This complete guide to SEO copywriting shows you how to study keywords and how to write in different stages. It will also help you write pieces that are easy to read and good for SEO. And last but not least, we’ll tell you about the difficulties of making SEO content for sites that are used in different countries. This guide will help SEO freelancers and agencies to provide better SEO services to their clients.
This writing guide for SEO material goes over the following:
List of what’s inside
Copywriting for SEO and all-around SEO
All-around SEO
Make the best copy you can!
Writing SEO copy in the age of self-learning AI
Before you start writing, you should always do keyword study.
1. Write down your goal.
2. Make a list of related keywords
3. Check the search’s goal.
4. Make landing pages for people who look.
How to write a story in three steps
Step 1 of writing is getting your copy ready.
The point of your writing and what you’re looking for
Text structure
Writing your text is the second step in the writing process.
Simply write!
Keep your text’s organisation in mind.
Make sure that your writing can be read.
Several ways to make your work better
Take a break every so often.
Editing your text is the third step in writing for SEO.
Step 1: Slowly and aloud read
Step 2: Pay attention to words
Step 3: Pay attention to lines
Step 4: Make sure the text makes sense
Step 5: Ask for feedback
Yoast SEO should be used.
Writing SEO copy for sites in other countries
SEO copywriting is a step-by-step process.
We do what we call “holistic SEO” at Yoast. Our number one goal should be to make and keep THE BEST website possible. Google will find it easier to rank your site if it is of very high quality and has unique, helpful content. Google does this because it wants to give users what they want. Their goal is to collect all the information in the world and make it available to everyone.
Google also wants to make money, but in order to do that, they have to show people the results they want. If they don’t, people will stop using Google. We can all agree that Google wants to show the best results to people. Google wants to put your website high in the results if it is the best in its niche.
How does SEO copywriting work?
SEO copywriting is one of the best ways to get ahead of the competition. By making high-quality content that is carefully optimised for search engines and tailored to the needs and interests of their target audience, people can increase their visibility, drive more organic traffic to their website, and eventually increase their revenue.
It’s like the perfect mix of art and science, where a little creative flair and strategic optimisation techniques can do wonders for your online profile. SEO copywriting can help you do well in the search result pages, whether you’re a small business just starting out or a large company trying to take over your market.
All-around SEO
Holistic SEO is a way to make the best website in a niche market by using marketing techniques from many different fields. To do this, your website’s technical design should be great, its user experience (UX) should be perfect, and all of its security needs should be met. But what’s most important is that the information on your website is well-written, marketed well, and aimed at the people your website is for. This method needs SEO writing skills that are pretty advanced.
Want to know everything about SEO copywriting? As part of Yoast SEO Academy Premium, our SEO copywriting training will teach you how to write copy that ranks!
Make the best copy you can!
The writing on your site should be easy to read if you want it to be the best in your field. You should change and fine-tune your text to meet the needs of search engines without sacrificing the quality of your SEO content. SEO copywriting is a lot like writing anything else. It’s hard work, and some of us will always be better writers than others. We can’t all be Ernest Hemingway, but with some training, anyone can learn how to write better SEO copy.
Read more: 5 tips for writing blog posts that are easy to read
Writing SEO copy in the age of self-learning AI
Generative AI is like a machine that can easily make SEO-friendly material. It can be taught to look at buzzwords and other factors to come up with new content and improve what’s already there. But we shouldn’t forget that the human touch is still important to make sure that the content created is of good quality, has no mistakes in facts, and is relevant to a target audience.
Because of how their technology is built, creative AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Google Bard can’t give you original writing yet, but they are very good at using things that are already out there. Still, it can’t think of things on its own.
In the future, AI that can create content will be a useful tool for making SEO content. But it’s important to use it wisely and make sure the material fits with your brand’s guidelines and the needs of your target audience. Please be smart about how you use creative AI. Use AI as a guide, but don’t let it make all of your content for you.
Before you start writing, you should always do keyword study.
The first step of writing for SEO doesn’t have much to do with writing. First, you have to choose what you will write about. What do you want people to find you for? You have to use the keywords you want to rank for in your copy, so the first step of SEO copywriting is to do keyword study. You do keyword study to make a list of the words and phrases you want to rank for.
The three steps that make up good keyword study are:
1. Write down your goal.
Think about your goal statement before you start researching keywords. This is what sets you apart from everyone else. Think about who you are and what your blog is about as you write your goal statement. What makes it unique? Spend some time thinking about and writing down your goal statement. Read our post on how to write a mission statement for your website to learn more about how to make a mission statement.
2. Make a list of related keywords
When you have a clear goal statement, you can start making a list of all the search terms (keywords) you want people to use to find your website. If you know what you want to do, you should be able to come up with search terms that fit your niche market and what makes you stand out. These are the words you want people to use to find you.
To come up with good words, you need to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. How will they probably find you? What would they use Google to look for? At the end of your keyword study, you should have a list of all the relevant search terms that people might use. Think about how these words could be used together or in different ways. You can also do keyword study with the help of tools. For example, Yoast SEO works with the Semrush tool for researching similar keywords. After making a list, it might be hard to choose which keyphrase to use. If so, check out our post on how to choose the right focus term.
Write a summary.
In the end, you should have a good picture, which will help you a lot with SEO copywriting. To sum up the information, it helps to make a table of your buzzwords. Try to come up with mixtures of keywords, and then put the keywords in order of how important they are. Which keywords are most important and closest to your goal statement? Which ones are less important? When deciding which keywords to focus on, you should also think about how likely it is that your pages will rank for that term. At first, it can be a good idea to focus on keywords that aren’t as popular and don’t have as much competition. If you want to learn more about why you should focus on long-tail keywords, please read our posts about why you should focus on them.
3. Check the search’s goal.
People’s questions should be at the centre of most SEO tactics these days. When someone uses a search tool to look for something, they are on a quest. There are four kinds of goals people can have when they
Informational goal: to learn more about a certain subject.
The goal of navigation is to use a search engine to find a specific website.
With a business goal: to buy something soon and do study before buying.
After doing their business-related searches, they want to buy something.
During your keyword study, you need to find out what kinds of search intent your keywords match and try to match these search intents. You can use the search results to figure out what your keywords are about and then make great content that matches this. Your writing style should also change depending on what you want to say. We’ll talk more about this later in this guide.
4. Make landing pages for people who look.
The last step of keyword study is to make great posts or pages for the keywords you want to be found for. SEO content should be made to draw people who found your blog by searching for a certain keyword. This could be a page or blog post that is specifically made for a certain term. Make sure people can find their way around your blog using the menu or internal links. And make sure that every important keyword you think of has its own page.
If you’ve found a good format for these kinds of posts or pages, you can use Yoast Duplicate Post to use that format for similar sites. It lets you copy a post and quickly fill it with the content for your page and this is effective in WordPress SEO.
Your keyword study will help you decide what to write about on your blog. Then, you’ll have to find material that has to do with a certain word. But a word is not a subject. Along with a keyword (or keyphrase), you’ll need an angle, or a story that centres on that keyword. If you want to learn more, read our tips on how to come up with ideas for your blog.
How to write a story in three steps
SEO copywriting starts when you decide what you want to write about or what story you want to tell. Three steps make up the SEO writing process: planning, writing, and fixing (or editing).
Step 1 of writing is getting your copy ready.
The first step in actually writing SEO copy is to plan your piece. Take some time to think about what you want to write before you put pen to paper (or fingers to computer). You should already have an idea of what you want to write about, but before you start writing, you should also be able to answer the following questions:
Why are you writing this article? Why do you want to write? What are you trying to do?
What will your post’s main point be? What’s the main thing you want to find out?
Who are you writing for? What do they want to find?
What do you need to know to be able to write your piece?
How will you put your facts together? How is your piece going to be put together?
In our post about getting ready to write a blog post, you can read all about how to answer these questions in a clear and correct way.
The point of your writing and what you’re looking for
The first question on the list is, “What is your article’s purpose?” You need to think about this ahead of time because it will affect how you write your piece. Do you want to tell people something? Laugh at them? Or get them to do something on your site? During the planning step, you should also think about what your visitor wants. If your keyword study shows that the goal of a certain search is to get information, you should write a page for that keyword that is focused on making sales and is convincing. If so, that might be a better match. This will be fine, of course, if you’ve thought about your keyword approach.
In any case, you should think about what your reader wants before you start writing, because a book meant to inform is different from one meant to persuade. When you write an informative text, you should use clear, focused language. On the other hand, when you write a persuasive text, you should use very positive language that focuses more on the reader. Texts that are funny use slang, humour, or exaggerations.
Continue reading to find out why the goal of your text matters for SEO
Text structure
Setting up the structure of your piece is an important part of making a plan for it. When writing for SEO, the way the text on your site is organised is very important. If the structure of your information is clear, you have a better chance of doing well on Google. Mind-mapping is a way to help you understand a subject and find links between its different parts.
Before you start writing, you should think about how your piece will be put together. Since the structure is the backbone of your text, it will help the reader understand what the key points are.
Your site’s conversion rate will also go up if your posts and pages have a clear framework. If your visitors understand what you are saying, they are more likely to buy your goods or come back to your website. Read our post about how to make a clear blog post structure for tips on how to set up the structure of a piece of writing.
Generative AI can help you organise your material and explain what it’s about.
You shouldn’t use AI like ChatGPT to make full articles for you instantly. You can use them to learn more about a subject, understand it better, and get ideas. AI that can make things up can also help structure words, like:
Automating content outlines:
Generative AI can make suggestions for content outlines based on the theme or keywords that have been found. This can help you write articles, blog posts, and other kinds of material by giving you a structure for the text and advice on how to write it.
Finding key phrases and topics:
Generative AI can look at a lot of data to find key phrases or topics that come up often in a certain field. This can help you include important information in your content and organise it so that it tells a story or follows a theme.
Content suggestions: Generative AI can suggest related content that you can use to arrange your writing. It can look at the content that is already there and find other information that is connected to the topic at hand.
Generative AI can help with writing by making suggestions about sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation. This makes it easier to write well-structured content. This can help you make good, easy-to-read information that is easier for people to connect with.
Formatting and style suggestions:
This feature can help you plan your content and make it as engaging as possible for users by suggesting the best structure for the type of content that needs to be made.
You can use these helpful features to make high-quality, well-optimized content that gets more traffic and engagement, but be critical and keep the human touch in mind.
Writing your text is the second step in the writing process.
At this stage of SEO copywriting, the most important tip is to just write. People often find it hard to write the first line (or paragraph). But at this point, you don’t have to write that first line. Just write a few words about what should be in the first paragraph, and then start writing the second one. After you’ve written the main part of your post, it’s easier to write the beginning and end.
If a line is wrong or sounds strange, keep going and don’t worry about it. The next step, editing, is where you can change these things. During the writing phase, it’s important to stay in the flow of writing.
Keep your text’s organisation in mind.
When you’re writing, use the structure you made in the planning part as a plan for how to write the paragraphs. Make sure your lines are easy to understand. Start each paragraph with the most important line, then explain or expand on it. Just by reading the first sentence of each paragraph, your readers will be able to get a sense of what is most important in your piece.
Make sure that your writing can be read.
Reading from a screen is hard, so if you want people to read your whole blog post, you need to make it easy to read. If your posts are easy to read, more people will come back and your conversion rate will go up. Most importantly, make sure that your text is written for the right target.
Read our post on how to make blog posts easier to read and our post on how to improve the layout of your blog to learn more about how to write text that is easy to understand. These tips will help you improve how you write SEO copy.
Several ways to make your work better
Some people are natural writers and don’t need SEO copywriting tips because they can write an interesting, fun, and easy-to-read piece in a few minutes. Some don’t have that skill. But while it takes ability to write well, practise definitely helps! Let’s look at some ways to improve the way you write and two different ways to write.
Read a lot of books!
If you want to write in an interesting way, you should read a lot. Reading books, blogs, magazines, or anything else will give you ideas for good pieces. You’ll learn how other people put together their words and paragraphs. It shows you how to use humour and play with words. Plus, it lets you get a feeling for what makes a piece easy to read. If you want to learn more about how to improve your writing style, you can read our blog post about how to get a good style.
The form of an upside-down pyramid
The inverted pyramid is a well-known way to write in news. It means that you put the most important information at the top. You don’t hide the main point in the middle of the third paragraph. Instead, you tell the whole story in the first paragraph. You can, of course, say more in the lines that follow. But your main point is clear right away. Some types of pieces work pretty well with this style of writing. It’s especially useful now that more and more people use web material to find answers to any question they might have.