copywriter – Creative Content

Are you worried about ranking behind your competitors when people do a Google search on your industry? You’re certainly not the only one! Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a crucial tool to put companies directly in front of their audience, first.

Optimised copy answers the search intent of your audience while remaining readable and natural. The days of simplistic Google algorithms to determine the ranking of search query pages are gone, but many old SEO myths are still going strong. The ranking system has become more intelligent and complex to display the most relevant and high-quality copy first.

If you are thinking about writing your own copy rather than using professional SEO copywriting services, we have prepared a list of tips for creating your own content.

DON’T keyword-stuff your copy

Many site owners believe that creating a relevant web page for a search query requires stuffing your copy to the brim with a target keyword as much as possible. Of course, your page needs to contain relevant target keywords, but sentence after sentence with the same word looks ridiculous and certainly makes for bad reading! Potential clients don’t respond to poor quality writing, and neither does Google.

DON’T write unnecessary copy.

It may seem that in order to cover all points of relevance to your audience, you have to write a lot of copy. Google does value in-depth copy, but you have to keep your audience in mind. Readers respond to compelling, well-thought-out text that gets to the point. If they see an overwhelming amount of copy, they might choose not to read it at all! Whether it’s a blog post or a landing page, make your copy comprehensive, succinct and genuinely enjoyable to read.

DON’T include hidden blocks of text with SEO keywords.

The ‘SEO trap’ is a common technique, but in truth, it is a waste of time and resources. The smarter Google gets, the more it values transparency!

DO take the time to understand your audience.

You can incorporate all the SEO techniques you like, but if your copy and entire website aren’t as relevant to your target audience as possible, you will not generate the traffic or leads you are hoping for.

To craft your website to your consumer, consider what they want from your product or service. What tone are they expecting? What problems are they looking to solve? What information do they need to see on your web page in order to make contact or hit the purchase button? The more you understand your consumer, the better you can create copy that satisfies the search queries they make, and therefore rank your website highly.

DO incorporate Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).

LSI keywords are semantically related to your main keyword. A lot of people think LSI keywords are synonyms. Synonyms are useful LSI keywords, but LSI incorporates all keywords frequently found together because they share the same context.

For example, ‘Apple’ and ‘iPhone’ and ‘smartphone’ are LSI keywords. However, ‘apple’, ‘juicy’ and ‘orchard’ are also LSI keywords; LSI ensures that the search query display shows pages relevant to the industry and topic your audience is looking for. Incorporating LSI, therefore, helps you better serve your user search intent.

Overtly stuffing your content with LSI keywords will, again, have you penalised by Google. Use them to help you rank, but do not let them interfere with the quality of your content. The idea of LSI is that you would naturally include the keywords as you write. You still need to create high-quality, well-written copy, but definitely with LSI keywords in mind.

Incorporating SEO into copy can take a lot of research and time – it’s completely normal to not know where to start! SEO research is particularly complex when it comes to small, niche (and therefore low search volume) businesses and products. To get it right first time and ensure the best results possible, you can bring in SEO and copy experts to optimise your site. At Creative Content, we use in-depth processes and techniques to make your site as ‘optimal’ as can be!

The Creative Content process:

As a professional web copy service provider, we make it our priority to create informative and inspiring website copy for our clients. We share our exact process for you so you can understand what is needed to complete a comprehensive plan for your business web content writing.

First, we need to understand your business including the services, the people and the company ethos. To do this we have developed a web copy questionnaire. Our goal is to understand what is unique about your business and the priorities of your potential clients. This helps us map your customer journey. We want to know how well-informed your customers are about your product or service before they visit your site, and what types of keywords you can think of that they would search to find you.

For particularly niche businesses, we have developed even more in-depth questionnaire to help web content writers create content specific to your very narrow audience. At this stage, we also do an analysis into the customer state of awareness about your product or service. For example; are your customers problem aware, but not solution aware? If so, we need to spend time explaining how your products solve their problem.

As part of our copywriting services, we use the questionnaires and work further alongside you to create the value proposition for your business. In essence, we identify why and how your customers would say ‘yes’ to your offer, and craft a succinct key message that often appears as a major heading on your home page, so readers are clear on the value of your business from the outset.

Armed with new knowledge about your business, we then utilise SEO software tools to generate target keywords and LSI keywords for you.

We follow proven structure elements that make your site easy to navigate and optimise it for search.

The ideal web copy structure

Headings that name the product in a way your target readers will understand.

Sub-headings briefly describing the benefit of the product to your market.

Summaries providing all essential information about your product. These have to be extremely well-crafted, as often people won’t read beyond summaries! The text needs to address the problem your product solves and why yours the best solution.

Quotes from you showing the human side of your company and the ethos behind your service.

Customer quotes describing how they experienced the benefits of your product – we help collect these testimonials.

Calls-to-action that encourage and provide avenues for readers to take the next step. In order to get more conversions, you need to get more potential customers to carry out a specific decision on your website. Usually, that action revolves around accepting an offer or contacting you.

We discuss our SEO copywriting strategy further here.

SEO copywriting is crucial to making your small business site as visible to your potential customers as possible. Correctly implemented techniques generate a surprising amount of traffic and leads for your website. You’ll be quickly convinced by the results of your new SEO strategy!

If you’d like to discuss SEO copywriting with us further, or find out how our professional copywriters can help you, get in touch with us.

Check out our other tips for small business marketing here.

The goal of copywriting is to persuade, and the goal of a content strategy is to create purpose. So, does a content strategist have the same role as a copywriter? The answer is no!

Over 170 million blogs are active online today, but it’s estimated only around 20% of blog content is actually linked to and read. You want content that is found easily in a search, is read by users, and has a positive impact for your business. It’s critical to the success of your marketing messages that you have a strategy for what you write about.

What does a content strategist do?

A content strategist gives your content a purpose and vision that is directly linked to your marketing and communications strategy. They ensure any copy written will be useful, usable, and relevant to achieving your marketing goals.

A content strategist blends their editorial skills with their understanding of the user experience to create content that is a communication pathway with purpose. Their focus is to generate copy that provides real value to your clients while showcasing your unique value proposition.

This requires an understanding of your business niche and your clients as well as thorough knowledge of the “decision-making journey” to map a content pathway to attract, onboard, and convert the audience.

Content strategists ultimately create an overall purpose to the copy, called the core strategy.

They put themselves in the shoes of each business owner and their audience to consider a website or marketing campaign. With these different perspectives they look at:

What are the business goals and how can the website copy or marketing campaign accomplish that?

Is the content pertinent to the audience?

What is the desired call to action for people to do after consuming this content?

How can we provide the best user experience?

What does a copywriter do?

Copywriters focus on crafting compelling copy that tells a story. They combine wit, writing skills, and empathy to create a call to action that will compel someone to purchase a product, sign up for a service, or fill out an inquiry form on a website.

A good copywriter understands sales funnels and will ask plenty of questions about their target audience before they start writing. Copywriters now handle most of the writing on a given website or within an integrated marketing campaign including:

Website copy

Blog posts

News articles

Press releases

eBooks

White papers

Billboard advertising

Posters

Flyers

Radio and TV scripts

Interactive social media posts

How can content strategists and copywriters work together?

A content strategist determines where the content needs to go, and then works with a copywriter to write the copy. After the content is published, the strategist will evaluate performance and make sure the strategy is delivering value to the business in line with its goals.

To put it simply, the content strategist defines how the site or campaign will be structured and what information will be included. The copywriter is responsible for crafting the actual words to engage users and drive them to those goals, getting them further into the conversion funnel.

When content strategy and copywriting have synergy, the result is a high-performance website or marketing campaign that helps you drive your business forward and stay relevant.

Are you trying to sell things over email but aren’t seeing results? Hire a copywriter. Don’t even know where to start your business content strategy? Hire a content strategist. Do you need both? Invest in a team like ours at Creative Content!

Tag: copywriter

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