SEO
17 SEO Copywriting Tips To Help Your Rankings
![17 SEO Copywriting Tips To Help Your Rankings 17 SEO Copywriting Tips To Help Your Rankings](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/1642114632_17-SEO-Copywriting-Tips-To-Help-Your-Rankings.png)
Writing is already hard enough, but writing with the goal of ranking in Google requires even more strategic planning.
Successful SEO copywriters consider what users want, and how search engines actually work, throughout their writing process.
For those site owners who want to grow their visibility through content, understanding SEO copywriting is the right place to start.
What Is SEO Copywriting?
SEO copywriting is the process of creating content with the goal of ranking in search engines for relevant keywords.
The process can be applied to your homepage, product pages, blog posts, or even your profiles on review sites.
When done well, SEO copywriting can increase the total number of keywords that your content ranks for.
Why Does SEO Copywriting Matter To Ranking?
Google relies on natural language processing to understand what users are searching for and what our content is about.
Over the years, NLP models have gotten far more advanced.
If you want to learn more about NLP technology, put some of your own website content into Google’s Natural Language API Demo.
Then, see how Google works to understand it.
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Screenshot from Google’s Natural Language Processing API Demo Tool, December 2021
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Screenshot from Google’s Natural Language Processing API Demo Tool, December 2021
Because of Google’s advancements in NLP, SEO copywriting has evolved to be far less about quick tricks and far more about creating informative and valuable content for users.
But as seen above, Google is still a robot.
SEO copywriters should consider how search engine technology actually works and leverage that knowledge when writing their content.
SEO Copywriting Tips For Better Rankings
The best content will always be created with users in mind.
But, there are strategic choices copywriters can make to help crawlers better understand their content and promote it accordingly.
Here are some SEO copywriting tips for creating content that is loved by both users and search engines alike.
Research And Prewriting
1. Choose A Realistic Keyword Goal
Before you start writing, you should have a clear keyword target in mind. But make sure you set your content up for success by setting realistic and achievable keyword goals.
Keyword research is the foundation of the SEO copywriting process.
You might be tempted to choose industry keywords that have higher search volume, but those keywords are often extremely competitive.
If you are a website with less authority, you’re unlikely to rank on page one for those terms, no matter how high-quality your content is.
So how do you know if your content stands a chance of ranking?
Keyword difficulty scores can serve as a benchmark for your keyword goals.
![17 SEO Copywriting Tips To Help Your Rankings Keyword difficulty score in the SearchAtlas keyword researcher tool](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/1642114631_115_17-SEO-Copywriting-Tips-To-Help-Your-Rankings.png)
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Screenshot from Ahrefs, December 2021
I suggest finding relevant keywords with difficulty scores that are less than or equal to your site’s DA.
These keywords might be long-tail or have more informational search intent, but they can present real opportunities for your content to rank quickly and start driving clicks.
2. Analyze The Top-Ranking Content
Want to know what it will take to rank? Look at the content that is already on page one.
Review the top-ranking pieces of content and use them as models for your own content creation.
How long is the content? What are the page titles and meta descriptions that are enticing the users to click?
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Screenshot from SearchAtlas, December 2021
The goal here is not to create a carbon copy of your competitors, but to better understand what content, authority, and page experience signals that Google crawlers are responding to.
3. Understand And Write For Search Intent
Search intent is often narrowed down into four categories: Navigational, Informational, Transactional, and Commercial.
The search intent of your target keyword determines what type of content you should create.
For transactional keywords, Google is more likely to promote product or service pages knowing that the user wants to make a purchase.
For informational queries, Google more often ranks blogs, top-ten lists, how-to articles, and resource-driven content types.
Most likely, your keyword can be categorized in the above four categories, so strive to meet that intent with your content.
4. Outline Your Structure
Not all content outlines will look exactly alike, but the idea is to determine the overall topic, subtopics, headings, and main points the content will include.
If you’re optimizing properly, your keyword targets will have a prominent place in these structural components.
Not all copywriters like to work from outlines, but they can be very useful in ensuring proper on-page SEO practices.
5. Prioritize Quality Over Everything Else
Google wants to rank quality content for its users.
But what is quality in the eyes of crawlers? Relevance, load times, backlinks, and referring domains, to name just a few.
In terms of the quality signals that are communicated through the writing, Google is looking for:
- Comprehensive, in-depth content.
- Original reporting and analysis.
- Expert authorship and sourcing.
- Proper grammar and spelling.
Do your best to meet these signals, and Google is more likely to see your website as high-quality.
The SEO Copywriting Process
6. Explore Your Topic In-depth
Although content length is not a ranking factor, there is a strong correlation between longer content and top rankings.
That’s because long content is more likely to display the quality signals listed in tip #5. Additional studies have shown that longer content also earns more backlinks and social engagements.
So do your best to be comprehensive and explore your content in-depth.
Keyword tools can help you expand on your content by showing you the subtopics that have a relationship to your keyword goal.
7. Write For Passage Ranking
Google’s Passage Ranking update went live in early 2021. As a result, Google no longer just indexes and ranks web pages, but specific passages of content.
For example, the below content provides a thorough answer to the search query, [What is an SEO assistant?].
When the user clicks on the SERP result, Google has indexed the exact part of the web page that answers that question and highlights it for users.
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Screenshot from ZipRecruiter, December 2021
Passage Ranking means that your content has so many opportunities to rank for multiple queries.
Strategic use of structure, headlines, and questions is key to helping passages of your content rank well in search.
8. Use A Content Optimization Tool
Leveraging AI and NLP tools can result in major boosts in keyword rankings.
Clearscope, SearchAtlas, SEMrush, and others all have content optimization software that eliminates some of the guesswork of the SEO copywriting process.
These tools identify common words and topics used in top-ranking content and suggest similar terms for you to include in yours. As long as you incorporate them naturally, the results can be significant.
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Screenshot of Google Search Console, December 2021
I’ve seen content tools have an almost immediate impact on the total number of keywords, impressions, and average positions that web pages earn.
More SEO copywriters should be using them.
9. Offer Answers To Related Questions
Another way to improve keyword rankings is to answer common questions that users are asking in relation to your target keyword.
There are a couple of ways you can find out what these questions are: Google Search and a keyword tool.
Look to People Also Ask and autocomplete to see what common questions people are asking about the topic. Then, make sure you include those questions and their answers in your content.
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Screenshot from search for [how to fix garbage disposal], Google, December 2021
Similarly, some keyword tools can tell you the common questions that searchers are asking.
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Screenshot from search for [how to fix garbage disposal], Google, December 2021
10. Include Synonyms And Keywords In Your Headings
It’s important to include your keywords in your h1s and h2s, but Google is now smart enough to understand synonyms and other related terms.
Choose words that have a semantic relationship with your primary keyword target.
Google’s NLP algorithms use them to understand your content more deeply.
Adding these terms into your headings can help you signal strong relevance but without keyword stuffing.
11. Avoid Long Sentences, Long Paragraphs, And Misspellings
In terms of readability, you want your content to be easily understood by a variety of people. If your content is too academic or technical, some may choose to bounce back to the SERPs.
Similarly, content that is poorly written or full of typos will deter readers.
Aim for shorter sentences and paragraphs to improve the reading experience.
Some SEO tools suggest a grade level, but the idea is to keep the language simple and accessible to as many people as possible.
Copywriting Extras
12. Break Up Your Content With Rich Media
Although long-form text is important to ranking, your content should have other non-textual elements that help readers stay engaged.
Make sure you include images, videos, or infographics in your content, particularly to break up long passages of text.
Google likes to see content that incorporates rich media, so leverage it to your advantage.
If that rich media slows down the performance of your pages though, it can work against you. So make sure any rich media is optimized for speed and performance.
13. Include Relevant Links With Contextual Anchor Text
Your internal and external links, as well as the anchor text of those links, are also important quality signals to Google.
Make sure you link to relevant, authoritative sources. Also, make sure you utilize anchor text best practices:
- Anchor text should be relevant to the destination page.
- Don’t use too much exact match anchor text.
- Avoid generic anchor text (e.g. “click here”).
- Use contextual anchor text as often as possible.
14. Make Your Content Easy To Navigate
Features like a table of contents and jumplinks make your content more user-friendly.
This is particularly true for longer articles or resource pages.
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Screenshot from WordPress, December 2021
Google crawlers like to see these navigational elements on the page that improve UX. Make sure you incorporate them whenever you can.
After The Writing
15. Make Sure That Google Understands Your Content
A week or so after you publish your content, login into your Google Search Console account to confirm that Google is understanding it correctly.
See what keywords you are earning impressions for.
If they are close to or relevant to your original keyword goal, great. If not, you may need to revise the content.
Higher positions and clicks will come with time and authority building, but impressions are a good early sign that Google understands your content and knows when to promote it.
16. Optimize And Test Your Meta Tags
Google now rewrites page titles and meta descriptions when it sees fit, but this only happens about 20% of the time.
It is still important to write optimized meta tags so Google understands your content and users are enticed to click.
However, you don’t have to take a one-and-done approach to meta tag optimization.
If after several months, your content gets to page one but still has a low click-through rate, test out page titles and meta descriptions to see which produce the best results.
17. Revise And Update Accordingly
Over time, your content will eventually become outdated.
New information may become available, keywords may grow more competitive, links may break, and more.
So make sure to revisit old or underperforming content to see if more attention is needed.
Your most important content assets should be updated at least once a year, particularly if they are discussing industry trends or analysis.
Final Thoughts On SEO Copywriting
The reality is, SEO copywriting doesn’t end after the content is published on your website.
The internet changes, algorithms evolve, and your content needs to be updated accordingly.
If you deploy this final tip, you can increase the shelf-life of your content so it maintains top keyword rankings for years to come.
More resources:
Featured Image: WarmWorld/Shutterstock
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
![WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WordPress-Insiders-Discuss-WordPress-Stagnation.jpg)
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
![Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Googles-New-Support-For-AVIF-Images-May-Boost-SEO.jpg)
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
![CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CMOs-Called-Out-For-Reliance-On-AI-Content-For-SEO.jpg)
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
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