What is SEO Copywriting and Why Does Your Business Need It?

Content marketing is how we have grown our own business as well as our clients’ businesses. A super effective way to grow your website’s online presence is through the content marketing approach, SEO Copywriting.

Content creation for your website is a meticulous process that requires a lot of thought and planning. 

There are two key reasons why writing web content is a delicate process: 

1. Firstly, you’re writing to engage, entertain and educate your audience. You need to keep their attention and likely want them to take action from reading your copy.
2. Secondly, you’re writing for search engines to help show your website to your target audience and send them through to read your content.

The two points above perfectly describe what the priorities are for SEO copywriting. 

Having a website means nothing without it being clearly visible and easily discoverable for people. This is why having an SEO and content strategy is essential and a smart move to grow your business.

SEO copywriting is fundamental in every effective SEO strategy.

Here’s what you need to know about SEO copywriting and the way we and other businesses benefit from it. 

What is SEO copywriting?

SEO, aka search engine optimisation, is the process of making your website rank highly on a search engine results page on the likes of Google. By following what people call ‘SEO best practices’, you can make your website more visible to prospective customers. 

Copywriting is writing for advertising. Writing copy allows a business to bring awareness to their brand. It’s most often used to craft website copy like product pages and blog posts.  

Combine the two and you get SEO copywriting, which is the process of creating content to rank on search engines like Google. There’s no SEO without content.

The main goal of SEO copywriting is to help your website user or customer to find an answer to their needs. 

Do you need SEO for copywriting?

For any digital content, SEO is vital.

Copy that’s written with SEO behind it will much more likely perform better than without any SEO consideration at all. Unless you’re very lucky and the content you write is well-optimised. 

The reason being that in your SEO research you’ll be able to learn a lot about the topic, and most importantly, what people are searching for around the topic. With that research, you will be able to plan what you’ll cover in your content.

SEO is more than keywords, it’s about intent and it’s also about using data to know what your audience want to know and need to know. 

Why is SEO important for copywriting?

There are two reasons SEO is important when writing copy.

First, by doing SEO research, you can find an amazing amount of data to use when planning your SEO copy. You can benefit from a great deal of insight on your target audience. 

The SEO data you get allows you to better plan your content and understand more about what your audience is interested in on the topic you’re writing about. 

The other reason SEO is important for copywriting is that even if you have the perfect solution to the user’s problem or needs, if you don’t write the copy to SEO best practices, the copy won’t rank. That means they won’t even find your SEO copy to read.

What are SEO keywords?

SEO keywords, sometimes called queries, search terms or search phrases, is words and phrases that a user searches on search engines (like Google) to find content.

From your point of view, you can use SEO keywords to find what your target audience is searching for. 

Not only that, but there’s more work involved with SEO keywords.

SEO keyword research gives you a huge amount of data, like:

• How many searches a certain keywords gets per month (known as search volume).
• What the intent is of a user searching that keyword – whether a user is looking for information or they’re ready to buy.
• Additional keywords around your main keyword you’re searching – related questions and additional wording to include and write about in your SEO copy.
• Who your competitors are to outrank for that keyword – you can then see what their content is and make sure your content is better!

Without all of this knowledge, creating your SEO copy would be difficult. You would be going in blind, writing content that you think is relevant to your user, rather than having real data to base it on. 

Imagine you’ve done your SEO research and have now written a great piece of SEO copy. Google will then crawl your content and assess it. It will weigh up whether your content is a quality resource and helpful to users. If it says it is, then Google will index your content, meaning it will start to show up on searches related to your keyword you’re targeting.

How do you write good SEO content?

It just so happens we have an in-depth blog to give you this advice – here’s how to write SEO content.

How do I know if my content is SEO friendly?

You can do a quick SEO audit of your website by using your SEO tool (like ahrefs, SEMrush Moz), or you can check your content manually and optimise for SEO best practices. 

Some of the typical SEO best practices include:

• Making sure you have keywords spread across your content: in your title, in your headings across the content, and within the copy itself. 
• Making sure you have a good structure to your content and cover off relevant topics related to your focus keywords.
• Adding relevant links in your content to relevant content.
• Add alt-text to any images included in your content.

Although we have spoken a lot about SEO best practice and Google, the main thing to remember is your audience. Write for your users with SEO in mind and you’ll create awesome content that not only ranks, but converts website users into real life customers for your business.

Start your SEO copywriting strategy today

Take your first step into marketing your website through SEO copywriting. Get in touch and let’s make a start on your strategy to grow your business online.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between copywriting and SEO copywriting?

The only difference is the focus on SEO. The process and art of copywriting doesn’t change. 

SEO copywriting has a specific focus on the keywords you target in your copy and what you cover in the content. It’s how you can get people to discover your content in their online search, thanks to your SEO research and data before creating your copy.

You’re still creating content as you would with just ‘copywriting’ – you’re taking your visitors on a journey through your content. You’re entertaining them, informing them or supporting them.

Is copywriting just marketing?

Copywriting is a marketing and advertising approach, however, the best copywriting doesn’t feel to the user that they’re being marketed to. They should feel they’re being supported or reading content that answers their search query. 

Underneath your content is a strategy to get the user to take the steps you want them to take and buy from you or become a client. 

Can SEO copywriting really help my business?

Yes! Our main source of work comes through our SEO copywriting.

To understand more about the impact of SEO copywriting can have and the results you can expect, check out this blog

Let’s chat!