Author: April Hall

Internet Copywriter

Happy Fourth of July!

It’s a time of fireworks, barbecues and patriotic songs as Americans celebrate our Independence. And we are an independent type of country, are we not? We are free from tyranny, free from despotic rule, free from dependency on foreign oil…. (Okay, so some things are really really hard to break free from!) One thing we are free from, however, is boring SEO content!

Everyone who works in SEO and internet copywriting knows that the ultimate goal of your site’s copy is to sell. But, does selling your products or services mean that you have to produce boring copy that’s chocked-full of industry jargon, accessible only to your professional contemporaries–or at least to readers who have Google on stand-by?

No way! Here’s a few simple suggestions for sprucing up your website content:

1. Use a bit of humor, when appropriate. Not every article or product description can be amusing, of course; but an unexpected line or two of humor is often appreciated by the reader who has spent the last two hours researching the newest colonoscopy procedures or funeral planning options (See how I just did that?!).
2. Never go long when going short will work just as well. Unlike college football quarterbacks, your goal as an SEO copywriter shouldn’t be to go as long as you can; sometimes it’s best to nickel and dime it. In other words, most internet readers want to get as much information as possible in a short amount of time. So try to pack shorter pieces of SEO copy with keyword rich, informative text.
3. Use current events to spur reader interest. Try using Google News or other cool tools to find current news stories in your area or industry. Not only are these timely stories more interesting, but they are also more likely to attract internet searchers.
4. Integrate attractive, relevant pictures into your text. Not only are pictures a great way to break up your writing into more manageable chunks, but they also help to give your content some real-world visuals.

As you spend your Fourth of July shooting off fireworks and grilling hot dogs, take the time to be thankful that good SEO writers have declared our own independence. Call it the Declaration of Independence from Boring SEO Writing… Call it Freedom from the Tyranny of Keyword Overusage… Whatever you choose to call it, I call it a whole lot more fun!

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Author: April Hall

Internet Copywriter

Time: No one every has enough of it and nobody has quite figured out a way to create more. In business, we are always looking for ways to make the best use of our time, making the biggest impact we can in the relatively short amount of we have of it.

For copywriters, there are two basic elements that will make our content successful: substance and time. Often, we in the SEO development business will spend an inordinate amount of our professional development learning ways to improve the substance of our writing–and don’t get me wrong, this is a very good thing! We absolutely must learn how to incorporate better keywords into our work, create pages that are useful to our readers and figure out how to give our readers the most information in the most concise manner possible. However, focusing on substance cannot be the totality of what we do as copywriters and SEO professionals. We have to also consider how time affects our website content.

In today’s information technology age, everyone already knows that time moves at an incredibly rapid pace. Computers are updated almost monthly and software seems to develop in tandem with the moon cycles…. There are also a few more aspects of time that content developers need to keep in mind as we create content for our clients:

• Need for breaking and unique news–Everyone wants to be the first to know the latest news and SEO development strategies. Sites such as the ever-current SEO Moz are great places to begin your search for new information about the web development industry. Of course, hitting up the Google information blogs is also essential if you want to stay on the cutting edge of industry news.
• Need to post content early in the day-Those of us who prefer to start our day around lunchtime, when our veins are filled with strong black coffee, may want to find another profession. The world of SEO content begins very early–and is usually geared towards the Eastern Time Zone; so if you prefer to begin working a bit later in the day, you will need to learn how to post in the wee hours of the morning in order to reach internet users who turn on their computers shortly after the rooster crows in Maine.
• Need for fresh content–This aspect of time is already well-known to content development professionals. You need to update the content of your websites regularly in order to remain at the top of the search engine results page. Check the content of your sites–if you haven’t posted anything in a few months, that’s simply too long.
• Need to use current events–Part of creating timely content comes from keeping up with the major current events in your area or sites’ particular industry. Check out one of the latest user tools from Google to discover a new way to stay up-to-date with world and local events.
• Need for content that will stand the test of time–This suggestion may seem counter-intuitive when placed up against my previous suggestion to keep your content fresh, but it’s actually not at all. You want to be known as a content developer who is very knowledgeable about your industry, which means that your advice and suggestions will be useful no matter how the technology changes. Of course, some of what you suggest may be tied to current industry applications, but truly useful content will never lose its power.

Do any of the rest of you have suggestions on how to make time work for the SEO industry rather than against it?

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Author: April Hall

Internet Copywriter

What is the ultimate purpose of the internet? (Wow-I know that’s a loaded question that could take forever to answer!) For some, the internet is a source of information. For others, it’s a place to interact with friends, play games and enjoy the range of available entertainment. For many of us who work with SEO, however, we have one true purpose for ourselves and our clients: to make money. We want to sell as many of our products and services as we can, and this is done by attracting customers–not just visitors–to our sites.

But, how can we attract those ready-to-buy customers to our site, when there are so many other sites floating around out there? How can we make our businesses stand out and make it to the top of the search engine results page when there are such giants as About.com and Yahoo to content with? The answer is to make use of long tail keywords.

I first head the term “long tail keyword” a few months ago; and although I got the gist of what that term meant, I was still confused about exactly how to write content using them. Did it mean that I had to put the entire string of terms together, without any words in between? Did I have to use the long tail keyword in its entirety every time? Some quick conversations with SEO pros, along with some sample searches, led me to these conclusions:

• Long tail keywords are one of the most effective ways to draw unique visitors to your site
• You may break up these strings of words with minor prepositions without causing any major differences to your page’s searchability
• It is best to use long tail keywords in conjunction with shorter keywords on the same page
  

Long tail keywords are 3 to 4 word keyword phrases that are very specific to what you are selling. For example, rather than a t-shirt company writing content that targets “t-shirts”, they may choose to target the long tail keyword phrase “funny political t-shirts”. It seems like targeting such a specific keyword would reduce your number of site visitors and reduce your page views, doesn’t it? Well, this may be true, but there are three very good reasons to use long tail keywords anyway:

1. It makes writing SEO Content much easier. Any content writer is more easily able to write a page of content on “used hybrid cars gas mileage” than they are “used cars”. A more focused keyword content makes for sharper, more focused writing.
2. It makes it easier to target customers who are actually ready to buy. An internet searcher who is looking for “home security systems company houston” is much more likely to be to the point of actually buying a product than a searcher who simply types in “house alarms”. You may be reaching a smaller pool of searchers, but you are reaching those customers who are ready to close the sale.
3. It makes it more likely to reach the front page of search engine results. Using long tail keywords means that you will have fewer competitors trying to reach the front page of the search results, because fewer pages have targeted that string of keywords. Big-name sites usually dominate the search result pages of simple, broad searches; but smaller sites that have created properly targeted content stand a good chance of reaching their ideal customers.

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Author: April Hall

Internet Copywriter

The goal of every SEO company is to make our customers happy, right? But, how successful are we really at doing that? Is customer happiness measured just by the number of longstanding accounts we have? If so, what does that say about our ability to land new accounts? When was the last time you got a random card or email of appreciation from one of your customers? Before we can know if our customers are really happy, or if they are only content, a few definitions are in order:

Happy: Enjoying or showing or marked by joy or pleasure or good fortune

Content: Satisfied in a limited way

Which one of these adjectives would you prefer your customers use to describe themselves? We all want happy customers, but too many of us provide SEO service that offers limited satisfaction and customers who resign themselves to remain simply “content”. Sometimes our clients stick with us out of a sense of comfortableness with our work, and not necessarily out of happiness with our service.

How do SEO and internet marketing companies know if our customers are happy?

• The only emails we get are ones that thank us for our great projects
• We don’t get repeated requests for our clients to gain administrators’ access in order to make site changes and additions
• We begin getting client referrals without specifically requesting them
• Our clients become loyal enough that when they are ready for a complete content overhaul, they don’t hesitate to turn over the entire project to us

Besides offering quality SEO service, using only well-proven and ethical SEO strategies, what can those of us in the industry do to gauge how well we are pleasing our clients? It begins with making ourselves familiar with all of the resources and training available, of course, but it also includes:

1. Adding a quality control staff member. The sole mission of this staff member should be to ensure that every piece of work that your company produces is of fine quality. This mission includes checking to make sure links work, double-checking all outbound links, ensuring pictures are appropriate for the content included, and all other aspects of quality control. It’s a big job, and its also vague in some respects; so choose someone who is familiar with many different areas of internet marketing.
2. Concentrate on improving your good ol’ fashioned customer service. Are you available during the off-hours and on weekends? Can your clients get in contact with a live person, or are they limited to cold, impersonal email forms? In our rush to the forefront of internet marketing and our drive to make it to that all-important first SERP, let’s now forget that your customers want you to value their patronage about all else. Treat them with the respect and appreciation they deserve, and you may be surprised at how loyal they become.
3. Ask for customer input. Don’t forget that sometimes the best ideas come from the customers themselves. Ask them point-blank if they are happy with their service; and don’t send out a mass survey, for goodness sakes! Make a point to contact a few clients–by phone–every week. Ask if they would like to see more updated content, better pictures, perhaps some video. Would they prefer to stay constantly updated with new site content, or do they like to just get a regular analytics report? Would they like to make a contribution to the content? And, a big one, how interested are they in learning some SEO strategies of their own? Remember, the project runs two ways, and your clients don’t like to be treated as just an account number

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Author: April Hall

Internet Copywriter

Internet copywriters are often a unique blend of accomplished, talented writers who also have an uncanny knack for marketing. We are skilled at taking those all-important keywords and creating content that flows well, provides information and is interesting to read. There are times, however, when some of us feel compelled to put marketing keywords on the backburner in favor of demonstrating our creative prowess when it comes to the written word. For those of us who create SEO content every day, and who work to create useful and understandable content for our readers, the following information about trusted newspaper and magazine publications may be extremely useful:

Plain-Language Services conducted a study of the world’s leading print publications, using the widely-accepted “Dale-Chall” formula that analyzes writing and gives each piece a grade level designation. Some of the world’s leading newspapers write at a surprisingly low grade level:

Grade Level and Circulation of Current Periodicals

Were you as surprised as I was to learn that Harper’s writers target a 9th grade reading level? Or that the National Enquirer publishes at a 12th grade level? Here I was thinking that I looked like an intellectual by carefully displaying New Yorker magazines around my coffee tables, when I would have been better off picking up the latest tabloid in the grocery store line!

So, what does this information mean for those of us who work with internet copy? It means that we need to always keep our audience in the forefront of our minds as we create new content. If the largest print publications in the world–TV Guide and Reader’s Digest–understand that to reach the most people, the most effectively, writers need to aim for a 9th grade reading level, how much more carefully should internet writers use language?

The reality is that the internet is the reading source for millions of people around the world, so your content should definitely be geared to reach them. Unless you are writing an academic article for an online journal, you really shouldn’t be using language that only college graduates would understand; and, in fact, you should probably shoot for the grade level that local newspapers often target, which is a 5th grade level. As a former English teacher, it pains me to recommend that SEO writers lower their writing level to reach site visitors rather than to spur readers to stretch their level of understanding… However, as SEO writers, our purpose is to provide relevant, understandable information in order to promote our sites as well as our products and services.

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Author: Henry Adaso
SEO Copywriter

You’ve heard that old saying “You only have 11 seconds to capture a web reader’s attention,” right? Well, I have some good news and some bad news about that age-old sentiment.

The bad news is, that time frame may have even shortened lately, following the emergence of millions of websites and blogs offering the same old solutions to the same old issues. Reading on the web may have enhanced communication between marketers and consumers, but with over 75 million blogs in existence and 120,000 new blogs being created every day, standing out from the crowd has never seemed more difficult.

The good news: there are still proven ways to get magical results on your business blog. Copywriting breakthrough is not unattainable, if you know how to navigate the rapidly expanding web world. Learning the tricks of SEO copywriting can help you gain higher conversion rates.

Practice headline research - Doing a headline research can make all the difference when it comes to niche blogging. If your headline is bland and uninspiring, your business prospect might never get a chance to learn about your products no matter how groundbreaking. Scour top social media sites like Digg and Sphinn to see which headlines are constantly making it to the homepage. For example, “How Tos” or instructional articles that add value to the reader’s experience will surely get you some attention.

Form a brainstorming group - Team up with your colleagues to come up with copywriting ideas. You may not find the magic bullet on the first go. In fact, many of your brainstorming ideas will end up in the proverbial garbage can. Still, you have a better chance of striking gold when you mine other people’s intellectual resources.

Dig deeper - Have you had a personal experience that relates to your topic? Don’t hesitate to share it with your prospects. Your story is unique to you and you alone. No one can tell it like you can. Ultimately, taking the personal approach allows you to connect directly with your consumers.

Subscribe to blogs, newsfeeds, and magazines in your niche - You’ll be amazed by how much content ideas you can discover by sign up for newsletters and RSS feeds in your field. Subscribing to most feeds only takes a few minutes, but the benefits to your business can be tremendous.

Let the reader decide - If all else fails, try a democratic-style blogging — of the readers, by the readers, and for the readers. There are so many ways to do this without turning your blog into spam central.

1. Ask a question (e.g. What’s Your Favorite Xbox game?) and unlock the experts in your readers
2. Ask for guest submissions from consumers or other experts in your field.
3. Turn user correspondence into an article. If a prospective customer writes you with a question, chances are there are other users with a similar concern. Why not address the issue on your business blog so that everyone benefits from your insight?

Good copywriting is not just about creative content. Any Internet-savvy marketer can write effective website copy. It’s about delivering valuable ideas to your consumers in a personable tone. When you find yourself running into a brainstorming firewall, don’t despair — reach out to your co-workers for content ideas, dig deep within for a personal angle, or simply embrace your consumers.

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