While blogging falls into the area of content writing, copywriters can be asked to write blogs for clients. And since blogs are utilized as tools to drive traffic to a website, its necessary to have some basic knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) writing. Strategically placed keywords and phrases in your title, subtitle, and content help boost the blog's rankings in search engines like Google, and that's vital to a blog's success from a marketing standpoint.
Finding the Right Keywords
Once you've chosen a topic for your blog, you'll need to do some keyword research to select the ones you wish to use. Start by taking your main topic and entering it in the search engine. Take the top pages that come up and study the content. Then use a software tool to analyze the keywords that made these pages rank at the top such as AccuRanker, SERPWatcher, or SEMRUSH. This method will spark ideas, and from there you can select the head keywords you want to work with.
The next step would be to analyze your chosen keywords in the search engine tool to find long tail keywords. It's important to understand the difference between head keywords and long tail keywords. Head keywords are those that generate high traffic for an entire topic. Head keywords alone bring up very general information and are difficult to compete with in a search engine. Long tail keywords are the ones consumers use to narrow their search, are usually made up of two or more words or phrases, and demonstrate the intent of the buyer.
For example, you may have the head keyword "bluegrass." That word alone would yield results for two main categories--bluegrass music and the bluegrass plant. A more narrow search using long tail keywords like "Kentucky bluegrass" or "how to cultivate bluegrass" would narrow the options in a more distinct way, leading towards a topic of actually growing Kentucky bluegrass.
Another type of keyword you can harvest is the LSI keyword (latent semantic indexing). These words are related to your topic, but make it more clear. Referring back to the topic "how to cultivate bluegrass," LSI words like "seed," "irrigation," or "pastures" would be the LSI keywords. These can be included in the body of the blog, image captions, and H1/H1/H3 headers.
Planning the Title and URL
The title of your blog is very important because it needs to be unique from other titles on the same topic to gain ground in the search engine. For help developing it, type your target keyword in the search engine and analyze the first ten titles. You'll want to craft one different from the titles you find. Your unique title should include the target keyword(s), contain around 160 characters, and shoot to spark interest in the user.
The URL (or permalink) you create should contain your keywords and be stripped of unnecessary words. The default URL may be the same as the title, but you can edit it down to the essential keywords, therefore making it short and SEO friendly.
SEO Support in the Content
The body is the meat of your blog and can house text, images and links to other pages on your site. The first paragraph should contain your keywords, but be careful not to pack it, or any subsequent text, with keywords. Google does not favor that approach. Your subheadings are good places to use long tail keywords. And you can interlace the rest of the body with LSI keywords.
Be aware of the user intent as you're planning all of this. You should put yourself in the place of the user, use your long tail and LSI keywords in the Google search, and if you aren't getting the results you hope to have in the search, you should adjust your keywords accordingly.
Images with captions containing long tail or LSI keywords also help the overall SEO goal.
The consensus is to have an image for every 150 words. If your blog has 1000 words, approximately 10 images would do. But be aware that too many images can slow down the site and create a bad UX.
One more key factor to remember is EAT--expertise, authority, trust. Google will search for elements that demonstrate that your overall site, your individual pages, and the content fall under the umbrella of EAT. So as the author, try to include credentials that demonstrate expertise (title, degree, etc); show authority in well-written content that is factually accurate; include citations from other trusted sites and make sure your site has trustworthy essentials like the "About" page, "Contact," etc.
Copywriter vs. SEO Copywriter
You can be a great copywriter and never touch the realm of SEO. There are so many options for the general copywriter (print, digital, and social media ads, email funnels, and more) that you can opt to steer clear of SEO writing. But depending on your job (if employed as an in-house copywriter), or your desire to write content for websites, this is a topic you will need some basic knowledge of. There are experts in this area referred to as SEO copywriters, and their main job involves content writing. Remember that content writers, in general, make less than copywriters, so it's advisable to aim higher. But in case your work takes you in the SEO direction at times, and you should know the basics.
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