Conversion Matters

I was just reading something on Tamar’s SEO blog about copywriting and keyword density and I’m wondering if copywriter’s jobs should be evolving?

Obviously in the past (and probably still true now) a copywriter’s job mostly involves writing articles targeting specific keywords, which hopefully the search engines will index and rank while still being appealing and readable to users.

However, I’d suggest that you’re not going to rank highly just writing targeted articles and that something needs to change. I don’t think this SEO tactic is going to yield many returns especially in competitive markets.

You couldn’t expect to write a keyword dense article about car insurance and then magically rank for the term car insurance!

What should SEO copywriters be doing to add value?

In this day and age of social media, copywriters who can write articles that appeal to the people at digg, stumbleupon, del.iciou.us etc. have a strong competitve advantage over the ‘old-school copywriters’.

Imagine you are a motorbike insurance company. You could start a blog and crack out some articles on the following topics:

• Top 10 superbike wipe-outs (this would have embedded videos)
• 101 great motorbike rides in the UK
• What you need to know about motorbike maintenance and tuning

I couldn’t say whether any of these would actually take off - they’re just quick ideas of the top of my head. Try and be creative and experiment.

It’s more valuable to be able to create content that gains major traction in the social media arena. Content that does this is able to gain natural, ‘editorially-vouched-for’ links, a huge spike in traffic - which may not directly increase the bottom line but can increase mind share in the market and increase your brand awareness (alternatively you can just make a few dollars off CPM ads).

Link-bait and social media marketing seem to be one of the few ways which is left to webmasters and SEOs to promote a website without falling foul of the Google Guidelines.

Paid links are a no-no, unless you’re sneaky, directories are pretty pointless. There’s no better way to get your content out there than through social media (as long as it is quality content and you invest the time to interact and engage with the communities).

Summary

• It’s still important to have quality content on your website related to specific keywords but…
• …Don’t pump out article after article purely for search engines - it’s not going to help much unless you’re targeting an uncompetitive market
• Instead try and create link-worthy content that may gain traction in the social spheres - it all helps with your brand-awareness and organic rankings