Just about everyone in our society today can agree on one thing; faster is better. Learn how to structure the page so that your casual audience becomes your captive audience?
Steve Krug, author of “Don’t Make Me Think,” is quoted as saying, “We don’t read pages. We scan them.”
He’s not wrong, is he? Think about it; we want to efficiently use our time, and what better way than to scan a content piece to make sure it’s worth reading?
So what exactly do our eyes look for? Is it bright colors, pictures, spacing, and format?
Here are some things to consider when making sure your SEO copywriting is the best that it can be.
Are your headlines engaging?
This is one of the oldest tricks in the book; the who-what-when-where-how-why effect.
Introducing these words in your title makes your content more engaging and interesting. These words often challenge the reader to think and seek out the answer provided by a headline such as, “Who are you trusting with your SEO copywriting, and are they doing their jobs effectively?”
There are other ways, however, to have the same effect on your reader.
You could ask them a question like, “Do you have any idea why it is that you’re not ranking on Google?” And if their answer is “no,” you bet they’re going to read on.
Imagine opening a magazine and every single letter and word was the same size, font, and color.
Kind of gave you a little mini headache just thinking about it, didn’t it?
SEO copywriting should be no different than a magazine or newspaper in terms of the page setup. When skimming pages, readers tend to look for headlines, page breaks, and other landmarks where they can find the beginning of new information or a completely new thought.
Remember taking notes in school when you would highlight the important words in the text so you could immediately refer to them? This is the exact same concept.
By bolding, italicizing, underlining (or any kind of formatting) your text, you draw the reader’s attention to it directly.
This is great for skimming purposes! (<< see what we mean?)
One of the easiest ways to make a piece of SEO copywriting skim-able is to insert:
Pictures, yes that’s right, pictures.
Pictures can serve many different purposes on a webpage and are very easy to use. Although this list is by no means comprehensive, it is a good idea to use pictures to:
It is known that SEO copywriting revolves around a series of keywords and topics that help it ultimately rank on search engines.
But it shouldn’t be glaring.
A reader should not be able to read a piece of content and start to think, “man, I’ve seen this word/phrase about 400 times, don’t you think they could have worded it differently?”
The keywords and phrases vital to the page’s internal SEO should be threaded into the content in such a way that they become invisible to the reader. The words should flow smoothly and should allow the reader to enjoy the content unobstructed by an abnormal amount of keyword repetition.
This sure seems like a no-brainer in terms of SEO copywriting but you’d be surprised with some of the content out on the web today. It is very easy to write about something you don’t care a whole lot about and make it sound blah.
If someone is reading your content, chances are, they are interested in the topic at hand. Shouldn’t the author be as well?
You could employ every tip and trick listed up to this point, but if you’re writing about something that you’re not genuinely interested in, chances are it’s going to show.
Write with your heart, believe in what you’re saying, and others will believe in it as well.