SEO copywriting is replacing regular text creation. How do you actually write texts these days that can be easily read by search engines and classified accordingly? How important is it to work with keywords today? What is the best way to go about getting ranked at the top of Google for specific search terms?
Even in 2022, many do not know how to write really good texts that are not only loved by search engines but also contribute to the achievement of corporate goals.
In this article, we will provide you with the ultimate guide on how to produce modern and well-functioning SEO texts for your company, whether in-house or with external help.
SEO Copywriting: The Essentials in Brief
- The word “SEO copywriting” is somewhat misleading in today’s parlance. A text must not only be optimized for the search engine, but ultimately for the reader and meet certain minimum requirements.
- A search-engine-optimized content should be created primarily on a data basis. Keyword research is particularly useful for this.
- SEO content is characterized above all by its structure and depth. A topic should be covered as completely as possible.
- What is meant by SEO copywriting? Essentially, SEO content is nothing more than a text that has been optimized for display on the web.
In order to be able to understand the phenomenon of SEO texts more precisely, one should first take a look at how search engines, in this case, Google, actually work and why in the past certain keyword densities or keywords had to be particularly incorporated into texts.
So before we continue to deal with the topic of texts for search engine optimization, let’s take a quick look at how they work and what the goal of a search engine is. For reasons of simplicity, I limit myself to Google in this example – but ultimately the system behind it also fits most other search algorithms.
Everything you need to know about SEO copywriting
Before we get into the practice of good SEO copywriting, I want to give you some background information to get you started. If you want to write really good texts that rank long-term on Google, you have to understand a bit of theory. So let’s get started.
What does Google want to achieve?
Google is simply a company that wants to offer its customers the best possible service.
For example, if I, as a Google user, search for the weather in Porto for the next week and the weather for Lisbon is displayed, then Google obviously didn’t do its job properly. It might be easy for this type of query, but it’s much more difficult for others.
Google has collected a lot of data over the last few years, which is why the algorithm is becoming more and more complex, but also more precise.
That’s why Google doesn’t like simple SEO tricks at all, because of course they violate the quality guidelines and as a result don’t help Google achieve its business goals.
You should always keep the following goals of Google in mind:
- Provide the user with the search result that covers a topic most completely
- 100% match the user’s intention and give him what he is looking for
- Deliver correct content that is easy to read and without spelling mistakes
- You have to manage to appear (and be!) trustworthy.
Our claim as webmasters must or should be to work in accordance with Google’s guidelines. That’s why I’m also convinced that high-quality content that satisfies the user will have the greatest success in the long term.
The so-called Google quality guidelines also provide a perfect basis for these findings. These were updated in July 2018 after a long time and should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in websites or search engine optimization.
The contents are too complicated and detailed to present all in this article. Ultimately, when it comes to content, Google is primarily concerned with these factors:
- Transparency
- Expertise
- Completeness
- Relevance
- Meeting the search intention
- Freshness (not for all searches)
The following quote shows what perspective an author should take in order to be ahead of the competition with their content or to stand out from them:
Think about the topic of the page. What kind of expertise is required for the page to achieve its purpose well? The standard for expertise depends on the topic of the page.
Writing SEO Texts: The Ultimate Guide for 2022
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s take a look at how good SEO copy can actually be put into practice. Anyone who really internalizes this guide will quickly notice that for really good texts today it simply takes more than just adding a few keywords.
Over the next few years, Google will focus more and more on the quality of the content, which is why you should study this guide very carefully.
Step #1: Customer Analysis or Target Group Analysis
Before keywords come into play, the basics must first be laid. A purely keyword-focused content strategy only makes limited sense today. On the one hand, the competition is now very strong, but on the other hand, it always focuses on the same keywords. Most neglect the long tail area.
When you develop a content strategy for your own company, you naturally focus on your target group or your customers. When you work as an agency or consultant, you focus on your customers’ customers.
The aim of this step is to gain the best possible understanding of the target group. You can only achieve such an understanding if you speak directly or indirectly with the target group. When I create content strategies for my consulting clients, I first conduct a 60-90 minute interview and ask various questions. Here you will find a small selection:
- Who would you call your favorite customer?
- What problems and challenges do your customers have?
- Why do your customers book you?
- What would be alternatives to your solution? Are there any competitors?
- How does your product or service work? What makes it special?
This approach gives me a lot of input, which I can then use for the further steps.
Step #2: Keyword Strategy – Macro Strategy
After the interview, I start keyword research. The aim of this step is to generate a list of relevant keywords that is as detailed as possible. For concrete use cases in B2B, I tend to focus on smaller, specific keywords. My approach is to look at the interview notes and type specific keywords into keyword tools or straight into Google.
This allows me to start keyword research as specifically as possible and avoid including irrelevant keywords in my list in the first place. This keeps the list from getting too big and prevents us from later creating texts on topics that don’t generate conversions or bring the wrong people to your website.
Basically, I always recommend starting with the most important and relevant keywords first – these are usually at the end of the customer journey. Specifically, these keywords can be:
- B2B SEO agency
- SEO costs
- SEO copywriting
With the help of SEMRush or Google’s own keyword finder, for example, tons of interesting keywords and keyword ideas can be generated. These are the tools that I would not want to be able to imagine my everyday SEO life without.
Once these points have been clarified and keyword research has been carried out, you can start creating a keyword map for the project. The keyword map is used to assign a specific target keyword to each URL or each subpage, for which the page should later rank. In addition, the SEO process can be monitored and optimized in the keyword map. This step is entirely optional.
Step #3: Analyze and understand the search intent
Before we can start writing any copy, we need to understand the search intent of our target keyword. Search intent is nothing more than the type of search result a user wants to see when they type the keyword into Google. In English, this is also referred to as user intent.
So the goal of our content must be that we satisfy the user and answer the questions that they have when they type the keyword into Google or that we provide them with exactly what they want to see.
By analyzing the search intention, there are practically two different levels on which we should later build our text structure:
- The type of content (long text, detailed text, etc.)
- The language of the text or the content itself
While analyzing the search function, it is important to answer the following questions:
- Who is the user actually?
- What fears or worries does the user have?
- What motivates the user to search for this term?
- How can the user be satisfied?
- What is his background?
- What stage of the customer journey is he at right now?
Of course, Google has already collected some data on this search intention over the years and therefore displays those results for each keyword that has satisfied users in the past.
This means that if our content is structured similarly to the average result of the top 10 rankings for our focus keyword, the search intention should already be pretty good. Therefore, the first step in search intent is that we simply type our main keyword into Google and take a closer look at the top 10 rankings.
The first search results page for the keyword matcha tea clearly shows that the main search intent of the keyword is information-driven – i.e. an online shop with mere products in a category will have a hard time with the ranking.
Why is understanding my target audience so important?
It is essential to understand which users are actually searching for this keyword and what level of knowledge they actually have. There is no point in making a highly technical article if the visitor is a complete beginner and needs to learn the basics first.
If you target your content to pros for the example text, but in reality, complete newbies or beginners in this field come to your site, they may (or even very likely) be unconvinced by your content and quickly bounce off.
Step #4: Complete competitive analysis
In the third step of our preparation for the perfect SEO text, we take a close look at the content of our competitors and evaluate it based on various questions.
The aim of this competitive analysis is to find out how good our competition actually is or to find aspects that we can possibly improve in our later article.
After we initially looked at the content in step 2 in terms of its presentation, we now go into deeper analysis and also take a closer look at the topics.
The following questions are our guide in this step:
- What type of content ranks exactly?
- What subtopics are covered?
- What media (videos, images, podcasts) are used?
- Are there sources? Is the text written by experts or an editor?
- How in-depth is the topic treated?
- Are there any other templates such as tips?
Following these questions, we will go into the preparation more intensively and look at how much “love” was put into the presentation of the content. The topic of content design is playing an increasingly important role in times of mobile-first and should therefore not be underestimated.
This process is also known as reverse engineering – a skill that should be mastered by good and experienced SEOs. I look at what ranks on Google and try to find certain patterns. From these patterns, I can then derive how I have to design my text or my website in order to achieve the same or even better results.
The following questions will serve as a guide for this step:
- How user-friendly is the competitor’s website?
- Are there special designs like boxes, accordions, and tables?
- How does the site look on the smartphone?
- What is the arrangement of the content?
- Are there trust elements? (reviews, testimonials)
After looking at the top 10 and asking ourselves the questions, we should have a very accurate insight into the depth and quality of our competition, which is the basis for the content strategy.
We should now have a relatively clear overview of the type of content and the depth of our competition and therefore already know roughly how we have to structure our text in order to be able to rank in the top 10 for the keyword later.
Step #5: In-Depth Competitor Analysis
After we got the first overview in step 4, we now go into the keywords more intensively. In the second competitive analysis, we identify the page in the top 10 that ranks on Google for the most organic keywords.
This type of keyword research is known as “competition-based research”. It is a very powerful tool and will make you discover some keywords that you hadn’t even considered before.
This can be done either with the tool Ahrefs or SEMRush. Unfortunately, I don’t really know any free variants for this step – I have to say that it’s not really necessary either.
Once we have found the URL that ranks in the top 100 for most organic keywords, we analyze these keywords and can later use them for the structure or body of our article.
Once you’ve taken a closer look at all the competitors, it’s a matter of finding the right intersection.
Competitor A, for example, may have dealt with a sub-topic in less detail but has significantly more content than competitor B on another sub-topic. Our goal is to create the perfect symbiosis of all competitors, which is why we have to create an intersection.
The larger the intersection, the more accurate the result. The more work you put into this step, the better your later results will be.
How do you manage to assert yourself with your content against big brands and publishers?
Anyone who has already done some keyword research and competitor analysis knows this: Some search results are dominated by large magazines or well-known names in the respective industry.
Of course, such publishers have the budgets and manpower to cover many different keywords since they have a large number of articles that they publish every month. The problem with this content is that it is very superficially written. The lyrics aren’t really high quality.
So if you make sure that your content is technically more demanding and not written superficially, you definitely have a chance. In addition, these big brands tend to use keywords with a high search volume, so that you can position yourself more precisely and better with the help of long-tail keywords.
Step #6: Identify content gaps
Once we’ve found the perfect intersection with our competition, we naturally want to ensure that our content is even more in-depth. It makes sense to identify so-called content gaps or content gaps.
Again, this can be done in a number of ways:
- Manual research: You research the web until you have found more content that could still be of interest to the target group of the SEO text.
- Use autocomplete function: This is possible with the help of a simple Google search. Google displays further results for similar search queries both when typing in the search slot and below the respective SERP page. This makes it relatively easy to access additional content.
- Use the help of a tool: SEMRush, Ahrefs, and other tools use a built-in autocomplete feature. Ahrefs has even slightly more in-depth features.
It is even worthwhile to research the questions manually on various other platforms, such as in well-known forums from the respective industry. There is usually a very precise insight into the target group.
Step #7: Create the structure of the SEO text
After we have completed our research, for the time being, we can take care of the structure of our content in this step. For this purpose, it is advisable to use headers to create a structure.
The structure forms the basic framework of our SEO content. The headings should be in a logical order. Sub-areas of our core topic that tend to be “less important” should be at the end of the text.
For example, when it comes to a buying guide, questions that users ask themselves before buying a product should be at the top of the list. Questions that you tend to have after the purchase, e.g. “How do I care for XY product?” should come at the end.
Once the structure of the headings is complete, we can start filling in the texts. This step is great for outsourcing to an expert copywriter.
Step #8: The final text optimization
Of course, once the text has been written, we are far from perfect. With the help of various methods, such as the so-called WDF*IDF analysis, an existing text can be further perfected.
WDF means “Within Document Frequency” and IDF means “Inverse Document Frequency” — it’s about comparing how often a word is used on a page of your website with how often that word shows up on other sites.
These methods examine the semantics of our content by comparing it with keywords from other texts, for example. The aim of this text optimization is to increase the relevance of our content for individual search terms.
The WDF*IDF analysis is quite controversial in the SEO scene – and I’m not a big fan of it either. Nevertheless, it can make sense to check your content with one or even several such methods.
For me, one of the most important factors that distinguish outstanding content from mediocre is information density. Because of such “rules” as “the longer your content, the better the ranking” many people tend to smack excessive text onto a page.
For me, the last step in my text creation is therefore always compression. I try to say things in 1-2 sentences that I expressed in 3-4 sentences in the first draft.
Nobody wants to read any “blah blah sentences”. On the internet, it is important to convey information in a simple way.
Step #9: Snippet optimization and choosing the right title
The best SEO-optimized web text is useless if it is not found or clicked on. It is therefore important that we pay special attention to the topic of snippets.
The snippets are the meta tags: title and description. The meta tags are displayed to the Google user on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). If this is designed in such a way that the user feels addressed by it, there is a high probability that he will click on the result and get to our site.
That’s why it makes sense to give some thought to the design of the meta tags. These should whet the appetite for more and suggest to the user that they will find the best answer to their question on our site.
But not only the meta title is important, but also the title of the post. For example, if you have a hero section (a big image with the title inside – like on this page), then the title will immediately catch the eye of your site visitor.
If he doesn’t feel addressed by this, the user may click back to the search results, which is a negative signal for Google.
What else you should know about SEO texts
In this section, I would like to answer all the questions about SEO texts that are asked again and again by participants in my coaching sessions or by customers.
What role does text length play in SEO?
The length of the content or the scope of an SEO text clearly correlates with the ranking – this was clearly shown by a study by the SEO tool provider Ahrefs. But why is that?
On the one hand, as already mentioned, the completeness of the content is an important factor, which has a particularly positive effect on user signals. The more comprehensively a topic is covered and the fewer questions remain unanswered, the better the user experience.
At the same time, in my opinion, this has to do with the functionality of the Google algorithm. This is able to hide all filler and stop words such as “and” “or”. The algorithm only analyzes essential keywords that help him to classify the text thematically.
The longer a text is, the more such keywords will automatically appear there. Therefore, long content naturally ranks for significantly more keywords than short content.
To put it simply, you should be guided by the length of the competition if you think that you need more and, above all, high-quality information. If you can present it in a shorter article, that’s even better.