How much SEO should a web copywriter know?

If you’re engaged in direct response marketing online, it might make sense that your web copywriter understands some search engine optimisation (SEO). However, before auditioning a web copywriter for their knowledge of SEO, it’s important to be sure you are:

Clear on the objective of your pageInvesting in an SEO strategy, not just copywriting as a standalone tacticNot confusing copywriting with content writing



Is SEO the primary objective of your web copywriter?

The goal of SEO is to persuade Google and other search engines to show your webpages higher up the search results.

If better search ranking is your number one goal, your web copywriter should be knowledgeable about SEO.

However, what few self-declared “SEO copywriters” will tell you is that the importance of the words on a webpage is often grossly overrated. Google considers hundreds of factors when it ranks your website. Your copywriting is only one of them. This makes it limiting to consider copywriting in isolation of other search ranking factors.

This means you’re extremely unlikely to rocket up the search rankings just by employing an “SEO copywriter”. There are too many other factors in play.

If SEO is your primary goal, you should be looking to a specialist SEO agency to give you a complete strategy. The agency might recommend copywriting as a tactic, but they might prioritise other tactics.

(If you don’t have a good SEO agency, feel free to contact us and we’ll tell you what SEO agency we recommend to our clients.)

Are sales or other conversions the goal of your copywriting?

SEO copywriting is about persuading a search engine. Conversion rate optimisation is about persuading a human. These are not the same skills.

If you are looking for conversions — to persuade a human to take action, not an algorithm — your first call should be to a direct response copywriter.

Is your webpage even eligible for SEO copywriting?

Many landing pages have a particular place in a sales funnel. The designer of the sales funnel doesn’t want anyone to find the landing page from Google before they have been through other stages of the funnel.

For that reason, your landing page might be configured to be invisible to search engines (or it should be set to be invisible to search engines).

If your page is invisible to search engines, you don’t need your web copywriter to know any SEO.

Are you looking for an SEO content writer rather than a copywriter who knows some SEO?

They call it SEO copywriting but they mean SEO content writing

Copywriting is the craft of persuading a person to do something. If SEO is your goal, you’re likely to be looking for a content writer, not a copywriter.

Are your visitors coming from SEO — Google and other search engines?

If you’re buying your website traffic from Google Ads, Facebook or elsewhere — and you’re not planning to invest in an SEO agency — you’d get better results from a direct response copywriter than from SEO copywriting for your webpages.

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Recommended reading about SEO copywriting

Here are some of the best articles you can read on the topic of SEO copywriting are:

SEO Copywriting: How to Write Content For People and Optimize For Google from Neil PatelSEO copywriting: The ultimate guide from Yoast

The post How much SEO should a web copywriter know? appeared first on Taleist Agency.