5 Most Common SEO Copywriting Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

A significant player in your SEO strategy is content. Whether it’s your main web pages, ongoing articles or external guest posts, your copywriting needs to be on point to ensure the visibility of your website and its content on search engine results pages (SERPs)—Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.

Here are some common mistakes we see and how you can improve your copywriting:

1. Not Doing Keyword Research

Keywords differentiate SEO copywriting from typical copywriting. 93% of people begin their search for a product or service on Google (or another search engine), you must also know what keywords they use when they do a search query.

Tip: Make keyword research your first step after determining what content you want to write. Whether it’s SEO web copywriting or SEO content in the form of blogs and other online copy, find your keywords and write them naturally into the copy. Check the keywords your competitors are using and invest in a keyword planning tool. It can quickly show you what keywords your readers use when searching on Google so you can use these in your copy.

2. Going Overboard with Keywords

The right keywords will get your copy in front of your target readers. However, stuffing your text with keywords is going to cause Google to slap you with a penalty. Many business owners assume that by using your target keywords in every sentence of your content that it will boost your ranking. While this was true once upon a time, nowadays this strategy could not be more wrong. Going overboard with keyword usage is registered as spam by search engines and hurts your website’s ranking.

Keyword stuffing can also have a negative effect on the quality of your content, which will lead to high bounce rates and low session duration.

Tip: SEO best practice is having a 1-2% keyword density. Hiring a digital marketing agency that has both creative and SEO experts, can help you meet your keyword goals as well as deliver high quality content that will engage readers.

3. Poor Linking Strategy

Millions of blog posts are published every day. But many sites do not utilise external linking for fear of driving people away from their site, but it is an important part of your SEO strategy to support your copy by linking it to credible sources.  Some also neglect to add internal links (content within their site), which can lead to readers staying on your site longer.

Tip:

• For external linking, make sure that you back up statements by linking them to sites that Google considers credible online sources. Be sure to have any external links ‘open in a new tab’ in order to not lose the reader to another website.
• For internal linking, review your website for previously published content that will support what you have written in your copy.

Don’t miss out on an excellent opportunity to increase your copy’s ranking on Google.

4. Not Making Use of Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Metadata is a collection of information (meta tags) used to describe the content on your site which can be read by search engines and web crawlers. But since it is not seen on pages directly, some think it’s not important. Many companies just leave the meta tags blank or leave the meta tags that are autogenerated by their website platform, which is just as bad.

Tip: There are some best practices you can use to maximise your effectiveness. Here are some tips for writing effective title tags and meta descriptions that will get more clicks on your links and, in turn, improve your overall results:

Title Tags Tips:

• Aim for no more than 66 characters
• Make sure your title tag accurately describes your page
• Put the keyword first (or within the first 11 characters, if you can)
• Don’t forget to mention your brand name
• Make unique title tag for every page

Meta Description Tips:

• Aim for around 155 characters
• Include your primary keyword for the page
• Make sure description is relevant to the page content
• Make the description unique for each page (no duplicate content) and interesting

5. Not Having an Ongoing SEO Plan

Many organisations think that SEO is a one and done process. Trends change, consumer behaviour changes, company goals change, search engine algorithms change, and SEO needs to be able to keep up with all of that. Regular evaluation and adjustment are crucial. The importance of ongoing SEO activity is very high, no matter what kind of company you have. SEO is all about playing the long game.

Tip: Companies must continually refresh their SEO strategy as their company goals change, new competitors emerge and search engine algorithms update. It is important to do a regular audit of your keywords, google analytics, site speed tests, and external links. You must also continuously add content to your page to keep your site relevant.

We hope this helps!

These are just a few tips to help you get started, but there are countless other things like schema markups, properly tagging images, site speed, cross-device compatibility…just to name a few more.

Implementing a strong ongoing SEO plan that will make an impact on your business can take countless hours in researching, executing and analysing.

So, if you’re strapped for time, lack the internal resources and expertise, you may want to bring on SEO marketing experts to create, implement and execute an SEO plan for your business.  o

Let the team at B2Me Marketing take the weight off your shoulders, strengthen your business’ online presence and help attract new customers through your website.