Copywriting for SEO

Hi everyone, this video is all about copywriting for SEO.

I don’t know about you, but I absolutely dread getting into conversations at business networking events with people who find out that I’m a copywriter and instantly think it’s their moral duty to make sure I know absolutely everything there is to know about SEO.

It is so annoying!!!

Because while SEO is important, it for damn sure is not the end-all, be-all of online success.

One of my favorite ways to think about SEO, is a way Rand Fishkin talks about it—if you haven’t heard him talk about it, he’s got his presentation called something like SEO in a two-algorithm world.

One algorithm is based upon the traditional SEO—the metadata, the kind of stuff all those annoying people think will give you online success, even if your website and business absolutely suck.

This traditional SEO is important because it’s what we use to tell the search engines what our websites and webpages are all about. Without this type of SEO, we wouldn’t get any kind of organic traffic at all whatsoever… which isn’t good. So, we do need it.

But the second type of SEO he talks about doesn’t have anything to do with metadata. Instead, it’s all about how users interact with your site and the kind of data search engines are able to pick up on based on that.

For example, if your site ranks for the keyword “budget hotels in the US”, but people bounce off the webpage less than two seconds after they click through to it, the search engines will notice, and it doesn’t matter how much work you’ve put into your metadata.

So if your competitor’s website ranks lower for that same keyword, but people spend five minutes on their side after they click through, the search engines are going to notice that too. And even if they’ve done less metadata work, they’re going to start out-ranking you pretty quickly.

You want to make sure you’re out-ranking competitors on search engines because search engine traffic tends to have a really high purchase intent. If someone is actively searching for something, it means a they care enough about that something to take action on it. So you do one that search engine traffic coming to your website.

Today’s video is not going to be aimed at SEO geniuses—so if you’re already really good at SEO and you understand how to do it and how to do it well, this video might seem a little basic for you.

And it’s going to be a little bit different of a video than I normally publish, because I’m not going to switch my screen and show you me live editing websites.

Instead, I’m going to give you 4 tips that you can implement starting right now to make sure that 1) your on-page SEO metadata is on track to get traffic from the search engines and that 2) it blends in well with your existing copywriting so you don’t come across as one of those really annoying people trying to do business online in the wrong way by using way too many obvious keywords on your site… because that just turns people off.

1) The first thing I want you to do is take the dates off of your blog posts.

I know this doesn’t seem like it has anything to do with SEO, but it does. The next 20 do a Google search on anything, notice how most results have a day underneath them, but some of them don’t.

The ones that do not have the date listed remain evergreen, and therefore carry more weight because they’re not seen as dated or old.

2) The second thing I want you to do,  especially if you’re an individual service provider, is create a page on your website dedicated to your name.

If people want to hire your services, they will Google you. I’ve only recently done this for my own site, but I realized how important it was to brand myself in the search engines this way when I became confused with another Chelsea Baldwin who is, I don’t know, a property lawyer or something in Washington state.

Yeah, definitely not me.

But if somehow people don’t know what I look like, I can easily be confused with her.

It doesn’t have to be anything major or serious, it can just be something you have a lot of fun with—as long as your name is in the page title, the URL, in H2 headlines, and appears a handful times throughout the page.

If you want to see mine, you can go to get getcopypower.com/Chelsea–Baldwin. It’s a little silly, but that fits my brand, and it isn’t my about page or anything, and it isn’t even in my main navigation menu.

3) Finally I want you to install Yoast.

It’s a free plugin for WordPress, and it’s absolutely wonderful.

Instead of me boring you with talk about keyword frequency, web snippets, H2 headlines, Page titles, URLs, and so on, you can just download and install this plug-in, and for every single page you have on your website, you choose which keyword you want to optimize it for.

You type that keyword into Yoast, it reads all the information and metadata on the page, and tells you what you’re missing.

So if I’m optimizing a webpage for the phrase “copywriting tutorial” and I’ve got everything covered as far as URL, H2 headline, title, and keyword frequency, but I’ve added an image and forgot to optimize that image’s metadata with this keyword, Yoast will tell me, and I can go back and add it.

It’s seriously the easiest thing ever to use, and it’s changed my world since I started using it on my website. I get so much more organic traffic now, and I don’t consider myself an SEO metadata genius.

So make sure you add that to your site.

The last three tips have been all about metadata. But this next one we’ll be about making sure your SEO copywriting is up to scratch and that people who come to your site will actually want to interact with you, giving signals to the search engines that your webpages are worthwhile to searchers, which will help boost your rankings.

And that tip is…..

4) Watch my videos and read my blog!

Sorry I couldn’t resist, but I am actually serious.

The videos here are only a few minutes long each, but they’re very useful in showing you real, live examples of how to optimize your on site hooks and headlines to make sure people stay interested and what you’re saying and keep scrolling down to learn more about whatever it is you’re talking about.

So that’s a really easy way to start making sure your SEO copywriting makes the grade.

On the Copy Power blog, I talk very in-depth about reverse engineering copywriting to make sure every single headline, sub-headline, paragraph, and call to action you write is specifically crafted to your ideal customer.

This means that when a prospect comes to your website, they don’t get bored with you and click off.

Things that I share over there will really help you pick out ways to make your website be the website in your industry that your prospects remember. With the way the Internet is, we forget almost every single thing we see and read online. It’s natural because there’s no possible way we can remember it all.

But some of it we do remember. And you can make your website one of the things your prospects will remember and will talk about if you implement the copywriting tactics and strategies that I teach on the blog.

When your prospects come to your site and are spending lots of time on it, are constantly coming back to it and visiting it again, and are referring loads of other traffic to it, you can bet the search engines will take notice, and your SEO will improve because of it… I promise.

I hope out of those four tips, you come away with at least one takeaway you can start implementing on your website today.

If you thought this very was helpful, and you feel like your copywriting for SEO will improve from one of the things that I said, it’d be great if you could share this on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

Also make sure to hit “subscribe” because even though this video is about copywriting for social media, I’ll have other videos coming out that will help you with more specific things for your website and online presence—no matter what your type of business is.

And if you want even more tips on how to improve your conversions right now, I’ve got a link to my free e-book in the description below. It talks about five hacks I use on the landing pages I write to decrease bounce rates and increase conversion rates, which I think is something we all can use.

Thank you for watching! See you around!