While your human audience should always be your first priority, your copy also needs to speak to the search engines in a language they can understand.
A good online copywriter will have a thorough understanding of SEO and how this can be integrated into his or her writing. Key phrases are used in long and short copy alike, to great effect.
Optimizing for human and machine users
One of the most notable differences between writing for print and writing for digital is that when it comes to the latter, you are writing not only for an audience but also for the search engines.
While your human audience should always be your first priority, your copy also needs to speak to the search engines in a language they can understand.
Optimizing your copy for search engines is important because your target audience is likely to be using a search engine to find the products or services you are offering.
If the search engine is not aware that your content can give users the answers they are looking for on a particular subject, it won’t send traffic to your website. Optimizing your content for search is the process of telling search engines what content you are publishing. Keywords and keyphrases are an integral part of this.
SEO copywriters need to know how to use keywords in conjunction with text formatting and metadata. In addition to assisting you with structuring your content, these tags indicate relevance and context to search engines.
Key phrases
A keyword refers to a single word used in a search query, while a key phrase refers to more than one word used in the search query.
Key phrase research is an important element of digital copywriting. Keyword research should be used to identify what phrases your target audience use when searching for you. It is important to know what people are searching for so that you can give them what they need.
Meta keywords
Meta keywords are the list of the words and phrases that are important on a web page. Using targeted key phrases is important, but remember – no keyword stuffing. The meta keywords are limited to 200 characters (including spaces). This is, however, no longer a major source of information used by search engines (though it certainly doesn’t hurt to include these).
Headings and sub-headings
Spiders assign more relevance to the text used in headings, so it is important to use your key phrases in the headings on your page. It also helps to structure your content. Headings are created with HTML tags.
Heading structures:
• <h1> Main page headings
• <h2> Sub-headings
• <h3> Information under the sub-headings
Having a good heading hierarchy is important as spiders use it to move through your page and understand its relevance to the search query; it also helps human readers to scan your page.
On-page copy
The number of times you use the key phrases is entirely dependent on how long the page of copy is. You want to optimize the page for the key phrases without their use being overt.
For SEO effectiveness, a page of web copy should be at least 250 words long. On a 250-word page, you could use the primary and secondary key phrases several times (this includes use in metadata, headings, title and body copy). Make sure that these integrate seamlessly into the text and that it sounds as natural as possible.
The page should not be so long that the user needs to scroll continuously to get to the end of it. If you find the page is getting exceptionally long, consider breaking it into different web pages for different sections. In this way, you could add several pages of optimized copy focused on one theme, instead of one very long page.
