Having a copywriter was once a luxury reserved for only large businesses, but thanks to the internet, countless smaller website owners are now finding it doable and within their budget. Investing in a copywriter who’s familiar with search engine optimization, or SEO, is a fantastic way to improve your website. Especially with local SEO, the content you publish on your website has the power to make-or-break your search rankings.
Here are 12 things your copywriter can do to improve your site’s SEO.
1. Use Keywords
Depending on the copywriter you work with, they may be able to research keywords for your content or you may have to provide some for them. If they are an SEO copywriter, you will find yourself in the convenient former situation where they should take the initiative to come up with the keywords all on their own. An SEO copywriter will be well-versed on the latest rules and best practices of SEO, which are always changing, and they will be able to select keywords that best fit your content’s direction and the audience of your website. Provide them with the tools they need to research the keywords ahead of time, including deadlines to account for how long it can take to look at what competitors are doing and dig up topics.
How To Do It:
Keyword density is no longer seen as a primary ranking factor and there is no particular percentage to shoot for (despite what many “gurus” will tell you). The real challenge is keeping things organic. Both the reader and the search engine crawler need to perceive the article as being relevant, detailed, and high-quality. The proper choice of keywords will enable you to achieve this. Free tools like Google Keyword Planner can be utilized by you or your writer to come up with the right matches.
2. Align Articles With Pages
Obviously, keyword usage is paramount to your website’s search engine success. That’s why you should be coordinating with your copywriter to make sure that they are consistently using the same top keywords in both pages and articles. This is when it helps to have only one copywriter working on your website as that will help them align all of your content together and keep a consistent tone to strengthen your site’s brand.
How To Do It:
Working with multiple copywriters who have no connection to one another can lead to redundant topic choices, redundant keyword usage, and the risk of having jarring shifts in the tone and voice of your website as readers move from one section to the next. In addition to finding one solid copywriter (or team of copywriters who work together) to populate high-quality, consistent content to your website, you should also produce a brand book that you can supply to everyone who works on your website. This brand book will define the tone and other key aspects of your site so things always remain fluid for readers and visitors.
3. Keep Content Fresh
You should give your copywriter the opportunity to create at least one article per week in order to keep your blog flowing with a steady supply of fresh, relevant, and engaging content. Again, depending on your copywriter, you may be the one selecting the topics or they may do it for you. The latter is usually best because with their experience and knowledge, they’ll be able to track what topics they have written about previously and also what topics your competitors are currently having success with.
How To Do It:
How To Do It:While researching topics, be sure your copywriter has the ability and confidence to branch out. They should also be tracking what they have already written. Keep in mind that proper keyword strategy takes a lot of time to lay out. Every article should have a focus keyword, and you should not re-purpose that focus keyword in more than one piece of content. This means planning is paramount.
4. Use Internal Links
Internal linking is a strong SEO pHow To Do It:ractice that your copywriter can employ to boost engagement and help aid in a search engine crawler’s job to index all of your site’s pages. Again, using only one copywriter or a collaborative team of copywriters is your best bet since they’ll be able to publish content on your site and dig up the links to other, relevant pages and posts when needed so that they can inter-connect your content.
How To Do It:
In addition to internal links, which can lead readers and crawlers in the right direction, you also need to consider your site’s structure. The structure of your website needs to be optimized to get you the best results. That means, beyond internal links, you also need to categorize all of your site’s pages and keep categories of a similar size to one another. Taxonomies and tags should be used, and cornerstone content should be defined.
5. Build Backlinks
It’s no secret that backlinks play a major role in your SEO strategy. Google’s leading team members have even hinted that your site’s backlinks are among the top three most important ranking factors when it comes to determining where your website should place in search results. With that said, you (or your copywriter) should be doing your very best to get backlinks to your website.
How To Do It:
The skyscraper technique is one of the most popular ways to earn credible backlinks. Basically, it involves researching current industry trends, finding a piece that’s performing well in the niche, and then making a brand new piece of content that delivers the information just a bit better. You might use updated statistics, a fresh design, or some other improvement to help the piece stand out. Whatever it is, the key to the skyscraper technique is then reaching out to entities who have linked to similar content in the past and asking for a link. The system was created by Brian Dean (of Backlinko) and it’s highly praised.
6. Optimize Images
If part of your copywriter’s job description is to publish the articles directly on your website and include images, one thing they can do to boost your SEO is to use alt tags for the images. They should also think about the size and placement of the image within the article and use a caption where necessary. For a greater impact on your SEO, your copywriter should also think about the actual file size of the image and compress larger images before uploading them to your website. This helps keep your site loading quickly.
How To Do It:
There are four critical things to check off the list when optimizing an image: name, scale, and file size. The first one is simple, make sure the file name is relevant and written with SEO in mind. The second has to do with load time. If you have a 1500×1500 image and it’s only going to be displayed in a 150×150 box, the entire image will still have to be loaded. Scale it down to the size it will be displayed at on your website. Finally, to boost load speed without compromising quality, reduce the file size of images by scaling them down and running them through a tool that removes EXIF data. This can greatly shrink the file size of an image while keeping it at 100% quality. Consider MozJPG for your JPG files, PNGquant for PNG optimization, and SVGO for your SVG files.
7. Use Breadcrumbs
To help your copywriter, you should turn on the “breadcrumbs” feature for your website to help readers navigate back to main categories whenever they click on a post. Your copywriters can help by appropriately tagging and categorizing every article they write, which will help readers find it on your site.
How To Do It:
Choose between a location-based, path-based, and attribute-based structure for your site’s breadcrumbs and then instruct your copywriters to carefully select the categories and tags for every article they publish. Not only will breadcrumbs help users navigate your site, proper categorization will improve your site’s structure overall.
8. Write Meta Descriptions
Simply relying on search engines to pull the first couple sentences of an article, or some random sentences from the middle of it, usually isn’t enough to get your article clicks when it displays in relevant search results. To get the most clicks in SERPs, your content needs compelling metadata. This includes both a title and description that will entice search engine users to click on your site over all the other results being shown to them.
How To Do It:
Luckily, any good copywriter will already know the importance of metadata, and they’ll be able to craft some copy that converts into clicks down the road. However, you may have to explicitly ask for it from them, so be sure to list it as a requirement.
9. Write Social Plugs
Social signals play a big role in SEO too. Your copywriter can help you use social media to get more shares and views for your content by crafting social plugs that you can Tweet, post on Facebook, and share on the other platforms you are active on.
How To Do It:
Just like with metadata, copywriters are familiar with social posts too. This promotional type of content needs to be compelling as well, in order to convince social media browsers to click-through to your website. Again, you’ll have to ask if they have experience doing this before you hire someone.
10. Keep An Eye On Your Competitors
Not only will a good SEO copywriter be checking on things like your competitors’ domain authority to see how their work is stacking up, but your copywriter should also be thinking about the tone, topics, and tactics your competitors are chasing after.
How To Do It:
You’ll likely have to pay your copywriter extra for delving into this in-depth competitor research, but most are more than skilled when it comes to finding your top competitors and analyzing what they’re doing. However, as the site owner, you need to tell them where to draw the line. For instance, if you’re trying to build a distinct brand, you probably don’t want them to mimic the voice of your competitors. That’s where communication with your team comes in to play.
11. Track Your Rankings
Although you may not delegate the analytical part of the job to your copywriter, giving your copywriter the ability to consider how different articles are ranking. This will help them optimize your future content and even make tweaks to your older content to get you better results.
How To Do It:
You should already be tracking the rankings of your content using page rank tools like Moz or SEMRush. To accomplish this, you can set up access to these dashboards for your copywriter so they can check themselves. Or, you can get into the habit of “screen-shotting” a weekly/monthly “digest” style message that keeps them in the loop about how the content they have written is ranking.
12. Hire Additional Help
Let’s face it, one person can’t do it all. SEO is a very complex thing and depending on your copywriter to research the keywords, write the content, consider your site’s navigation, think about your site’s load speed, analyze your competitors, and keep an eye on your rankings is a lot to ask from someone who just signed up to write you some high-quality content.
How To Do It:
You may luck out and find a copywriter who has the time to do everything content-related for you, but as your site and demands grow, it never hurts to speak with your copywriter and hire additional help — whether that’s a SEO guru or just some premium tools to help them work faster.
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Hope this long list of benefits and tips related to hire and make use of a copywriter helps your business skyrocket this year — and all the many years to come!