SEO is – or rather, should be – an integral part of the copywriting process. However, because of its challenging nature it is often disregarded.
This creates a problem. Your website could have amazing content that is incredibly useful, but if it isn’t optimised for SEO, it will get ignored.
In this article we will look at five essential practices for SEO optimising your web copy. By implementing these, you will essentially be ensuring that Google will not only see your page, but rank it!
1. Implement your keywords correctly
It’s 2021 and you can’t get away with keyword stuffing anymore. Your website content needs to have keywords, yes. But those keywords need to placed correctly and in the right order.
What does this mean? Well, your website should contain keywords but your content must flow naturally. They must never appear on their own or out of place. To anyone reading the site (Google bot or human visitors), the content must make sense.
Another factor that’s very important is keyword density. You need to have enough keywords on a single page to make sure that page gets ranked.
2. Title and meta-description optimisation
It’s just not enough for your content to be SEO optimised. Most writers and developers tend to ignore or pay little attention to the page title and meta description. This results in Google ignoring the page altogether.
You see, the algorithm is trained to look for the title, and the meta description appears in the SERPs (search engine results pages). This means that your title and description are equally (if not more) deserving of SEO optimisation.
3. External AND internal links
You heard that right. It’s just not enough to have a couple of random external links on your website content. Your content must link internally as well.
Always make sure you link to high quality authority websites. This helps Google bots crawl your website easier, and helps them decide whether your content is authentic or not.
Apply the same to your internal links as well. This will help your users have a better browsing experience as well as establishing authority.
4. Make sure your text is readable
There are quite a few ways you can improve your readability. The first, of course, is always writing web copy in good English, with as little grammar mistakes as possible.
The next thing you can do is to improve your text structure. Use lots of big bold headings. Break up your text into shorter paragraphs. Use shorter sentences. All of these help your copy rank higher.
One last thing. Add as many bullet points and lists as you can. Lists are easier to read than line after line of text.
5. Include an effective call-to-action
A CTA (call-to-action) is a piece of text that encourages the reader to perform an action. For example, “sign up now” or “get in touch today!” are examples of CTAs.
Here are some excellent placement and usability ideas for your CTA:
- At the end of the page
- For social media shares
- Blog subscription
- Or simply anywhere you like!
