It is Aug 31st, and we passed 2/3 of the year 2020. Do you feel well? As network technology and artificial intelligence have been developing, the SEO techniques have evolved a lot in 2020. Let us introduce 5 SEO copywriting techniques involved no coding, it is just how we should deal with the words and text. If you think content marketing important, pay attention now.
- Keyword research
- Q&A format
- Point form
- Citation
- SEO copywriting structure
Keyword research
For all those doing SEO copywriting, the very first thing is keyword research. Don’t be afriad of the terminology. Keyword research in SEO is only a process to find out what words people use to search information. For example, if you plan to write an article to boost your SEO ranking, you may search “SEO copywriting technique” in Google. As a copywriter, my work is to know what words and phrases you search.
It seems abstract, but the best tool is Google itself. First, we input the fundamental keyword root into Google, and Google will give hints in at least 3 ways:
- Autocomplete – When we input the keywords, Google will attempt to autocomplete the phrase. There must be significant quotes for Google to guess so.
- Related search – the Search Engine Return Page (SERP) includes “related search” as suggestion. E.g. we search “SEO copywriting” and it suggests “SEO copywriting tips” and “SEO copywritng services” etc.
- Result – I encourage you to check the first 3 returning pages (click into the webpages but not only read the title and the meta-description). There must be good use of keywords so that Google ranks them high.
Keywords represent what people weigh. Remember that if you want a good SEO rank, you should always focus on these keywords to provide best information and answer to users. In the article “SEO Copywriting Success“, I mentioned that the potential keywords were “BUD consultant”, “TVP consultant” etc. Once we input the keywords, Google will hint “BUD successful cases”, “TVP successful stories” (in Chinese). We used accordingly and became featured snippets.
Q&A format
Speech recognition has advanced rapidly in 2020 that voice search and smart assistant become more and more important. People search with questions, for example, “how to do SEO copywriting good?” instead of “SEO copywriting technique”. Therefore, we start writing with 5W1H (Who, what, when, where, why and how), set up the Question & Answer to satisfy readers.
I promised not to discuss coding in this article, but just introduce an appropriate technology for better explanation: Structured data. The structured data is a standard schema to make information more comprehensive to search engines. One schema is “FAQ” and we should post our Q&A in this data format in the web design. A WordPress SEO plugin called Yoast already provides the tool.1
Point form
Unless you are required to answer in paragraphs as in an exam, point form is an easier way to read. Google understands human very well and encourages copywriters to use point form. The most common way is <ol>(Ordered list) and <ul>(Unordered list) in HTML, but there is also other way to achieve. For example, I used “10 TVP successul cases” as an article title, put each case as sub-title(<h2> tag), and the page became a featured snippet.
Sometimes we cannot make the whole article into point form, and we should still apply it in the paragraphs. In the “Keyword research” section of this article, I present the 3 Google hints in point form. I’d like to emphasize that we should use point form reasonably.
Citation
If you wrote academic journals before, the very first lesson was how to do citation. Honesty is important in academia, and plagiarism is absolutely an unethical misconduct. We must cite properly to make readers confident. Trustworthy articles are influential to SEO performance, and nobody likes reading the content farm. I encourage all SEO copywriters to give your originality and respect intellectuals. For instance, I wrote an article about Macau economy recently and quoted the data from Statistics and Census Service of Macau government. I gave footnote with official links on the page.
Maybe you doubt if adding external links will let visitors leave the site or give link juice to the others. We can set opening external links with a new tag while link juice is another complicated topic. I don’t recommend to add “nofollow” for all links to reduce link juice loss. In a nutshell, trustworthy external links can increase article authority.
SEO copywriting structure
The last technique is relatively easy for a copywriter: SEO copywriting structure. In general, we consider a good writing with interdependent paragraphs. It is another case for SEO writing. Internet article cannot be too lengthy or it will be boring; on the other hand, SEO writing cannot be too short or it will be poor in SEO. Professional SEO copywriters resolve this conflict from the structure. First, we outline the copy so that all headers can give a main message or key information, and segment the whole article by headers. Take this article as an example, I won’t know what keywords leading you to come, but I have to make sure each paragraph can deliver messages to satisfy some readers. No one should be left without reading the whole page.
Compared to classical writing, SEO copywriting is indeed much simpler. We have to make sure one message under one header, that is.
The above 5 SEO copywriting techniques applys not only in 2020 but also in 2021. EstherPoni is a professional SEO copywriter who loves mixing technology and art to create textual promotion.
- Quickly build FAQ pages and get rich results, https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/faq-schema-content-block/