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Copy + Context = Good SEO Results
All SEO for Beginners starts with the importance of the written copy, also known as text, that appears on your website. The first fundamental SEO basics for beginners starts with the importance of the written word in an SEO campaign.
The text on the page provides a core functions which involves:
- Informing and educating website users
- Selling goods and services to website users
- Telling search engines what you are informing, educating and selling
In short, an SEO campaign is a planned effort to put the right words on the page or website (‘to optimize’) to improve its Google SEO rankings, overtime.
Written copy is at the core of every SEO campaign. Content is literally why the world wide web came into existence. In 1989, the internet was born by allowing content to be written and shared amongst scientists working at The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, in Switzerland.
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Writing For Website Visitors & Google: SEO For Beginners
With regards to websites in general, how Google sees your website is as important as what website users see via a browser. With SEO, you need to write for…
- Website users, and
- Search Engines, such as Google
…in that order.
When someone types in “keywords”, the search engines work by giving users the results they have asked for. Writing for the needs of the website user is the best way to get Google’s attention when it comes to ranking your content higher in SERPs.
It’s important to write useful, compelling content that is written around industry specific keywords (see below). This is so other people will interact with it by sharing it and promoting it on social media platforms. These actions help to increase the authority and relevance of your content and improve its ranking in Google for the selected keywords.
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Start With Some Detailed Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of finding and analysing search terms (words and phrases) that people enter into a search engine to find something. Keyword research is actually a whole dark art in itself.
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Since this is about SEO basics for beginners, we won’t get bogged down too much with fine details.
When thinking about where to start, we recommend that you list the answers to three basic questions. These are:
Ask Yourself What Do You Do?
From services, qualification, skills to products – what are you promoting? This will impact on the style of writing.
Where Exactly Do You Do It?
In the context of a business what geographical areas do you service? It can be anything from as Australian city, suburb to the whole country.
What Do People Type Into A Search Engine To Find It?
We can assume that you know who you are targeting, the trick is with this is to try to think what they think. What would type in to search engines to find you.
In the context of SEO, we are interested in writing SEO copy for the purposes of ranking for organic traffic. Organic traffic is basically the list of links to web pages, on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) – not the Ads at the top and bottom of the page, the bit in between. For this process there are many keyword research tools available, some such as Google Ads & Ubersuggest are free, or you could pay for tools such as Moz or KWFinder.
Now we have a tool, something to sell, the answers to the three basic questions (above), let’s start listing keywords. One of the best ways to do this is to write down what one main thing to do and want to focus on selling. Place that at the top of the list and see what variations you can come up with, as a tip use words with locations too.
As an SEO Agency, if we were planning to write about our SEO services, this is what we listed:
- seo
- seo brisbane
- brisbane seo company
- brisbane seo service
- seo marketing agencies
- buy seo services
- seo process
- gmb seo
- blogging and seo
- seo services experts
- need seo help
- seo performance check
- best seo services brisbane
- seo services for business
One last thing about keywords that anyone teaching SEO for beginners should always mention: There are two basic categories of keywords:
- Short tail keywords – A short tail keyword is a phrase that contains 1 to 3 words. These are generally the broader search terms people use to find what they need.
- Long tail keywords – a long-tail keyword is a highly specific phrase consisting of 3 and 4 words and sometimes more.
By example:
- “SEO” (1 word) is an example of a short tail keyword, whereas
- “seo services for restaurants” (4 words) is a long tail keyword.
By shortlisting, combining and adding them to web pages we can write copy to satisfy the needs of different users.
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The Right Way To Write - SEO Copy
Producing the best quality content is really the best way to appear at the top of SERPs. Since we were interested in selling SEO services, then we will focus on writing sales focused marketing copy.
We wanted the text to both rank high in Google and generate leads. We referred to the latter as converting. In this context, the potential clients contacted us. A conversion is an action we want a user to take when they visit our website.
So now that we’ve done the keyword research let’s start to write the content. We need to create a sales page focused on selling SEO services to organisations in Brisbane. As you may be a copywriting novice, here are three tips that we recommend that we use and highly recommend that, you follow:
1. Writing Great Heading
When you are writing the headline, think about the main message that you want to communicate? Focus on that one thing. Explain what it is that you do. Or tell how your readers will benefit from what you have to offer.
Using a keyword in the title will not only help add context to an article, but it will also help rank that word and in turn, that article -better.
If you want a better chance at getting your entire headline read, keep your headline to six words and under. Six-word headlines are hard to write, making them rare. If you can’t cut your title down to six words, you can still be aware of how your headline might be read, and you can adjust the phrase to meet your needs.
2. Write Short Paragraphs
This is as far removed from the more traditional method of writing as you can get. Writing sales copy that converts, requires a different approach to how you should write the pages on your site. Your sales copy needs to be as easy to read as possible, as your readers don’t want to make that effort to read your content.
Short sentences are much easier to read than long drawn out, dull sentences. That’s why when writing sales focused SEO copy you don’t need to worry about starting a sentence with the words “But” or “And”. They need to do it quite often to grab attention and sell their services to you! Lastly try to use one of your main keywords in the first paragraph.
3. Be A Problem Solver
SEO writing, especially sales copy needs to be about solving problems. If someone has searched for “I need seo help” then they probably are looking for an organisation such as ours. As an SEO agency we know people will look at multiple websites before they shortlist and connect with the agency that they want to use.
Use all of your keywords multiple times when writing SEO copy, this is referred to as keyword density. As a beginner we recommend that you look into it. Be warned over use is referred to as keyword stuffing, may incur some Google penalties.
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Local SEO
Local search is the use of specialised Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a list of local business listings. At Bambrick Media we use Google My Business (GMB) as it’s one of the best tools to get businesses listed locally (on search engines).
Google is more likely to share content that it can support and verify, GMB is their main tool to help businesses meet Google’s needs. As a SEO Agency we regularly set up and optimise GMB profiles. Add add information about your business, such as:
- Business categories
- Office address
- Locations you service
- Business opening hours
- A brief description of the business
Over and above the business information, you can use GMB to write and publish the following
- short posts,
- special offers,
- promote events and
- post products for sale
All of the information on the GMB profile and the various posting options are useful in promoting a business and its services. As a SEO beginner you need to make yourself aware of how important local SEO is.
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Ranking Factors
The term “Ranking Factors” is about describing how search engines evaluate a piece of content in order to compile the rankings of their organic ERPs. Whilst this article has been text copy, it is worth noting that Google will sometimes return SERPs that also include images and videos, if it considers these elements to be of value to what a user searched for.
When you publish something – copy, image, video, search engines grade it against all of the other content produced. Everything you publish should have context i.e. “buy SEO services” or “SEO services for business”, so when you publish something about “SEO services for business” that gets graded against all of the other content published about “SEO services for business”.
Google has about 200+ (known about) ranking factors, Google itself has never published its ranking factors, so it’s all down to experience, expertise and execution. Over the last 20+ years Bambrick Media’s SEO experts have observed and documented how the information we produce performs. By creating an effective SEO Strategy and monitoring it, is the best way to ensure success.
Ranking factors can be split into two groups, on page and off page. To get websites ranking higher up in Google SERPs you need to focus on these two ranking factor groups in equal measure.
On Page SEO
On-page SEO is the practice and processes involved in optimising the user experience on individual web pages in order to rank them higher and earn more qualified, relevant search engine traffic. On-page refers to both the content (what users see) and HTML source code of a page (what Google sees) that can also be optimised – such as the meta title tags and the meta description.
Learn more about how we practice on page SEO
Off Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within SERPs, the most common form of off page SEO is reference to as blogger outreach, at times referred to as link building. A link on another website pointing back to your website provides ranking factor signals to Google, about the overall authoritativeness of your website.
Read more about how we sell our off page SEO services.
