SEO copywriting — that’s the subject of this lesson. How to write an SEO-optimized article, what SEO copywriting is, SEO writing, SEO text, SEO articles, copywriting for the web, SEO copywriting techniques… there’s a lot to get through.
As you’ll know, in our SEO Academy we cover every topic connected to ranking on search engines. If you’re new here, have a look at the earlier lessons — we’ve covered a number of things that will help you follow this article.
If this lesson interests you, it’s probably because you want to optimize your website by writing SEO-optimized articles and SEO-optimized pages, and you want to focus above all on understanding how SEO copywriting works and which techniques to follow.
So let’s get going!
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What is SEO copywriting?
As Wikipedia puts it, copywriting is the craft of writing content — text — with the aim of creating brand awareness and getting people to take the actions you want.
Narrowing that down, SEO copywriting is the craft of writing content, pages and articles for a site with the aim of achieving the highest possible ranking on search engines — the ultimate goal being to place what you’ve written first on Google, and on search engines generally.
There are rules and SEO techniques, SEO writing techniques, that have to be followed to do SEO copywriting properly.
Ready to learn them and become a successful SEO copywriter?
Here they are!
Keyword research
An SEO copywriter’s work always starts with keyword research. It’s the most important part of the whole SEO copywriting process. Everything else can be done imperfectly, but get this wrong — or fail to pay attention to it — and none of the rest counts for anything.
Why is keyword research the most important part? Because it’s what lets you identify the focus keyword (the main keyword), the secondary keywords and the related keywords.
Finding the focus keyword
Once you’ve settled on the topic you want to write about, the first job is to find the focus keyword the article and the SEO copywriting strategy will be built around.
Say you want to write an article on “writing SEO content”. The first thing to do is go to SEMrush or Google Ads and look up the search volumes for the keywords that might be useful for the piece.
You might look up the volumes for:
- SEO copywriting –> 480 searches / month
- copywriting SEO –> 10 searches / month
- SEO writing –> 140 searches / month
- web copywriting –> 140 searches / month
From that research it’s clear the keyword SEO copywriting has the most searches per month, so that’s the main keyword to build the article around.
Image from semrush.com
Finding the secondary keywords
Once you have the focus keyword (FK), it’s time to find the secondary keywords.
How? Here SEO tools come to the rescue. One of the best is certainly SEMrush: enter the focus keyword and the related keywords section gives you a list of every keyword you could use in the text you’re about to write.
Going back to our example, with “SEO copywriting” as the focus, SEMrush returns a list of 31 secondary keywords:
copywriting seo, what is seo copywriting, seo copywriter, seo writing, seo text, seo articles, what is copywriting, web copywriting, seo writing, copywriting course, technical copywriter, copywriting for the web, copywriting definition, what is a copywriter, what a copywriter does, google content, what is seo, copywriter meaning, a text, seo rules, seo language, becoming an seo, seo techniques, online copywriting, marketing copywriter, web seo, web writing, google page optimization, writing for the web, seo and keywords, seo content.
As you’ll notice, some of these aren’t closely related to our focus keyword and some are unusable in our text. Plenty of them, though, fit easily and belong in the content we’re going to write.
Finding the related keywords
Once you have the primary keyword and the secondary keywords, the next step in our SEO copywriting work is finding the related keywords.
How? Very simply — we let the search engine help us. We let Google help us!
- Open an incognito window;
- Type your focus keyword into the search bar;
- Scroll to the bottom, where you’ll find the “Searches related to SEO copywriting” section
Image from google.co.uk
As you can see there are 8 results, and you should try to work these related keywords into the text you’re about to write:
- SEO copywriting course
- what is SEO copywriting
- SEO copywriting books
- SEO copywriting PDF
- SEO copywriting guide
- freelance SEO copywriter
- SEO copywriter jobs
- online SEO copywriting course
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The page title
The page title matters enormously in an SEO copywriting strategy. It’s one of the first things Google and the other search engines (or rather their spiders and crawlers) analyse.
The page title should open with the exact focus keyword, followed by a second part explaining what the reader will find in the article. It would be excellent if that second part could carry a related keyword.
In our case, for example, the title we chose is:
“SEO copywriting: how to write an SEO-optimized article”
A reminder that the page title is an H1 (we’ll come back to this in the section on headings).
SEO writing: the structure of the article
Doing SEO copywriting well means following a paragraph structure in which the section headings are marked up as H headings.
What H headings are
HTML offers several types of heading, each carrying a different SEO weight.
The headings available are: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, where H1 (which is also the page title) is the most important, descending to H6, the least.
Anything you put inside a heading gains importance in the eyes of Google and the other search engines. So always try to work the primary keyword, the secondary keywords or the related keywords into your headings.
Apart from the H1, which is the page title, the ones used most are H2 and H3; the others are almost never used.
Paragraph structure
So, as we said, aim for a paragraph structure defined by H headings.
Here’s an example structure:
- H1 (the article title)
- H2 (as many as we like)
- H3 (as many as we like)
- H3
- H2
- H3
- H3
- H2
- H2 (as many as we like)
As you can see, inside the H1 there are several H2s, each of which contains H3s.
The H1 should be used only once (it’s the article title), even though Google has said you can use more than one; for H2 and H3 there’s no limit — it depends on the structure and on what you want to say in your article.
Choosing your sections: competitor analysis
But what do you write inside those sections? You have to define your SEO copywriting strategy.
One very effective method is to search Google for your focus keyword. Once you’ve run the search, open the pages that come up in the SERP and see what the top 10 competitors are covering.
Note down the topics you can then use to decide what to write about and how to structure your sections.
PS — do not copy the content! Take inspiration only, or you’ll be penalized.
SEO copywriting: how to write for SEO
Now to the heart of it. So far we’ve covered things slightly outside the content itself; now let’s talk about how to write SEO content.
Which SEO rules do you follow to try to rank a piece of content on the first page of the search engines?
Here are the main points to weigh for SEO copywriting done properly.
Placing the keyword
Placing keywords in the text is one of the most important parts of SEO copywriting. Let’s look at how SEO copywriters use them.
How many keywords to include
The main keyword goes in as often as possible — without forcing anything, and with common sense throughout.
The right density for the main keyword (keyword density) is around 1.8–2% of the text. If your site runs on WordPress with Yoast SEO installed, you can check this very easily.
Above that percentage you risk keyword stuffing. Some SEOs argue you can go higher; to my mind there’s no sense in forcing it beyond the figure I’ve given.
The secondary keywords and related keywords go into the text too. As a rough guide, one or two mentions each — though it depends on the length of the text.
Where to place keywords
Keyword density should be higher at the start of the page, at the start of headings, at the start of paragraphs and so on. This is the effect known as prominence: Google gives more weight to what’s written at the start of the page, of headings, of paragraphs.
Another thing to weigh is working the secondary keywords and related keywords into the H headings (H1, H2, H3 and so on), remembering that thanks to prominence they should come at the start of the heading.
An example.
If the keyword we want to place is “SEO copywriting”, it’s better to write:
“SEO copywriting: how to write an optimized article”
rather than:
“Writing an optimized article: discover SEO copywriting”
Because in the first example “SEO copywriting” sits at the start of the heading.
The same holds for the start of the page (what you write higher up matters more than what’s further down) and the start of paragraphs (what you write at the start of a paragraph carries more weight).
Another idea worth understanding in SEO copywriting is proximity — how close keywords sit to one another. Two or more keywords close together in the text reinforce each other, lending authority to all the neighbouring keywords and making the content more effective from an SEO point of view.
The last idea to cover is consistency. The keywords, and above all the focus keyword, have to be distributed across the whole length of the text. It can’t appear at the start and then be forgotten until the end. It has to be spread evenly through the text, with a natural weighting towards the opening.
Using bold
Bold is there to give a keyword importance. When Google sees a word in bold, it treats it as an important word within the text.
The primary keyword always goes in bold, from start to finish, while the secondary and related keywords may or may not.
How do you decide?
If you’re writing an article built around the focus keyword — if your only goal is to rank the primary keyword — then don’t bold the related and secondary ones.
If instead you’re writing a comprehensive article or page and want to rank for as many keywords as possible, then bold the secondary and related keywords too.
If for aesthetic reasons you need bold on a word that’s neither the focus keyword nor a related or secondary one, you can — but swap the bold for <b> in the code.
How?
When you apply bold, the code looks like this: <strong>SEO copywriting</strong>. On the front end you see: SEO copywriting.
What you do is replace <strong> with <b>. In the code you’ll then see <b>SEO copywriting</b>, while on the front end it still looks like: SEO copywriting.
Thanks to this SEO trick you get the bold on your site, while Google reads it as ordinary text.
Google has weighed in on this and said that <strong> and <b> have come to be treated the same way. I’m still convinced <b> carries less weight than <strong>.
Free to use image from google.co.uk
How to write
How you write depends, obviously, on the kind of service or product you offer.
What you generally notice is that informal writing, addressing the reader directly, works better than something more formal.
Clearly there are sectors and products where informal communication isn’t an option.
Length of the text
How long should a text optimized for SEO copywriting be?
Views differ, and plenty of SEO experts and SEO copywriters disagree. After a number of tests I’ve run personally, I believe the longer the article, the easier it is to rank.
Articles under 800 words certainly struggle to rank, and to me they aren’t articles at all but something closer to a social post.
The articles that rank best run over 1,500 words. For competitive keywords especially, articles have to be very long to rank easily — I’d say between 3,000 and 5,000 words.
My advice would be to always write articles of at least 1,000 words.
External links
External links matter a great deal in an SEO copywriting strategy and belong in every article. That’s because an external link connects your article or page to other content on the web, giving Google a signal about the topic you’re covering.
The sites you link to have to be chosen carefully:
- try to link to sites covering the same topics, or ones connected in some way to what you’re writing about;
- link to authoritative sites;
- don’t link to sites that lack authority or are subject to penalties. Link to a penalized site and you risk a penalty yourself.
If a site isn’t authoritative and isn’t related to the topics we cover but we need to include it anyway, it has to carry the “nofollow” attribute.
One tool that helps you judge a site’s authority is the MozBar, an app that plugs straight into Chrome. You can download it here. The MozBar shows a statistic telling you how trustworthy the site you’re browsing is.
Internal links
Internal links are fundamental to SEO copywriting too, because they tell Google which page you consider important for the keyword you use as anchor text.
For instance, among the articles in our SEO Academy we’ve written one about the “301 redirect”. I want to tell Google that if a user searches for the keyword “301 redirect”, the page I’d like shown is this one: https://euwebagency.com/academy/redirect-301/.
How do you do that? Simply link the anchor text “301 redirect” to the page, like this: 301 redirect.
We’ll do the same with the keyword “SEO copywriting”. If you go to the other Academy articles and find the keyword “SEO copywriting”, it will be linked to the page you’re reading now.
Images
Placing images in the text is a fundamental part of SEO copywriting and of the SEO copywriter’s job.
The problem is that Google doesn’t recognise an image visually — it reads it as code. So the image has to be named properly, because that’s exactly where Google looks.
The image you upload to the page should be named with one of the keywords (focus, secondary or related) and must carry an ALT attribute.
In this article, for instance, if you check you’ll find images named “SEO copywriting” whose ALT is the same keyword. You’ll also find images named “SEO copywriter”, “SEO writing” and so on.
The more images the better — without overdoing it, as always.
SEO copywriting: related work
Some jobs aren’t strictly part of SEO copywriting but are often asked of SEO copywriters.
Let’s go through them.
How to write a proper URL
Choosing the page URL matters a great deal in your SEO copywriting strategy.
The URL has to contain the focus keyword, and in 99% of cases it should be exactly the main keyword.
In our case the page URL will be: https://euwebagency.com/academy/seo-copywriting.
As you can see, the article sits inside the Academy section of our site and carries exactly the main keyword.
Remember: the shorter and more specific the URL, the more weight it carries in Google’s eyes.
What do I mean by that?
That if the URL had been “https://euwebagency.com/academy/seo-academy/seo-copywriting”, the article would have carried less weight, because it sits inside a second folder.
If the URL had been https://euwebagency.com/seo-copywriting, the article would have carried more weight, being connected directly to the site’s root (https://euwebagency.com/).
So why didn’t we use that structure for our article?
Because we decided internally that everything to do with the Academy has to live under the /academy folder.
So weigh the structure and what you put in the URL carefully, according to your SEO copywriting needs and your business’s strategic choices.
SEO title
Writing the SEO title — which is a different thing from the page title — is fundamental, and it’s very often asked of the SEO copywriter, who then has to supply an SEO title for the page or article they’ve written.
To find out more, go to the lesson –> SEO Title
Meta description
Everything above applies to the meta description as well.
To find out more, go to the lesson –> Meta Description
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered SEO copywriting. You now have what you need to write excellent SEO-optimized content.
Follow this guidance and you’ll certainly become a successful SEO copywriter.
But is that enough to rank a page first on Google? Sadly not…
SEO copywriting is only one part of an SEO strategy. To rank a page well, particularly for difficult keywords, you also have to think about other factors: the number of backlinks, the site’s authority, the page’s authority and the others we’ve covered and will keep covering in the lessons ahead.
Stay tuned and keep following us — in the next lessons of the SEO Academy we’ll get into plenty more interesting territory…
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