A beginner’s guide to writing SEO copy

If you have a basic understanding of SEO, you’ll know that how Google reads your website is a key factor in how well a page will be crawled, indexed, and ranked on the SERP. We don’t have time to cover that in detail here so be sure to read our article on how search engines work if you want to understand crawling and indexing more.

Simply put, you quite literally need content in order for any page to rank in a search engine. Without content, the search engine will simply deem a page as uninformative and therefore not worth indexing for users.

With the right informative content combined with some SEO know-how, you’ll be able to get your pages ranking on Google, meaning more organic traffic, and more sales if you run an eCommerce site. And you want that organic traffic as it shows how good the quality of your work is.

So, what are these SEO elements that go into writing SEO copy?

All written content strategies begin with two things. Ideas and keyword research. These two factors work hand-in-hand to create content that will rank well on Google. You need to know what people are searching for so you can target these words, but you also need new ideas for original content.

Before going any deeper, let’s touch on what keywords actually are. On a surface level, they’re specific words or phrases used by search engine users when making a query to find information, and Google uses these to help pages rank where the relevant info appears.

In essence, they help Google to identify what search terms are most used by users and provide them with content that matches these terms. This means you want to include these words and phrases when writing SEO copy so that your page ranks.

For example, if you had the keyword ‘what is SEO content writing?’, you would want to include this keyword a few times in your copy so that you ‘rank’ for this phrase in a search.

There’s plenty to learn about finding and collecting keywords so be sure to read our beginner’s guide to keyword research.

Now, let’s touch on site structure. While not wholly related to writing SEO copy, good site structure is still necessary so Google, or any search engine for that matter, can crawl your site. Good content won’t do anything if Google can’t read the page.

When it comes to site layout and structure, it’s recommended that you opt for a pyramid shape. Start with the home page at the top, then categories, then subcategories, and so on and so forth.

Of course, if you already have a website built, or are more likely writing for one, then you have to get a little more creative. There are a few tricks you can use to help Google navigate a page, one of the most important being internal linking.

Internal linking is where you add a link to an important page you want to rank inside the copy on a page. Firstly, this makes it easier for content to be crawled as you’re providing the search engine with more links to follow, and if a page is linked to multiple times, it hints to Google how important it is for this content to be indexed.

This process is also known as linking from tail to head, and you should always be referring to pages you want to rank with links. However, these links need to make sense, and you should always try and link a page using anchor text, text that matches a page’s URL, in some capacity.

By linking to the pages you want Google to rank highest, you’ll create a bedrock for your ranking structure with authoritative pages that will rank because of the linking structure created.

While the previous two points we’ve covered are important, when it really comes down to it, the quality of your written content is what matters the most. Your copy needs to be attractive to read and make people want to stay on your website, while also appealing to Google.

But there’s more to it than that. You can’t simply write your copy with some keywords thrown in and expect it to start ranking immediately. It’s no good having an optimised piece if it reads badly.

You’ll need to consider ideas generation, keyword research, heading structure, readability, and final optimisation checks before your copy is ready to be published.

When it comes to SEO copy, you want to be creating original content. The last thing you want to do is plagiarise the work of others. Not only is this morally wrong and potentially illegal, but Google can also pick up on it and punish you by not indexing your page.

However, it’s important to note that, by original content, we don’t mean something completely brand new that no one has covered. Original content simply refers to content that is written differently from other content. So long as it’s written in your style with your take, Google will register it as original content.

But as important as original content is, it’ll count for nothing if people aren’t interested in reading it. So, before you start generating any original content, you need to start thought dumping and researching.

Take whatever it is your company does or that you want to write about and start writing down ideas for a topic or content. Once you’ve got a list, you can start researching related keywords to see how viable each topic is. Soon, you’ll have a varied list of keywords related to each topic and you can start writing.

With your keywords to hand, your next step should be researching your chosen topic in relation to the keywords you have. Unless you’re an expert on the topic in question, you’re going to need to research it so you can answer the reader’s queries and provide quality content.

Once you’ve thoroughly researched the topic, you then need to think about your heading structure. It’s not as simple as having a title and then vomiting your copy onto the page, you need to have some order.

For example, if you’re writing a blog post, you only want a single H1, and then as many H2s as you need to cover each section of your topic. You can then dot H3s throughout the page when you need to split up the topics beneath an H2.

Not only will this make your content much more scannable and readable, something we’ll touch on in a moment, but it gives you a chance to put your keywords front and centre for Google to look at. Questions and lengthy keywords are the perfect choice for putting in headers.

With everything written and ready to be published, the last thing to discuss is to ensure your SEO copy is properly optimised.

First, while we’ve mentioned including keywords a lot in this article, you should not be trying to stuff in as many as possible. This is known as keyword stuffing and Google can see when you’re doing it. It won’t index the page if you do this, and it generally makes the content difficult to read.

Always put written quality ahead of optimisation so your content doesn’t read like trash. As we said right at the start, your keywords should be woven into your SEO copy, not the other way around.

When you’re thinking about where to put your keywords, limit yourself to using each one 2-3 times, depending on your copy’s length, to avoid overloading the content. And speaking of length.

Research has suggested that long-form content does really well on Google. Gone are the days of short 300-word pieces. Instead, you should aim for things like blog articles to be a minimum of 1,000 words.

Of course, this will differ if it’s a home page or a product page, which might be closer to 400 words, so use your intuition to estimate the number of keywords you should be using on a page.