Top SEO Copywriting Tips

These SEO copywriting tips are designed to help online business owners create website copy which achieves two goals simultaneously: generating organic search engine traffic, and converting visitors to customers. Getting this balance right is absolutely essential to making sure you get the most out of a website. If you shift too much in either direction, you’ll either end up with not enough traffic, or a low conversion rate - both of which are bad for business.

SEO Copywriting Tips: Optimizing Your Content

Many site owners have been fed misinformation when it comes to optimizing a web page for the search engines. We’re only talking about on-page factors here - don’t worry about off-page factors like links for now.

Each of your pages should be built around one specific keyword phrase. You can include secondary keywords if you like, but only four or five more at most. Preferably, your keyword phrase will have lots of people searching for it at the search engines with relatively little competition.

A good keyword phrase should also indicate that the searcher is willing to spend money. For example, "buy anti-virus software" is much better tha
"free anti-virus software" in terms of getting high conversions. The "free" keyword phrase may bring more traffic, but that traffic will convert at a lower rate because the searchers are not setting out to spend money.

Your specific keyword needs to appear in a few crucial places. It should be in the Title META tag. It should be the first phrase in your Keyword META tag. It should also appear in a h1 headline on your page, at the start of the body copy, and it should make up about 3% of the total body copy. If your keyword density is much higher than 5%, you may set off alarm bells as a spammer at the search engines. Your keyword phrase should also appear in a text link some on the page, such as a link back to your home page.

How Much "Sales" Do You Need?

Now that you understand some of the fundamentals of writing for the search engines, you also need to think about writing for your human visitors. Remember that it’s humans who buy from you, not search engines, so having copy that plays on human emotions always takes priority over search engine optimization.

The SEO copywriting needs of every website are different. Some sites will require a more "hard sell" approach, whereas others will do better with soft, informative, pre-selling content.

You can usually get the best results with a bit of both. You have a large, high quality SEO content site with free, useful information. In this case, these articles are your "soft sell" - they introduce the reader to your industry and your products, but they don’t push. These SEO pages then lead through to a direct response sales page. This is where the big guns come out and you try to convert visitors into customers.

But never underestimate the importance of pre-selling visitors. Don’t try to oversell someone who has just come through to your site from a search query - the visitor is looking for information, not a sales pitch. You need to understand the psychology involved in getting someone to buy from your site after they come through from the search results.

The visitor wants information, so give her information first. Make it good information. When she can see you know what you’re talking about, then you can lead her through to your sales pitch.

Whether or not you search engine optimize your sales page is up to you - it can help get more traffic and sales, but it won’t be necessary if you have a large, well-optimized content site. With lots of good content, you’ll never be short of traffic. Hopefully these SEO copywriting tips help improve your traffic-building and conversion improvement efforts. Check out the Premium Online Writing website for more tips and SEO copywriting services.