6 important SEO considerations for marketing copywriting

In the world of online marketing, your content is your sales person and your calling card. Your web content is what gets you found online, builds trust with your readers, educates and informs them, leads to conversions and sustains ongoing, mutually-beneficial relationships with loyal customers.

But for content to be really useful, online marketers must think like SEO professionals to ensure that the content reaches the right audience at the right time. To ensure that your content is being ranked for the right words, we have listed here some critical SEO considerations to include so that your marketing copywriting is both compelling and search engine-friendly.

1. Well defined target audience and tone of content

In all SEO activities, content is king. However, your attempt to optimize the content for search engines will backfire if it contains no message for your target audience. Don’t create content simply for the search engines. Start by defining your target audience and the appropriate tone that would get the message across. For instance, if you are writing for the IT industry, the tone should be clear and concise with no room for ambiguity in meaning. Then again website content pages can be more formal but you can adopt a more informal tone for blogs.

As you define your target audience, you must also think from their perspective. Remember, you are writing for them, so the content needs to be focussed on them. Only then will you be able to optimize that content for the keywords you want to get found by in the search.

2. Keyword research

Conduct keyword research to confirm your intuition about their topics of interest. For this, you can use Google’s Keyword Tool. Type in a word or phrase you think you should target and the tool will return a list of recommended results and suggestions. These keywords will help you define your game plan or confirm what you have already defined to achieve clickthrough rate. You can also compare traditional metrics like the search volume and competitiveness of a term.

3. Branding nuances

While creating website content and copy, do try to maintain a well-defined and consistent brand. Establish how to approach words specific to your particular brand such as your company name, names of product lines, services, and individual products. For instance, if your business name is capitalized, make sure it is capitalized throughout the copy.

4. Content formatting

The copy of your website pages and blogs should be reader-friendly and should include images, headers and subheaders. Copywriters can use specific keywords in these headers for higher rankings. Similarly, all of your links should use strong anchor text for the keywords or phrases you are trying to rank. Make sure you provide your copywriters with all the resources they need such as your inhouse style guide to succeed with SEO.

5. Copy editors

Share your content with a copy editor to review for inconsistencies and errors. Find a copy editor who is eagle-eyed and supremely detail-oriented, and have him/her review everything you write before you publish it, no matter how seemingly small or inconsequential.

6. Content calendar

Consistency of language is important – the same holds true for the timings of when you publish. Studies show that early morning publishing times, Monday through Thursday, work best. Also remember that search engine crawlers return to your site on a regular basis. If they find new content, they will index it. If there is no new content – you lose out.

The more consistently you publish quality content the more consistently those crawlers will come back to check for new content and other general updates. So develop an editorial calendar or some sort of publishing schedule to help you publish regularly. Easier said than done? In today’s competitive environment, if you are time-challenged, you can hire the services of copywriters in India to create marketing copy, blogs, articles and web content to engage your audience and keep the web spiders happy.