density is somewhere between 2-5% per article but it all depends on the length of the phrases and how organically it fits in with the rest of your text.
8. Dont over-optimise – keyword stuffing is spammy. Google hates spam. Write as organically as possible and make sure any keywords you choose are relevant to what your page offers.
9. Unique content for every page – page differentiation is very important if you want Google to index all the pages of your site. If you want Google to recognise the internal pages as well as your homepage, you need to show that they all serve a unique purpose. By adding unique content to each page, you are helping search engines differentiate between them.
10. Don’t forget the F pattern – research using an eyetracking heatmap tells us that the human eye scans a webpage in a F shaped pattern; two horizontal scans across the page before a vertical scan down the page. The formatting and layout of your content is very important when you upload onto your website and you should consider using subtitles to break up the text. The F shaped pattern can also be a great guideline for helping you position your most important information strategically.
“Heatmaps from user eyetracking studies of three websites. The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations.” - Source: useit.com
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