skillshare: seo for copywriting

SKILLSHARE

SEO CopywritingWriting for robots

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Intro✓ Who exactly is the audience for SEO copywriting?✓ Does that audience limit how we write?Brand keywords✓ How do brand keywords fit in?The long and short of keyword research✓ How do you find the keywords you need?✓ How important/difficult are long tail keywords to

find/use?

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SEO Copywriting 101

AUDIENCE AND LIMITATIONS3

Intro | SEO? Copywriting?

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SEO copywriting has to struggle with two audiences:

1) SEO is for robots, and copywriting is for humans

However, these robots are designed to impersonate humans, and they’re becoming better and better at this. So instead...

2) SEO copywriting is for robots trying to impersonate humans

Much better, though perhaps also a slightly scary statement about robots becoming Skynet.

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Intro | How clever are the robots?

The robots/bots/spiders, that ‘crawl’ the web come from all search engines. This means they vary in intelligence.

If a bot can’t impersonate a human well enough, then it shouldn’t be in our audience.

It also gives us a little bias in favour of the human aspect of our audience. A key rule of SEO copywriting is to write naturally.

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The aim of the bot is to look at your site and determine its relevance in regard to a given keyword phrase.

This is done, in part, by the volume and frequency of related keywords in the page’s copy.

There are other factors too, but we’re mainly concerned with relevance, and achieving high relevance for what our target audience is searching for through optimal use of on-page keywords.

Intro | How does this affect SEO overall?

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BRAND KEYWORDS

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Brand keywords | Home is where the heart is

Brand is how a user remembers you over your competitors. So consistency is key.

Use the brand name in the title tag and meta description for the page (and throw in a description of what that means)

Then repeat that brand name, naturally, in the main copy, as soon as possible with a H1 tag, to give it the spotlight it deserves. Many companies forget to highlight their own name.

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THE LONG AND SHORT OF KEYWORD RESEARCH

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Type any non-brand term into Google, and a list of suggestions will appear next to the typed word(s). We’ll use [web design] as an example, with regards to Bozboz

1) [Web design] suggests [company], [software], [courses]

2) [Web design company] suggests [London], [UK], [Manchester]

Web design company in BrightonBrighton web design company

Research | Which keywords? - A quick Google

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We can level up our research with a tool designed solely for suggestions: Über Suggest.

Similar to a Google search, but with far more results

[web design] in Über Suggest produces 360 results. Select the best ones as you go, and save them to a shortlist.

Research | Which keywords? - Uber Suggest

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Then we pop that shortlist into Google Adwords Keyword Planner, which can expose rough search volumes and even bid estimates for keywords.

This gives us priorities for our keyword shortlist. Popular doesn’t always mean highest bid to advertisers, which may also influence our SEO copywriting.

Research | Which keywords? - Adwords Keyword Planner

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Research | Long tail vs short tail

Let’s break it down a bit further, so that it can applied more broadly than just our [web design] example.

[web design company in Brighton] follows this structure:

([ADJECTIVE]) + [CORE KEYWORD] + [SERVICE/PRODUCT TYPE] + ([LOCATION])

(Order not essential)

Rock + music + festival + at Donington Park in the UK

Specialist + cheese + shop + in WiganPies + with personality + in Ankh-Morpork

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Research | Long tail vs short tail

Or we can introduce a verb. Think of the product/service a site offers by the way in which you want users to interact with it.

[VERB] + ([ADJECTIVE]) + [PRODUCT/SERVICE] + ([LOCATION])(Order not essential)

Make + ceramic + skulls + in BrightonDrink + spiced + mead + near St Peter’s Church(These were made up on the spot with a single business in mind. Both of these hit the intended business in position 1. This just shows how good Google is getting at semantic search, and how free a copywriter is to

write naturally.)

These phrases can be used on-page, as they are the phrases people search for, and so lead to natural language use.

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✓ Mention the brand on the homepage, title tag, and H1

✓ Use Google search for a quick list of suggested terms

✓ Use Uber Suggest for a near exhaustive list of suggested terms

✓ Use Google Adwords’ Keyword Planner for search volume and competition

✓ Long tail terms are easy, and go hand-in-hand with natural, user-friendly language use

✓ Most importantly, write naturally

Recap | Summary

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Thanks for reading!