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Perfecting Your Brand’s Tone of Voice for SEO Copywriting

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perfecting your brands tone of voice for seo copywriting via juliaemccoy

We all know when it comes to SEO, content is key.

Copywriting enables you to tell your story, gives you a chance to strategize with useful keywords, and helps you gain trust and loyalty among prospects.

But content alone won’t bring you success and build long-lasting customer relationships.

It’s your tone of voice that really resonates with your audience.

In fact, 65% of consumers say a brand’s tone of voice helps them build an emotional connection to the company.

Think of it this way: your content is the “what.” Your tone of voice is the “how.”

Tone of voice is the way your message comes across to your reader.

Tone of voice in SEO copywriting

In verbal speech, this is communicated through pitch and inflection.

In copywriting, you portray emotion with word choice, punctuation, and style of font.

This is what elicits a response from your readers.

Understanding your audience and writing with the tone of voice they relate to is a must when developing copywriting for SEO.

Why Is Tone of Voice so Important in Online Content?

Tone of voice helps shape the overall feeling of a message – and it especially matters online.

Why? What’s so important about that?

The thing is, it actually impacts your business in lots of ways.

Consistent Brand Tone of Voice Establishes Your Brand

When you think of your favorite brands, the first thing that comes to mind is probably their logo or slogan, right?

But if that was gone and all you had to go on was their messaging, would you still recognize them?

Tone of voice plays a major role in brand identity.

When written in the same tone consistently, messages begin to reflect the image of your brand.

That’s important because people want to buy from brands that are authentic.

By developing a tone of voice that is uniquely yours, you enable people to pick your brand out of a crowd and increase the likelihood of generating more revenue.

Consistent Tone of Voice Keeps Messaging From Going Stale

Have you ever eaten a handful of stale chips?

They’re stiff, flavorless, and definitely not enjoyable. 😝

The same goes for your writing.

Just because you’re a professional company doesn’t mean your content has to be stuffy.

Loosen that top button and let your hair down a little!

Use your tone of voice to create a unique writing style that people enjoy reading.

It’s more fun and memorable and leaves a lasting impression.

Consistent Tone of Voice Creates an Emotional Connection

The main objective of your copywriting is to drive people to act, right?

With the right tone of voice, you can elicit a variety of emotions in your readers.

This is important because purchase decisions are really driven by emotion.

The way people feel is 1.5 times more impactful than the way people think.

The way people act is influenced by emotion, a key concept in copywriting.

A brand that writes with authenticity and makes an emotional connection with its audience is more likely to succeed.

Consistent Tone of Voice Gives You a Competitive Edge

Content written with a clear tone of voice is more compelling to read.

This keeps people on your site longer, entices them to click through more of your pages, and results in higher conversion rates.

All of this is good for SEO and the business as a whole.

Consistent messaging that is memorable and unique will set you apart from your competition.

Potential customers will prefer your communications over theirs and will keep coming back for more.

5 Steps to Nail Your Tone of Voice

It’s clear that tone of voice plays an important role in your SEO copywriting.

But how do you go about perfecting it for your company?

Here are five ways to identify your brand’s tone of voice and use it to drive sales.

1. Choose From the Four Dimensions

four dimensions of tone of voice

Copywriting can be characterized within four dimensions of tone of voice.

These dimensions help to simplify tone profiles for a brand’s online presence.

They are:

  • Formal vs. casual.
  • Funny vs. serious.
  • Respectful vs. irreverent.
  • Enthusiastic vs. matter-of-fact.

Each dimension is book-ended by two extremes.

Your tone could be one of the extremes, or it could be somewhere in the middle.

You could even combine some for a more unique tone of voice.

Whatever you choose, this is a great starting point to set you on a path for messaging that resonates with your audience.

2. Set Some Guidelines

The key to an effective tone of voice is consistency.

Keep yourself on target by setting some guidelines for your copywriting.

Think about the following:

  • Syntax: how you’ll develop and structure your sentences.
  • Grammar: use the right form of verbs, adjectives, etc.
  • Vocabulary: what words you will or won’t allow.
  • Punctuation: how many exclamation points are too many?

A good exercise is to come up with three words you would use to describe your business.

Then, let those adjectives guide your writing style.

If your words are “friendly,” “positive,” and “outgoing,” your messaging should be upbeat and welcoming.

Guidelines help you deliver messaging that’s consistently unique.

3. Get the Inside Scoop From Your Customers

Maybe you’re having a hard time identifying your brand voice on your own, or you’re sensing a disconnect between the company and your audience.

Reach out to the people who engage with you the most: your customers.

Survey them to get a better feel for how they perceive you.

Ask them to choose from a list of adjectives, or give them open-ended opportunities to describe ways to improve your brand.

Either way, you’ll get some valuable insight that will let you know how you can alter your tone of voice to connect with them on a deeper level.

4. Scope Out the Competition

Tone of voice is all about writing in a style that’s unique to your brand.

So, of course, you don’t want to copy what your competitors are doing.

But you can certainly gain some inspiration from seeing how they handle their messaging.

A quick Google keyword search will show you a list of competitors.

Visit their websites and read through their content.

See how they handle things like:

  • Sentence structure.
  • Vocabulary.
  • Humor.
  • Metaphors.
  • Punctuation.

Learn from what they’re doing well and make note of things that could be better.

Use this intel to develop a tone of voice that works for your brand and create content that resonates with your audience.

5. Write for Your Audience

While it’s important to write in a style that’s true to your brand, you must keep your audience in mind.

Who are you writing for, corporate executives looking for professional information?

Tech-savvy millennials who respond well to GIFs?

Each audience persona is unique, so they each need a tone of voice that speaks to them.

Listen to how they speak on sales calls.

Read their comments on social media or email communication.

Pick up on the way they communicate, and use that to shape the tone of voice you use to reach them.

Use Your Tone of Voice to Define Your Brand

Your tone of voice paints a clear picture of who you are as a brand.

The way you make your readers feel through your SEO copywriting defines your personality and has a direct impact on the success of your business.

Take a close look at who you are as a brand and what perception you want people to have of you from your writing.

Creating consistent messaging that is uniquely yours will set you apart in the minds of your customers, build lasting relationships with them, and help drive success for your brand.


Image Credits:

Image 1: Studeo
Image 2: AdAge
Image 3: NN/g

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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

Claravine and Advertiser Perceptions surveyed 140 marketers and agencies to better understand the impact of data standards on marketing data, and they’re ready to present their findings.

Want to learn how you can mitigate privacy risks and boost ROI through data standards?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how companies are addressing new privacy laws, taking advantage of AI, and organizing their data to better capture the campaign data they need, as well as how you can implement these findings in your campaigns.

In this webinar, you will:

  • Gain a better understanding of how your marketing data management compares to enterprise advertisers.
  • Get an overview of the current state of data standards and analytics, and how marketers are managing risk while improving the ROI of their programs.
  • Walk away with tactics and best practices that you can use to improve your marketing data now.

Chris Comstock, Chief Growth Officer at Claravine, will show you the marketing data trends of top advertisers and the potential pitfalls that come with poor data standards.

Learn the key ways to level up your data strategy to pinpoint campaign success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

SaaS Marketing: Expert Paid Media Tips Backed By $150M In Ad Spend

Join us and learn a unique methodology for growth that has driven massive revenue at a lower cost for hundreds of SaaS brands. We’ll dive into case studies backed by real data from over $150 million in SaaS ad spend per year.

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After 'Unexpected' Delays

OpenAI shares its plans for the GPT Store, enhancements to GPT Builder tools, privacy improvements, and updates coming to ChatGPT.

  • OpenAI has scheduled the launch of the GPT Store for early next year, aligning with its ongoing commitment to developing advanced AI technologies.
  • The GPT Builder tools have received substantial updates, including a more intuitive configuration interface and improved file handling capabilities.
  • Anticipation builds for upcoming updates to ChatGPT, highlighting OpenAI’s responsiveness to community feedback and dedication to AI innovation.

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes. 

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

  1. ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
  2. Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic. 

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demandThe top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demandKeyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential): 

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywordsPages with more referring domains rank for more keywords
Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
How much traffic pages with no backlinks get

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks: 

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content ExplorerExample of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

  • Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
  • Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank. 

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

  1. Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
  2. Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

  1. Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
  4. Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)
Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation. 

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages. 

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinksPage selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks
Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga matsNumber of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial: 

Original landing page for our free backlink checkerOriginal landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away. 

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since. 

Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the pageOur rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page

Organic traffic went through the roof, too. From ~14K monthly organic visits pre-optimization to almost ~200K today. 

Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checkerEstimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker

TLDR

96.55% of pages get no organic traffic. 

Keep your pages in the other 3.45% by building backlinks, choosing topics with organic traffic potential, and matching search intent.

Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. 🙂



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