Content Marketing and SEO copywriting

By SEO copywriting, we mean writing quality content that works for users and search bots.

Content aimed only at bots can be keyword-rich but empty in content - a pattern that often triggers Google penalties. Users are not interested in this. They probably will not read it and will leave the site. This will affect the ranking: search engines do not keep the top sites from which users are fleeing.

But if you write materials thinking only about people, you risk choosing the wrong keywords for which real users search the topic. As a result, the page will not give the ranking and traffic results that it could.

What should the content be?

You need to choose interesting topics for the reader, design the material so that it is easy to perceive, and get rid of water. Still, you should not forget about the semantics and proper markup collection.

Such content will be good for the site’s SEO and will bring pluses on ranking factors:

  • an increase in backlinks;
  • low bounce rate;
  • long session time on the site;
  • high CTR;
  • social media reposts;
  • an active discussion in the comments, building a community of supporters.

Working SEO copywriting tricks

How to get a reader interested in three steps

This technique should keep users on the page and show why they should read your material. This will reduce bounce rates and increase session time on the page.

The trick is three steps. Brian Dean called it “APP”: Agree, Promise, and Preview.

Let’s break down the technique in more detail:

Agree

An idea or concept that the audience of this material agrees with. This is how you show that you understand their problem.

An example: Most people looking for information on optimization techniques have become frustrated with SEO advice from the Internet.

That’s why he emphasizes that in the article, only working methods are proven in practice. This is how he shows that he feels their pain.

The Promise

What can happen if the reader uses the tips from the material? Continuing the example of SEO tips, you need to write about what the methods in the article are aimed at and what the author achieved through their use.

Announcement

What will the reader find in the material? This example could be a list of SEO techniques that the author discussed in the article, designed as clickable content for easy navigation.

With such a template, you can convince users that the material will be useful to them because it solves their problem and promises clear results. Provided your arguments are convincing to the audience the article is intended for.

How to accentuate with Bucket Brigades

When a user comes to a page from a search engine, he usually takes a quick look at it. If nothing interesting catches his eye, he may leave. Readers can be held back by accent elements – Bucket Brigades.

Bucket Brigades are short sentences ending with a colon, usually in a larger font than the main text.

“Bucket Brigades” means passing items down the chain, the way they used to put out fires by passing buckets of water to each other. In the context of SEO, these phrases also move the reader’s attention from one paragraph of the article to the next.

This copywriting tactic was originally developed for promotional emails, but for SEO strategies, it is also useful – it allows you to increase the user’s session time on the page.

What to do:

  • Find a place in the content where someone can click the “back” button on their browser and return to the giveaway.
  • Add Bucket Brigade phrases that might attract attention and promise something interesting.
  • Repeat in all places where such phrases might be on point.

Examples of phrases:

  • What’s the bottom line:
  • You might be interested in the following:
  • What happened next:
  • It’s crazy:
  • What changed the rules of the game:
  • After that, things took off:
  • But here’s the best part:
  • Now for the most effective methods:

You can make up your own to fit the context of your material.

Try longer headlines

A study of 912 million articles found that users are likelier to share articles with long headlines. Perhaps this is since such titles of articles more fully disclose the topic, attracting details. And they may also include more keywords.

Write an introduction to the PBC formula.

While reading an article, a user is constantly deciding whether to continue reading the material. According to studies, the first scroll of content is the most read, so it’s best to write the most important and catchy information there.

In our experience as users, many authors are afraid to start with useful information “head-on” and try to lead off smoothly with a long lead with well-known facts or the term’s history. Since these are common knowledge facts, reading about them is not interesting.

All of us often skip such introductions or close articles where the author has gotten carried away with getting to the point.

Brian Dean developed a formula for writing the introduction to an article. He called it the “PBC Formula” based on the first letters of Preview, Benefits, and Call-to-action – content, benefits, and call-to-action.

Introduction to the PBC Formula:

Briefly outline the content of the post:

  1. List the benefits the reader will get from learning the material:

These techniques will help increase traffic to the blog and keep readers’ attention. They’re all tried and true – here’s a case study in which a blog author was able to increase organics without investing several times over – screenshot.

  1. Call to action:

Try implementing these techniques on your blog and measure the results

or simply, Let’s get started!

This kind of introduction introduces the reader right away, answers their question of “why should I read the material in the first place” and is usually worded briefly, so it doesn’t take a lot of time.

  1. Check the page: optimization, relevance, and technical parameters.

You can quickly check a page online through Content Analysis. It assesses the relevance of the text to the keywords you specified, checks the filling of meta tags, and analyzes the structure of the text, as well as technical parameters: download speed, presence of micro markup, number of links, canonical URL, and more.

The tool works for free and checks any page of the site.

Twitter and Facebook

Get more reposts with Twitter.

It’s common to put social media buttons at the end of the material or at the bottom of the page for reposts. With reposts, the page gets links, a new traffic channel emerges, and more people can see it.

There are buttons like these on many sites. They’re familiar and not conspicuous. You can get even more reposts if you put call-to-action buttons inside the article where it is relevant.

For each such call to share on Twitter, it is better to make a different text: it must be related to the content of the item and intriguingly worded.

How to add a button for a tweet with a quote

There are services for this, for example, ClickToTweet. It allows you to create five free tweets, track stats, and shorten links.

For more, there are paid plans.

  1. Find a description of an actionable strategy, an interesting tip, or a fact in your piece.
  2. Go to ClickToTweet.com and select Basic Link. The service will ask you to enter through your Twitter account to fight the scam.
  3. Make a short, intriguing description of the tweet and insert the link. The link can be added to any account. You can’t shorten the link beforehand; it has a built-in shortening and conversion tracking system.
  4. Click the generate tweet button, and a preview will open. Below you will see the finished link, its statistics, and options for buttons with HTML codes to insert into the site.
  5. Add a link to your post and keep track of the statistics.

Put tweets in places in the article where something is interesting and unusual that the user might want to share.

Adding subplots to your social network for content from your site

Facebook’s algorithms give less priority to posts that take users away from their platform. So just sharing a link to an article on the site isn’t enough. You need to add native content.

A post with a short article description gives social media algorithms what they want – original content and engagement.

As a result, such posts bring in more traffic.

The main bet is on low-frequency (LF) search queries.

This is another one of the SEO strategies. For businesses working within a specific region, combining this with local SEO compounds the effect. In this case, the main KPI of the project is the amount of highly targeted search traffic. The task is to widely cover the semantics – this is usually from 2-3 to 40-50 thousand search queries.

You have to constantly work with this semantic core, mass and pattern the pages and evaluate the dynamics of the URL groups. Many professionals now follow these SEO strategies, often without realizing that they bet on the BF and BF. As a rule, the objectives and hypotheses they form as part of this strategy should be most effective if they address the entire host and are scalable.

In other words, it’s pretty useless to think about how you can improve positions on one mLF query if it can’t be scaled, or applied to neighboring hundreds, thousands of other search queries. So you must stop every time you think of some hypothesis to improve the position of any query. Instead, you have to ask yourself the reasonable question, “So what do we do about it next?”

Monobrand

The key KPI here is visibility for a narrow group of queries, but in this case, they are branded and associated with a particular manufacturer. Maximum coverage of all branded queries, and different spellings, as part of the high-, medium- and low-frequency keywords – you have to hit the user’s need as accurately as possible. Mono-brand stores often don’t do search engine promotion, thinking they’ll be found anyway. In fact, we know that mono-brand stores usually have no more than 50% visibility in the semantics they promote, although, in reality, they should have visibility close to 100%.

Clearly, this is often solved by matching the user’s exact need – in particular, by creating additional pages that will fall pretty clearly into what the user is looking for. For example, a query like “bags that are allowed in samsonite carry-on luggage” should lead to a page that matches the query. This is where the Customer Journey Map needs to be worked out, where we talk about and understand how users interact from the moment a need is formed to the specific transaction.

For example, many mono-brand stores operate through dealers, and we need to think through the user journey from visiting the official site to finding the specific store where they will make a purchase. In this SEO strategy, such hypotheses are formed: search cues, reviews, conversion, commercial ranking factor, and working through the semantic core with different brand spelling options.

A shaped strategy requires active action.

By itself, generated SEO strategies do not automatically get results. If you have conducted analytical work and discussed all the steps but did not take concrete action, the site will not move. Even though this is obvious, people are waiting for growth after in-depth analytical work. You have to understand that analytics is the ground for management decisions. You have to decide in what direction the project will move.