SEO has lately been a plethora of information about Linkbait, tricking engines, social marketing and such and I wanted to post something in my mind that really takes me back to what got me into SEO, using my creative side and copywriting for the search engines. After all, I still believe content truly is king.
These may or may not impact your overall SEO performance intentionally, but it will increase conversion and possibly indirectly affect your rankings in the SERP’s. Here are a few factors that I have found to be HIGHLY important when writing good content or copy:
1. Talking to your customer: This really has the least desired significance from an SEO perspective, but is still highly critical. Your copy should really put your customer or reader in a situation where they feel like you are talking directly to them in a “1 on 1” style conversation.
2. Be Consistent: Maintaining a level of consistency with your page copy is going to lead you in the right direction. Maintain a consistent theme, ensure your crucial keywords and key phrases are being called out and stand out. You can throw a bold/italics/underline tag in there to make it stand out to the user and even the search engines.
3. Markup, Markup, Markup: As mentioned above, throw some tags in there to mix it up and have content that sticks out. Use custom CSS to create sexy header text and give the search engine’s more visibility into key phrases. Be creative in the way that you do things, but, DO NOT SPAM! If you spam, you won’t gain conversion, which goes back to being consistent and talking to your customer.
4. I said I wasn’t going to talk about links, I can’t help it!: Another way that you can be creative with your markup is not just by marking up your phrases, but also, linking to internal pages within your site. This will really give you an opportunity to really get some attention with SE’s.
5. Having a Call to Action & Being Persuasive: So, you’ve talked to your customer, you’ve maintained consistency, you’ve got the SEO stuff out of the way, now how do I sell?! Well, maintaining all of the above will get you part way there, but having a really persuasive call to action will really help you convert customers and readers. Overall, that is your main goal, conversion, so ensure that you are really taking control here and throwing all your creative juices in this basket.
Some of this must be quite obvious to the seasoned folks, and even to myself, but it is very nice sometimes to remind yourself and bring yourself back to the basics. Especially since in my mind, when it comes to good marketing at all, Content is always king.
This is a brave new world for me, and I appreciate all the advice anyone can give! Thanks.
Ed