As per the Yahoo report, spending on content marketing is set to rise by 186% in 2020.
Brands who were a little hesitant about the potential of content marketing as a lead generating channel are now convinced about the ROI that content marketing alone can generate.
For effective content marketing, there are some SEO copywriting tips that need to be followed well especially when we are stepping into 2018.
Here are some powerful SEO copywriting tips that can raise the standard of your content and increase its chances of going viral.
1. Don’t Make it a Hard Read! Use Plenty of Paragraph Breaks
People love articles that are easy to read. Maintain a Flesch-Kincaid score of around 60 as this help the readers to easily read the content without much difficulty. You can check the Flesch-Kincaid score with the help of a tool like Readable.com.
Next in place, you should have lots of page breaks! Remember in your school days, you got bored reading lengthy paragraphs? No one likes to read long-long paragraphs!
The best way to let people scan through your content easily is to use shorter paragraphs with frequent page breaks wherever possible. The human mind will easily grasp the content resulting in greater shares and improved ROI.
Content Marketing Institute is a good example where you can see these kinds of posts. The posts have shorter paragraphs 3-4 sentences long and lots of paragraph breaks.
2. Organize Your Content Into the Best Fit Hierarchy
As you redesign your website to conform with the latest trends, it’s also necessary to redefine your content hierarchy to make it easier for readers to read and follow your content.
Use analytics to identify the best spots in your content. In-page analytics can help in this regard. Make sure to include at least a year of data in order to minimize the impact of seasonal fluctuations.
Once, you are sure which content generated the most conversions and which buttons had the maximum clicks, it’s time to organize your existing content and create a master page.
For example, a master page can have a hierarchy similar to: white space, main headline, grids to provide a consistent structure to the content, blurbs, excerpts, CTA, pull quotes, images and videos.
The exact position of these elements will depend on your main site theme and insights from the analytics data.
Moreover, you need to adopt proper content management strategies that enables your content to rank highly in search and get found by more customers.
3. Reduce Verb Phrases and Create Simpler Sentences
Content that performs well in the search engines are the ones that do not have fluff in them. When it comes to SEO copywriting, shorter and simpler sentences produce more value as compared to longer and complicated ones.
Use simple verbs in place of verb phrases. For example the sentence, “there have been several studies in the past that suggest that high intake of caffeine is bad for health” can be reduced to “studies suggest that high intake of caffeine is bad for health”.
4 Ensure Your Content Focuses on a Problem and Provides a Complete Solution to It
People are looking for solutions when they are browsing the web. Search engines makes this task easier by providing a reference to the exact solution that the user is looking for.
The best SEO copywriting tip that I can give is to present the content in the form of a complete solution. Adding FAQ’s, including screenshots, having statistics, making use of proper images, including videos, having lots of above-the-fold content are all means of allowing the users to have complete information on the subject they are looking to explore.
Here is a great SEO chart describing how customers form queries in search engines in order to find content.
5. Write Long-Form Content and Use Keywords in the Right Areas
Long-Form content performs better in the search engines as compared to shorter pieces. An ideal word count is about 2500 words. Anything around that is a good choice to opt for.
In 2018, take the help of analytics and identify all the under-performing pages. Re-write the content and increase their word count (add value ofcourse and don’t focus only on the word count). Adopt the skyscraper technique and follow all the steps listed in this case study by Ahrefs.
Moreover, use your main keywords in the right areas. Start the title tag with your money keyword, use keyword phrases in the description tag, H1 tag, page URL, at the start of the opening para, in between the para and use synonyms of your main keyword wherever possible. Maintain a perfect LSI ratio as Google uses topic modeling in order to extract topics and establish relationship between documents.
Apart from the above discussed strategies, some of the other essentials that you need to keep in mind are:
- Use an active voice having power words in them.
- Use bullet points and subheadings wherever possible.
- Add proper meta descriptions.
- Include authoritative external links and relevant internal links.
- Use the APP method to write a compelling intro.
Start following the above strategies and you will gradually realize more of your pages improving their visibility in the search engines.
