How to Write for SEO and Sound Like a Human
There are a lot of ways copy can impact how you are building your business and standing out from the crowd. From helping you show your personality and communicate your value, copy is important at a lot of customer touchpoints but especially at the first—the one where you get found by potential clients on the internet. Because, when it comes to putting your business in front of people who don’t already know you exist and convincing them to learn more, you’ve got to have a ground game that is founded in SEO. And, that means you have to understand how to write for it.
But Tayler, isn’t that what you and Gillian do as copywriters?
Yes! But, the reality is, it is important for you to know how to write optimized copy because there are lots of instances you can’t hire a copywriter (think: last-minute projects, a quick blog post or tweak to your website copy). So today, I wanted to make sure that you have a basic understanding of what it means to write for SEO as well as how to do it in a way that doesn’t sound robotic. Read on for my top copywriting and SEO tips!
What does it mean to write for SEO?
The most plain-English way to explain it is that writing for SEO means writing in a way that helps you get found on the internet. And, the key to doing this is knowing the keywords (the words someone types into a Google search) that are related to your service or product and knowing where to put them in your copy—which is in your headlines and paragraph copy.
Optimizing your headlines (or titles) – It is important to use keywords in your headlines and titles because these are places Google looks at in an effort to try and understand what a web page is about. To explain this from a more technological perspective, your headlines and titles are typically labeled as H1 and/or H2 tags in your website’s settings and code and what you put there tells Google how to understand the page. From your point of view, these are the larger font types on your website (that is what you as the human sees) but now that you know this is an important piece of real estate, you might be realizing you’ve stuffed them with fluff copy.
Your to-do: Review your headlines and identify places it makes sense to include a keyword.
Optimizing your paragraph copy – You might already understand the need to include keywords in the paragraphs you write or different content blocks of your website and the key to writing for SEO here is understanding how many times you should use them. This is called keyword density and the optimal range is as low as 0.5% to as high as 2%. What does this look like in terms of word count? On the low end, it would be once for 200 words or twice for every 100 words on the high end.
How to sound like a human
Now that you have a baseline understanding of how to write for SEO, it’s time to address the other thing that stresses people out—writing without sounding like a robot. And, this is important not just because I’m pretty sure you don’t want your brand voice to sound stiff and impersonal but because Google wants you to write like a human. Now, this is a bit of an art you need to practice, but I promise you’ll become more and more comfortable doing it over time. Here are some tips to get you going:
Start by writing what you need without a concern for keywords. In fact, write it without any concern for grammar either! The goal here is to get your fingers typing to create the “ugly first draft”
Then, do a pass on your draft and find the places it feels natural to put your keyword. Add it in and/or revise the section to make it fit
And, if you need to soften things further to make it sound human, you can add adjectives or phases just before or after the keyword
For example, if you are writing a headline with the keyword “wedding films,” you can soften it by writing:
Romantic wedding films that will make you…
Unforgettable wedding films to relive your unforgettable day
See, it isn’t that hard to write for SEO. And, if you’re feeling ready to tackle that list of blog posts on your own, be sure to check out our Wedding Blog Introduction Templates that come with all the SEO tips to make sure you’ve optimized it from tip to tail!
