I have a confession to make! I haven’t blogged in months! With many personal things going on and the fact that my desire to write has been at a scarily low level.

I think it’s slowly coming back! It started a couple of weeks ago when I decided to see where this page was ranking. Low and behold it’s numero uno for “professional copywriter” and “professional copywriting”. This was obviously a pleasant surprise as I already had Bing and Yahoo under my belt.

But what had i’d done to have influenced the positioning, in short, nothing. For weeks this site has only shown twitter updates and that’s about it.

If I ever needed proof that Google enjoys fresh content, this would be it.

I’ve noticed an increase in traffic 20-50 per day and I’m quite proud to be ruling the roost. Not only have I captured top stop it was almost done entirely automated.

I essentially did the following -

  – thought of a keyword phrase “professional copywriter”
  – bought a relevant domain (as above)
  – bought an SEO kick ass theme (wp thesis)
  – did the meta data dance (keyword optimize pages)
  – added the right plugins (basic seo compliancy and syndication/twitter tools)
  – linked my site from a couple of my personal pages (twitter, linkedin etc)
  – footer optimised
  – wrote 12+ articles on the train home on my android (like now)
  – set my blog to announce all my tweets on a weekly basis.

Leave for 2 months until ready. Still pink on the inside.

This military style keyword optimising with very little linking (check using seoquake) was all I needed to dominate a niche.

The next thing on my list is SERP domination. Position 2,3,4 here I come!

More and more companies are choosing to blog on their sites. Whatever industry they’re in you’ll find a collection of blogs that are the flagship of the industry. Competition look at these blogs for advice and insight, despite being a relatively similar company with regard to size, turnover etc. What does this blog have which gets their competitors reading it?
Two things…

…Authority and reputation!

Good blogging in B2B can be an incredibly powerful and pursuasive tool. If you have authority and reputation online you are in the driving seat. You could be a small business, but if your online presence is fighting above it’s weight, you instantly become an industry figure and one which usually is able to provide a service with lower overhead costs.

Your online reputation takes time to create and requires consistant commitment for it to succeed.

How to build Authority
Building authority is therefore the aim of the game. If you become an authority online, it is the quickest and highest ROI return for your companies brand.

So how do you build it?

You simply need to produce quality content and contribute to the industry better than anything else.
If your company provides a service, write about it, tell people industry secrets and report about any industry news. Equally interact with other industry blogs. If you disagree with a particular article someone has written, write a reply and link to it from the original post.

People won’t know who you are if you don’t put yourself out there!

Quality Content
The importance of quality content cannot be emphasised enough in B2B blogging. If you can consistantly produce content which is valued by the industry, they will continue to come back for more. Generating this content requires skill and knowledge, your entire team needs to show that they have the ability and technical know how to be industry leaders.

Ultimate Linkbait

Linkbait is a term used in the blogosphere to describe content that gets people talking and linking. This linking can occur if something is funny and shocking, people want to tell their friends about it and do so through links. In B2B you can’t tell jokes all of the time. The best way to link build within an industry community is to produce content that the community want to read, watch or listen to.
If you produce quality content you will gather links from industry sites. For SEOers out there, we don’t have to think a lot about how much of a good thing that is.

Regularly creating useful content is the best way of becoming bigger.

Conversation
Who do you notice at a party, the quiet guy in the corner or the guy talking to everyone about interesting topics, not only is he smart but he values your opinion and agrees and disagrees with confidence. Being a social commentator online requires a lot of industry knowledge and interaction and people can recognise that in comments, articles and tweets etc.

Be the guy everyone wants to talk to. Don’t open your mouth and sound like a fool, but equally, don’t eavesdrop on peoples conversation and remain silent. How many times have you read an article, had an opinion and then not put any comments. Contribute! (Preferably below)

If you want to discuss your business contact me today through the contact us form or leave a comment. Bloggers don’t bite!

Working in the world of e-commerce I’m more than familiar with a product page. A retail site is made of thousands of pages with the majority of them being product pages!. They all look the same and it is difficult at first glance what the difference is, barring the image.

For SEOers it is vital that each of these pages is different*.

*different being
No generic metadata.
No duplicate content
No generic image names
No generic copy.

For usabilty and SEO it is important to have information on the product displayed on the page. If you have 30+ products of a similar nature, this is more difficult than it sounds. The content needs to be keyword focused pushing that particular product.
The product title needs to reflect the products individual terms rather than a generic e.g. batman deluxe costume instead of batman costume1 batman costume 2. This adds to the user experience and also means that 2 of your pages aren’t competing on exact terms.

you maybe thinking that successful retail sites such as amazon.com and play.com don’t practice this strategy, and you’d be right, however they have something you don’t, millions of pages, millions of backlink, millions of affiliates and more content than you can shake a stick at. They don’t need to focus on keywords, they naturally rank well.

However focusing on long tail keywords can often show you your marketplace and the potential of keyword focussing.

Recently I did some keyword research for a client of mine, looking to sell shoes online. He makes great margins and was looking at the best way of selling. He had a problem. He only sold mens leather shoes.
So I took off doing KW research looking at competition for his terms.
Now this is what I found, type in “mens shoes” into google and/or look at the keyword tool. Apparently the term gets 1.5 million local searches per month!

As you’d expect, the big boys schuh, asos etc were ranking for that term, they have more money and people to throw at SEO than my client (sadly) I then looked for “leather shoes” which gets roughly 800,000 monthly searches (still a lot) and the sites ranking were small companies occupy the space, no big brands, no high street stores. Just independant companies.

The big boys tend to ignore the lesser keywords, and Google tends to benefit this set up. By that I mean, you wouldn’t get a brilliant user experience if one site was ranking organically for every variation of a given term I.e. if Schuh ranked for every shoe term, Google could seem bias by ranking mega brands everywhere.

Google’s willingness to give users choice over different terms gives you the opportunity to get a slice of the pie, and forces big brands to focus on the big terms and you get the crumbs, potentially large crumbs.

Creating microsites is a great way of creating a link network and gives you the ability to target longer tail keywords without affecting the SEO setup of your main site. When targetting the long tail, the microsite content needs to be keyword rich and very specific to your particular term.

As a result of this strong focus, the meta data and onsite copy is often very similar with very little informative content. With this in mind it does create issues with the effectiveness of the site. If people land and read some KW copy they will quickly deduce that the content isn’t the works Billy Shakespeare.

This content therefore gets them to act, whether it is to return to the SERPs or to click through!

Is there is an attractive call to action amidst the copy, this has a proportionately high chance of getting clicked on if the copy isn’t compelling! Sure the page ranks for a particular term but if the copy lacks information then they are left with only one option, action!

Now I’m not suggesting that copywriters should be producing spam content and creating dross copy for microsites, but what I am saying is that the negatives for SEO based content is ‘unclear’.

I appreciate that bad email content can have a negative response but with microsite click throughs, people appreciate that if Google determine a site deserves to be in the SERPs for a particular term, then the site must be trustworthy (which it is) therefore they instantly trust the site and the call to action which exists on that page!

It will be interesting to see the difference between evocative and well written copy to SEO content with excellent CTA.

Just a thought!

I thought i’d write a little article about copywriting with seo in mind and how it can be done effectively. Firstly, the keyword phrase “copywriting SEO” has the most traffic out of many copywriting KW terms, I thought i’d put it in to see if I can get a page ranking for the term “copywriting SEO”. (Elephant in room)

Writing seo friendly copy is all about getting the balance right, giving search engines what they want and getting your message across to readers. I’ll look at each party separately as they both need your undivided attention.

Google et al

Firstly, Google in particular are closing the gap between search engines and humans, trying to reach the holy grail which is, “what is good for search engines is equally good for readers” for example, they announced a while back that they have disregarded meta keywords as an seo attribute, yet still place a great deal of emphasis on meta descriptions, this is due to the fact that users see meta descriptions and not meta keywords, similarly Google are using page loading times to attribute SEO compliancy, again because users are browsing using mobile technology, where heavy java and chunky coding simply will take to long to load up.

The kind guys at search engine journal announced this boldly last week, although the rest of the SEO community found this in webmaster tools months ago!

With this in mind it is making copywriters focus on what the internet is all about, information! Original content, video and image media and social media has never had so much value under SEO, aligning both human need with search engine compliancy.

People with the money – humans

Writing for humans is the paramount of all online content, without which you wouldn’t be writing at all. This needs to have slightly higher priority than search engines in my opinion as the internet allows different channels to get traffic to your landing page. Your landing page better be good otherwise you won’t get goal conversions, no matter how many people visit your site.
Optimising media for humans is very similar to search engines. If you imagine that through browser issues, visitors cannot see images or video, only the text attached to the content, you’d want that content to contain information helpful for humans to still understand what the image/video contained. This form of media is as important as ever now that search engines are including the content in the SERPs.

I thought I’d kick the blog off with 5 elements of SEO copy.

Firstly before I get into the list I first want to share a couple of words of wisdom (rants) about SEO copywriting.

1. Content is King – original content is great content

2. Users buy not SE – although Google et al may love your copy make sure people like it more – people read and buy! not Google!

3. Search Engines are not fans of your work  – sure regular content gets SEs coming back to crawl your site, but they aren’t fans! Humans are fans!

Thats it, I’m going to attempt to give a couple of pointers every post to get the stress levels down and chip in my 2 cents……..Enjoy!

1. Titles

If someone knew the recipe for the perfect title – they’d be millionaires, The title to get people to read, open or buy are simply vital to sucessful copy and thats even before the content has be written. Onsite titles and meta data equally show their importance in relation to communicating the content of the article/site to the Google gang!

2. First Paragraph

Having keywords in your initial paragraph/sentence is vital for a sucessful SEO strategy, as research has shown that Search Engines weigh initial copy as valuable copy and in cases without Meta Description information can be used in the SERPs. With regard to the Human experience, after reading the first paragraph, people will have instantly decided whether to click off or read on. We really want “read on”!!

3. Related Words and Phrases

Related words are vital to good copy giving SEs and peopl alike the opportunity to relate to words they are familiar with. Google’s keyword tool shows words that it believes are similar to certain keywords. There we are! your word list is ready and waiting and by the way search engines are now using context relation algorithms to decide the meaning of the content.

4. Be Specific

Copywriting is all about giving the reader the opportunity to realise that they need your brand/product/service. Be specific and demostrate relevancy and allow the reader to enjoy your dynamic copy, giving them information on your brand/product/service without slowing them down with bland terminology.

One of the hallmarks of great copy is specific, descriptive words in lieu of bland general terminology. Specificity aids the reader by clearly demonstrating relevancy, allows for more dynamic copy, and provides opportunities to increase the general on-page keyword frequency. Make sure to employ your specific keywords when feasible within the context of the copy, rather than rely on generic wording.

5. Lists of 5 are better than 4 or 6

Lists of 5 often are more informative than 4 and 6. Fact!