Writing good, quality content is perhaps the single most important thing you can do for your website, and is a core part of any decent SEO strategy.
But writing “well” isn’t enough from an SEO perspective, you need to write relevant content. Search engines like Google consider how relevant your webpage is, and will rank it in search results accordingly.
There are three key steps to SEO copywriting:
- Research your keywords — which keywords do people search for, when trying to find content similar to yours?
- Pick the keywords you intend to focus on — this can be as many as 15 or as few as 1
- Write your content — put together your content, utilising your keywords throughout (but not too often!)
Simple, eh?
Here’s an example. Say you run a website, www.football-shirts.com, which sells football-themed t-shirts. You perform your keyword research, and identify a few simple words and phrases to use in your SEO campaign. These keywords are “football shirts”, “football clothing”, “footie shirts”, and “soccer shirts”. You’ve done your research, but you wonder: how often should I use these keywords in my website’s pages and articles?
What you’re asking about is called keyword density and, as explained in our glossary of SEO terms, it refers to how often a word or phrase appears in your writing; the percentage of your content that’s made up of your keyword. If you write a 1,000-word article, and your keyword appears 100 times, the keyword density would be 10%.
While there is no agreed-upon percentage, and search engines have never published any precise figures, it’s commonly said that a keyword density above 2–5% is likely to negatively affect a webpage’s search ranking, as it will be considered ‘keyword stuffing’.
So, you’ve researched your keywords, identified the keywords you’re going to use, and you understand you need to make use of these keywords throughout your writing. What other things can you do, from an SEO perspective, to improve your content?
The key, as any good SEO copywriter should know, is people. Your content needs to be engaging and it needs to captivate your intended audience.
When you write content, always bear your audience in mind, and remember to express yourself clearly but using simple, straightforward language.
The easier your text is to understand, the wider the potential audience.
You don’t need to write a masterpiece, but always avoid making the oh-so-common mistake of writing 10,000 words and inserting your keyword(s) every other sentence — nobody is going to want to read that! If you write engaging content with your audience always in mind, people are far more likely to interact with and explore your website further, share your content, and revisit your website at a later date.