Even if you write wonderful copy, it won’t benefit your business if it can’t be found. This is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important to keep in mind in copywriting. Employing effective SEO makes it much more likely that your target market will find your copy when they type key search phrases into any search field (Google or others).

SEO is a huge topic and there are endless tips, tricks, and strategies. What we’ll cover here are the basic guidelines that will help to get your copy found.

You don’t need to spend a great deal of time on SEO. If you follow the simple guidelines outlined here, it will be enough to make an impact. If you’d like to delve further into it, you can, but this is the basic foundation.

How Search Engines Find Website Content

Everyone has used Google or another search engine before. You enter keywords and then websites containing the information you’re looking for appears as if by magic.

The “magic” here is a set of secret algorithms that search engines use to rank and find content. The reason that Google is the world’s most used search engine (at the time of writing) is that it has worked hard to refine its algorithms, making constant changes to them, in order to return the best results.

Google “crawls” websites and collects data about them. By analyzing the text used on websites, as well as other factors, it determines what the website is about. Then, when a user searches specific terms, Google sends the user to the relevant websites.

What This Means for Your Web Copy

What this means is that you can increase the likelihood that your website will be found by the search engines by using specific keywords and key phrases. From now on, we’ll use “keywords” to mean both individual words as well as phrases.

For example, let’s imagine that you have a company that offers translation services for Asian languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. You conduct some research and find that “Asian language translation” is a good keyword.

You would then use the words “Asian language translation” wherever possible naturally in your copy. For example, your headline might read something like, “Let us take the headache out of your Asian language translation needs.” You might then use the exact phrase a few more times in your copy.

It’s very important that your keywords are used naturally. Years ago, marketers and copywriters “stuffed” their text with keywords. Using keywords too much can actually get your website penalized by Google, so use them naturally (we’ll discuss more on this later).

How to Find Good Keywords

The search for good keywords is one of the major occupations of online marketers. Although many businesses focus great effort on finding that one perfect Holy Grail of keywords, the keywords you use don’t exactly make or break your SEO strategy.

It’s actually quite simple. There are three things you’re looking for in keywords:

• Relevance – They’re relevant to your website (in other words, they’re the search terms your prospective customers are searching for).
• High Search Volume – Preferably the keywords you select get many searches, which means you’ll have more traffic directed to your site.
• Low Competition – It’s good to try to find keywords that are not already being used a great deal on other websites. Try to find keywords that people are using for search, but which competitor websites aren’t focusing on. If you have a great deal of competition for your keywords, it will be more difficult to be found in the mass of online content.

To illustrate this last point, let’s take the example of “weight loss.” If you have a site about weight loss, this seems like a perfect keyword. After all, it gets a tremendous number of searches per month.

However, there are already probably thousands of websites out there using this as their main keyword. You’ll have a very hard time ranking for them. If you target a high-competition keyword like “weight loss,” you’re wasting your efforts.

How do you find keywords that are high-search AND low-competition? This is tricky and it’s what all SEO marketers hope for. For now, try to find keywords that are relevant to your site and get a decent amount of search volume.

Tools for Finding Keywords

The most important criteria for keywords is that they should be relevant. It’s not that important for beginner, basic SEO to get hung up about search volume and other statistics. One way of finding good, relevant keywords is to simply brainstorm. What search terms would your prospective buyer (who you know well through your research) be looking for? Make a list of good, relevant terms and use them in your content.

You can also use online tools that offer data about keyword searches. An easy tool that’s popular, effective and free is Google’s free AdWords Planner. 

The AdWords Planner is designed for businesses running Google AdWords campaigns, but it can be used by anyone to find data on keywords. It’s free but you have to make a Google AdWords account in order to use it.

If you already have a Google account, you can sign in with your email and password. If you have a Gmail, Google+, or YouTube account, you’re already registered.

There are other free services and premium services that you can use to find keywords, but it’s good to start with Google’s AdWords Planner first. It offers a wealth of reliable information and is relatively easy to use, so it’s a good introduction to keyword research.

How to Use Your Keywords

Once you’ve selected a few keywords to use, it’s time to work them into your text. Google’s algorithms are mysterious so no one knows exactly how they crawl pages, but there are some general guidelines you can use that will boost your site’s SEO.

• Use your most important keyword somewhere in your headline
• Wherever possible, work your keywords into sub-headers, but keep it natural
• Use each keyword a few times in the body of your text (generally once every few paragraphs)

You should also include your keywords wherever possible in your meta-tags. Meta-tags are bits of code that tell search engines about your website without changing the appearance of your website. The most important of these are the title meta-tag, the header tags, and the description meta-tag. The description is what appears under your website’s title in the search engines. Images also have a meta-tag.

Marketers argue over exactly how to use keywords and there is much difference in opinion. If you use your keywords in your headline, sub-headings, and meta-data, it’s enough. Be careful not to overuse or “stuff” your text with keywords or it will actually harm both your search results and your conversions.

Tools for Checking Your SEO Power

A good tool for checking your SEO is Google Analytics. It’s a free but very comprehensive program that offers a wide variety of stats and reports. It offers just as much data as the best premium program and you can customize your reports so that you only get the metrics that matter to you.

Two free online tools you can use for a quick check are SEO Centro’s SEO Analyzer and Site Analyzer’s website analysis tool. The advantage of using online tools like these is that they’re very simple.

SEO Analyzer shows you areas where you “passed” (where your SEO is good) and also offers warnings and errors that you should clean up or improve. Simple graphs show you data about your traffic sources, website speed, and content.

Site Analyzer’s website analysis tool rates your website in various categories. Its data is more detailed and complex, but it’s not as easy to use if you don’t have a basic understanding of SEO.

There are many other free tools like these available.

There are also SEO plugins that you can add to your WordPress site. The most comprehensive is WordPress SEO. It offers a variety of packages and in addition to reporting on your site’s SEO, it automatically fixes things that can improve your SEO.

Beyond Keywords

SEO is a “rabbit hole” that you can get lost in. As I’ve mentioned earlier, keep your SEO simple. Choose a few good, relevant keywords and work them into your copy wherever it’s natural to do so. Keywords aren’t the be-all end-all.

In fact, the best SEO strategy is to not rely solely on SEO. Search engines like Google change their algorithms from time to time and if you rely solely on search engine traffic, you may find a dramatic drop in traffic.

Another major component of SEO is backlinks, or the links coming back into your site from other sites. If you can build backlinks from relevant sites, you’ll get a higher ranking in the search engines.

It’s even better, however, to develop a strategy where you bring traffic from social media, YouTube, and other sources where you connect with your audience. If you diversify your traffic sources, you won’t be putting all of your eggs in one basket.

When it comes down to it, having well-written copy is what will bring people to your site. And well-written copy includes using words and phrases that your target market would normally use every day.  Therefore, those same words are likely to be used in their searches, otherwise known as keywords!