SEO, Web and Conversion copywriting is quite a challenging task. The main goal of SEO copywriting is to provide structured content-rich writing that both visitors and search engines can easily find on the web. Not only do you have to write extremely compelling and informative content that makes visitors want to read every word and ultimately buy a service or product (which is hard enough alone), but you have to structure your writing in such a way that top search engines such as Google and Yahoo can determine that your writing is genuine and optimized for targeted specific search items. SEO experts know exactly what search engines are looking for to bump your site up higher within the hundreds of thousands or even millions of other sites just like yours.

How SEO Copywriting Works

Search engines have sophisticated algorithms that determine how well your site will rank. You could have the most compelling and well-written text in the world, but if a search engine cannot find major contributing factors in its algorithm, then your site will not rank high. Examples of these contributing factors include: relevant text, strategically placed related keywords throughout the body of text, keyword density, keywords in the title tag and description tag, headers, bulleted lists, the number of links on your page, the number and quality of web pages out on the web that are linking to your site, and clean code. If a search engine cannot find these contributing factors, then it will rank your site lower in search engine result pages. Consider that if visitors cannot find your website on the first page of search results, maybe second if you’re lucky, then it’s as if your site doesn’t exist at all. Most people are too busy to search through pages and pages of search results to find your site.

Relevant Content

Now that you know you have to structure your copywriting techniques a bit differently for SEO purposes, you must then consider how to write relevant content to convince your consumers to actually purchase your service or product. First, determine if your site is selling a service or a product. A service is an act or a variety of work done for others, while a product is a tangible object. Paying someone to change the oil in your car would be considered buying a service, but actually purchasing a bottle of car oil would be considered buying a product.

Make sure to gear your content towards your audience. Is it Business-to-Business (B2B)? Or is it Business-to-Consumer (B2C)? An example of B2B marketing would be a company that sells massage table accessories gearing their marketing efforts towards salons and spas. An example of B2C would be a salon gearing their services and products to consumers.

Your content must convince your audience that what you’re selling is the best on the planet, set at the best price, contains all the best qualities and that if they don’t purchase it their lives will be incomplete. Essentially, you become somewhat of a marketing expert to make your service or product stand out. Whether you are marketing your content towards businesses or consumers, remember that relevant content will grab your reader’s attention, present all the facts and benefits, and then create a call to action.

Call to Action

A call to action is telling your reader exactly what to do: Click here! Purchase now! Learn more, Call this number, etc. Although there is no rule of thumb about what the best call to action is, they are nonetheless important to include in your text. You may feel as if you are dumbing down your writing by doing this, but it is critical that you make it extremely obvious what you want people to do. If readers cannot easily find the link to click on to tell them what to do, or how to purchase your product, then they may click right out of your website and into someone else’s.

Final SEO Copywriting Tips

:
• Research, research, research! Research everything you can about the topic you’re writing about. Become an expert, or at least have enough facts to sound like one.
• Try to make your writing as clear and to the point as possible.
• Use related keywords throughout your writing, but don’t overdo it. http://www.quintura.com/ is a great site to find related keywords.
• Create attention grabbing titles, bulleted lists, and calls to action.
• Know the type of audience you’re gearing your writing towards.
• Stay up-to-date on ways you can improve your copywriting/marketing techniques. A great site is http://www.copyblogger.com/. It has many informative articles on what works and what doesn’t.

The more you can learn about what search engines are looking for and how to better market your service or product to your audience, then the easier SEO, Web and conversion copywriting will become and the higher search engines will rank your site.

Bookmark to:

The traditional methods of getting a message across to potential customers are growing more and more ineffective with each passing day. Radio commercials are reaching fewer people since the onset of satellite radio and the iPod. Music lovers no longer have to wait for their favorite song to play. Radio stations can no longer hold listeners at bay, flooding them with advertisements, as they wait for their favorite song. People quickly turn the page with print ads, and TiVo has all but made tv commercials a thing of the past. I’m no longer held captive by Fox, or NBC, or even HBO. There are other ways to view their programming. Simple ways that not only spare me the boredom of commercials, but also save me time as well. And I don’t need TiVo to do it. All of us can avoid the interruption of traditional marketing.

Even online, advertising to your target audience is getting harder every day. Punching the monkey no longer works, banner ads are being ignored, and sites with popups are being totally avoided, or stopped by the latest browsers. Any smart internet browser knows that ads on the right side are transactional based, and that the information contained on those pages comes with a price. We stick to the left side. (more…)

Bookmark to:

What is Data Feed Optimization?
Data feed optimization is the process of modifying product feeds to rank highly in one box results and shopping comparison websites. Similar to an RSS feed, data feeds can be used in several different ways. Many companies make data feeds but SEO experts have paved the way for data feed optimization. A data feed for something like Google Base may contain things like product description, name, price, SKU, color etc. A huge advantage of data feed optimization is that onebox results for products appear before all organic search results. Additionally a well optimized feed takes much less time to see demonstrable results. Few SEO companies specialize solely in data feeds but there are a select few.
(more…)

Bookmark to:

Yahoo! Buzz is a new social media news site currently in Beta. With Yahoo! Buzz you can vote up stories to the homepage. A story is ranked based on its Buzz Score. The score is derived from search term popularity, the number of times a story is emailed from Buzz, and the number of votes a story receives.

I’d imagine Kevin and Jay of Digg.com may be shaking in their boots right now because this means huge competition for other social media sites like Mixx and Reddit. Jay recently stated that Digg is not in a bidding war with Microsoft and Google but I’m sure many companies have their eyes on Digg.com and will pownce on it when opportunity arises.
(more…)

Bookmark to:

Utah currently has one of the most stable economies in the entire nation. Much of the reason for this seems to be largely based on a strong real-estate market. Utah has thus far avoided the subprime banking issues that have plagued even well-established financial institutions. The housing market in Utah is stable, unemployment is low, incomes are up, and according to Wells Fargo economist Kelly Matthews, Utah is not feeling the squeeze as much as other states, and faces little threat of falling into a recession. Utah’s economic situation is a model for the nation.

So what does Utah’s economy have to do with PPC? Think about how consumers are being affected by the national financial downturn. The general advice from analysts is to spend a little less and save a little more. Marketers in other states have to deal with this reality when they consider marketing budgets for the coming quarter. The economic squeeze will inevitably affect their bottom line. However, if you are a business that markets goods and/or services to the local Utah market, you’ve got potential customers with more stable jobs and more money to spend than those in other metro markets whose prospects are crumbling under the burden of bad loans and rampant foreclosures.

Are you in Utah Real Estate? Do you provide other local services such as legal consulting, chiropractic or other health care services, child care, food delivery, etc? Professionally structured and managed PPC marketing should be a no brainer for you right now. A strategic search marketing partner will help you to maximize opportunities to gain a competitive advantage even in difficult times.

Bookmark to:

In a perfect world great things remain great, honest people and defenders of truth remain spotless, Client #9 still has wife #1 and stocks always go up.

In the real world The US economy is struggling because of a real estate driven credit melt down, Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer seems to have some very expensive and now high profile habits after being the peoples champion rooting out corruption, seeing the look on her face recently, I can’t imagine that client # 9 will have wife # 1 for long and will probably lose most of his accumulated assets in the process and the number one search engine on the planet, Google has lost over $95,000,00,000 (Billion) in market cap over the last 4 months.

So what does all of this “not so good” news have to do with SEO, SEM or the future of search? (more…)

Bookmark to:

The process of evaluating risk in any venture, decision, or daily activity is primarily based on our own individual experience. That experience teaches us to either move forward because we have a comfort factor with the expected outcome or to run the other way because the risk is undefined and therefore represents danger to us.

My own team of Technicians, SEO Specialists, Copywriters, Web Designers, Bloggers and Database guys have their own personal definition of risk and because they are for the most part young. They have never paid for a wedding, funded college for a child, dealt with a debilitating medical issue or cover payroll every other Friday.

In the search marketing business there is a responsibility for all participants to better understand that what they do each day “represents risk to any CEO or CFO” mostly because these senior managers don’t get the SEO process, don’t understand the Social Media Marketing world and certainly have no concept of the dynamics, preparation or complexity of building an effective web strategy. Even though that strategy, if well conceived, will likely change their business forever; in ways that they have no concept of at the early decision making stage. They therefore are naturally skeptical until the concept sinks in or is proven on an income statement.

(more…)

Bookmark to:

We are currently expanding our offices and needing to hire more SEO specialists, SEO copy writers, Social Media Specialists, PPC specialists, Bloggers, Business Consultants, Graphic Artists, Web Designers and basically all of the smart guys that do stuff that I can’t do but that our clients around the country desperately need.

It was suggested that in the new section of the office it might be a good idea to have a POOL TABLE available for the team to unwind, take a break and to as they say “CHILL’ from the stresses of the day. I have been considering their request and have come up 10 possible reasons as to why I should think carefully before saying yes.

(more…)

Bookmark to:

Quick! Who’s the latest American Idol favorite this week?

1. David Archuletta
2. Colton Berry
3. Alana Whitaker

You’re right if you chose #3.

The whole American Idol craze is hard to ignore. I’ll bet that even if you’re like me and hate American Idol, most of you have some idea who the current and past contestants are. Does the name Sanjaya ring a bell? Of course it does, as does the word made popular by one of his famous hair styles, the Pony Hawk.

Sanjaya was blessed more with great hair than he was with a great vocal style. Yet he was last season’s most talked about contestant on American Idol. He rode the American Idol wave to pseudo-celeb status. We all remember his name. We recall his hair. I secretly tuned into American Idol last season just to see what Sanjaya was going to do. Through a little differentiation, Sanjaya became a brand through the American Idol medium.

What does this have to do with Pay Per Click? Well, PPC vendors work in much the same way for advertisers as American Idol works for wanna-be idols. How so? (more…)

Bookmark to:

I acquired an internet company 10 years ago in a less than shrewd business transaction. Having been trained as a stock broker with no experience handling a technology company. I was compelled to hire others that did. I have been very fortunate to be able to surround myself with a talented team that I trust without hesitation.

I am currently attending the SMX West Conference in an attempt to further my knowledge about an industry that I seem to be in the middle of. My hope is that with this increased knowledge, will come very wise and prudent strategic decisions. I am the lucky one, however, since virtually all of my business associates running major companies have no clue about how to market themselves online.

After attending the SMX Bash last night, and the meetings today, it is not a surprise to see an attendee population that probably has a median age under 30. I am amazed at the collection of bright, talented, focused, driven, competitive, and forward-thinking individuals. (more…)

Bookmark to: