Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a way to drive more traffic to your website and gain more customers. It depends upon content, technical website optimization, link building, and keyword research to ensure that your website appears near the top of a Google results page. A BrightEdge survey conducted in 2019 found that SEO is 1000% more effective at driving website traffic than organic methods like social media posts. Professionals who work with SEO are often called Website Optimization Specialists.
The primary goal of SEO is to build trust between your business and your users. You can do this through high-quality content, ensuring your website loads quickly in desktop and mobile versions, and optimizing your site for voice search. Another way to improve your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs) is to create a “Google My Business” listing.
What Can You Do with SEO?
SEO is used to determine search engine success in three crucial ways: technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO.
Technical SEO looks at a website’s technical features and how they affect search engine rankings. These include the site structure, schema, and URL. The site needs to be easy to navigate with a clearly understood organization. Other aspects of technical SEO are website loading speed, mobile friendliness, voice optimization, and the XML sitemap.
The primary goal of on-page optimization is meeting the intent of the searcher/user with high-quality content. On-page content is essential and refers to everything that appears on a website, including text, keywords, images, tags, and internal links. Researching and choosing the best SEO keywords shows that the website has authority and is trustworthy.
Off-page SEO involves building links and strengthening social media engagement. Backlinks and social media help build authority and trust with search engines. Link building refers to finding reputable and relevant websites to link to your website or content. The more references to your content on other reliable sites, the better. Additionally, building out social media presence across various channels will further establish your internet presence and boost your SEO. You can use different analytical tools to track SEO and conversion rates.
Average Time it Takes to Learn SEO
Experts say it usually takes one to three months to learn the foundations of SEO and a year or more to master the practice fully. The length of time it takes to learn the basics of SEO depends upon several factors. How much time do you have to study? How quickly do you pick up new information? Are you trying to learn independently, or are you taking a class? How much time can you spend practicing?
Time to Devote to Study
The more time you can spend studying SEO, the less time it will take to learn it. If you only have a few hours a week to spend, it will go more slowly, and if you can spend a couple of hours a day, you will learn SEO much faster. The more time you can devote to reading blogs, listening to podcasts, and watching YouTube videos, the less time the process will take.
Independent Study vs. Live Classes
It is possible to learn SEO on your own. There are plenty of free tutorials and podcasts, plus the blogs mentioned above, and some people have learned the basics of SEO by teaching themselves. But most people find it easier to learn new material by taking a class. You have an instructor who can steer you toward the most critical information, and you can ask questions when you need to.
We each have our own learning curve; some pick things up quickly, and others need to work harder. This will affect how long it takes you to learn SEO. Signing up for a class can make the process easier and quicker.
Other Factors
There are other factors that can help you learn SEO more quickly. Learn to use analytics and keyword tools and the basics of SEO to start with. Distinguish which actions give you the best results and focus on those first. Learn how to build quality links. And probably the best way to learn SEO is to create your own website and dive in.
Build a Knowledge Foundation
Tools like Google Analytics, SEMRush, and Moz Keyword Explorer are the backbone of SEO. They collect the data you need to see if your digital marketing campaign is working, and they can help you fix things if it’s not. Again, you can follow tutorials to learn how to use tools or sign up for a class to concentrate your efforts.
Focus on the Big Results
In learning SEO, it is a good idea to focus on the actions that will give you the biggest results. The easiest way to get significant results is by creating quality SEO content. Learn how to choose the best keywords and build pages that attract and engage your target audience.
Level of Difficulty, Prerequisites, & Cost
SEO is not necessarily hard to learn, but it does take time, effort, and persistence. If you are just starting out and know nothing about how search engines work, you can expect to feel a bit overwhelmed at the beginning. However, it is important to keep trying. This is where classes can be a real sanity saver.
Some skills pave the way for a successful SEO career. Logical reasoning, curiosity, a love of learning, and perseverance are personality traits that can make learning SEO easier. Some technical skills that will help you get a job in SEO are knowing how to do website audits, keyword research, and data analytics.
Beyond the cost of a class, learning digital marketing is not very expensive. Some of the most widely used tools, like Google Analytics, are free, and others like Moz have a free version to get you started. SEMRush is another useful digital marketing tool, and while it can be expensive, you get a seven-day free trial to try it out first.
What is SEO copywriting?
To understand what SEO copywriting means, let’s look at the two elements of the phrase. First, SEO stands for search engine optimization, a set of best practices for setting up websites to be crawled and ranked by search engines.
Copywriting refers to writing short-form text to promote, advertise, or sell goods and services online. Unlike content writing (such as in blog posts), which serves to educate readers, copywriting is shorter text geared toward inspiring readers to take a specific action—such as buying a product, joining an email list, or visiting a website.
SEO copywriting is the combination of copywriting and search engine optimization. It means optimizing web or advertising copy to increase the potential for search engine rankings. SEO copywriters need to balance the art of writing compelling copy with implementing on-page SEO best practices to increase a site’s chances of ranking for certain keywords.
Five tips to improve your SEO copywriting skills
Perform thorough keyword research
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a major part of SEO copywriting—but you can only optimize for search engines if you know which keywords your audience is searching. Keyword research is one way to figure this out.
The keywords you research will vary depending on your business or industry. For example, if you sell organic essential oils, you’re looking for people who either use them or are curious about them. By using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs, Uber Suggests, Semrush, or Answer the Public, you can dig deeper to see what your target audience is looking for on search engines.
Keyword research is just the start. Talking to customers, your sales or customer service team, and other customer-facing teams will also clue you into the needs your product or service fills for customers. These terms also make for excellent keywords to target. The main goal with keyword research is to match search intent, so you’re providing customers with products that match their needs—and are described accordingly.
Optimize your headings and meta descriptions
With your desired keywords in mind, it’s time to optimize your copy by inserting the keywords naturally. Say, for example, you’re building a landing page for your essential oils company (let’s call it “Breathe Deeply”). Instead of just using the heading “Breathe Deeply,” a keyword-optimized title would be “Breathe Deeply Essential Oils.” You could even add a subheading with a secondary keyword your audience also searches for.
The same principle applies to the meta description, which is the short descriptive text most search engines show under the title on the search engine results pages. As you craft your meta description, include more relevant keywords in the persuasive text so as readers skim the search engine results, they can identify your site as their first choice to answer their question or provide the product they need.
Use the inverted pyramid principle
The idea of the inverted pyramid is to front-load your copy by placing the key information upfront, and gradually lowering the density as the customer reads further. This lets you hook readers with a captivating lead and convince them that your product or service is the right fit before they bounce.
The inverted pyramid makes way for the next impactful part of your SEO copywriting: the call to action (CTA).
Make your CTAs effective
Copy is useless if after trumpeting your product or service, there’s no option for readers to take action. This is where the call-to-action (CTA) comes in. Effective CTAs must be:
- Clear: Clear always trumps clever, especially with accessibility in mind. Not every website user has a full vision, so vague CTAs like “I’m in” might sound clever, but may not be descriptive enough for some users. Choose something like “start your free trial” instead, which highlights the benefits users will get from signing up.
- Well-placed: Place your CTAs at page breaks, after highlighting winning features or explaining the benefits of your offer to your audience. That way, users are primed to try your offer.
- Repeated (but not too often): Don’t just use one CTA. You can place up to three on a page. One after the initial introduction to your product, another after your feature listing, and the third after sharing client testimonials. You never know when your audience will feel ready to commit.
Cybersecurity technology company Aura follows these principles excellently in their copy. Their button states clearly what users can expect, complete with an arrow!
Harness the power of linking
Internal linking does wonders for SEO by helping Google understand how your site’s content is related to each other. It’s crucial for both copywriting and content writing.
As you create landing pages, sales pages, and other copy, find opportunities to connect pages with related content. For example, you can link your sales page to feature pages so interested customers can gain more in-depth knowledge of your product’s features. Be sure to link only truly related content. This way, your audience is more likely to click on links to related pages.
How do you measure success?
After all your hard work following SEO best practices and writing the most compelling copy possible, how do you measure success? Well, it depends on what your objectives are. For most businesses, copywriting has one purpose: selling. If that’s your goal, there are a few key performance metrics to watch out for as you evaluate the impact of your copywriting.
Rankings
One of the first (and easiest) ways to see how well your SEO copywriting is working is through search engine result page (SERP) rankings. Ranking in the top 10 results for your desired keyword—while a result of many efforts, including on-page and off-page SEO—can indicate that your SEO copywriting is hitting the right notes.
Clickthrough rate
Your clickthrough rate is the percentage of searchers who click on your site when it pops up on a search engine result page.
Once your website starts to rank highly, the next test of your copywriting skills is how many people click through to view your site’s content. Often this is highly influenced by your site’s meta description, and how it compares to those of other high-ranking sites in the search results. Offering a free trial, or promo code, or shining a light on your unique selling point in your meta description can convince visitors that your product is worth viewing or buying.
Of course (depending on their location in the buyer’s journey) they may or may not have encountered your brand in the past before, which can also influence whether or not they choose to click.
Brand awareness
If most of your copy is geared toward increasing brand awareness, this might be a harder metric to evaluate. A good way to “measure” this qualitative metric is to keep track of your brand’s mentions on social media. You can set up tracking using tools like Brandwatch and set up automation to notify you of new brand mentions. A spike in brand mentions may indicate that your business is gaining traction.
Conversions
In marketing, a conversion results when a site visitor goes from passively perusing to actively interested in purchasing or taking the desired action. If a potential customer visits your site and buys a product or signs up for your newsletter, they go from being a potential lead to a lead or customer. This is one of the major goals of SEO copywriting and the most valuable metric for most businesses.
Tracking how many site visitors become customers is one way to measure the efficacy of your copywriting. You can also track the efficiency of ad copy by monitoring how many customers land on your site via PPC ads on search engines. Most ad links have trackable links that make it easier to monitor their impact.
