The Surprising Way to Increase Traffic to Your Website
Harnessing the Power of Search Engine Optimization
You know when you’re in a meeting with a marketing consultant or website developer and all they want to talk about is SEO? You pretend to know what they are talking about because you know those letters stand for “Search Engine Optimization” and those are all English words you know...but beyond that, it’s a bunch of gobbledegook.
You smile and nod, but figure you don’t need to worry about it, so you leave it to them. Because who has time to learn about this and isn’t that what you’re paying them for? The thing is, you need to know what it’s about so you can understand if your website is working as the marketing tool it’s supposed to be–and what to do when it’s not. I promise it’s not as complicated as it seems.
Hi! I’m Katie. I’m a copywriter who’s interested in making websites, marketing materials, and tools accessible to as many people as possible. I find it’s easier to learn something new when I have a picture to look at. But, since I’m a copywriter, I’ll have to paint a picture with my words to show you what SEO is and how it works.
Understanding SEO for Your Website
Here’s how I see it: the internet is like the Ocean.
It’s huge–almost impossible to fully explore.
There is so much in it! Some treasures, some trash, and some things you didn’t know you needed.
It can be overwhelming to search when you’re looking for something specific.
When someone does an internet search, it’s like they’re going fishing. Not fishing with a rod, though. This is the kind of fishing done by trawling. Internet searches are like trawling because it’s all about what’s near the surface. The person puts their keywords into a search engine like a trawler puts down their net. Then they sift through the results to see if they caught anything they wanted.
Your website is like a fish you want others to catch, so you need it to stay near the surface. Search Engine Optimization is what keeps your website near the surface. Websites that stay near the surface have tapped into SEO to keep them buoyant. The stronger your website’s SEO, the higher the chances it will show up in someone’s net and get the clicks you want.
Get an SEO Check-Up for Your Website
So how do you know if your website is staying afloat? Perform a website audit. You can pay someone–like a copywriter or web developer–to do this for you. Or you can use an auditing software on your own. Ubersuggest provides a full audit for the price of a monthly subscription, and shortened versions if you’re using the program for free. Paying for a full audit is worth it if you’d like to see how your website has performed over the last few years. Caution: you might find yourself geeking out unexpectedly!
Doing an audit will show you how strong your website’s SEO is and why. Ubersuggest will tell you exactly what is hurting your SEO, how badly, and what you can do to improve those issues. Some of those issues can be fixed by a website administrator, but a handful can only be addressed through copywriting.
The Link Between Copywriting and SEO
Recommended Word Counts
One of the most common issues I see with websites I’ve audited is that they don’t have enough words on each page. Search engines crawl through the pages on your website to understand what kind of service or product you provide. The more words you put on the page, the easier it will be for the search engine to know what you’re about and when to direct people to your site.
Pages without enough information will act like dead weight and pull your entire site down the search results page. Ensuring each page on your site has enough words–about 800-1200–will keep your website floating happily near the top. But you can’t put just any words on your website–you do have to be strategic.
Are You Duplicating Text Anywhere?
For instance, you can’t just say the same 300 words over and over on your site and call it good. Of course, you would never do that! But you might be repeating yourself accidentally in the body of the website or in title tags for individual pages.
Repeating text hurts your SEO because search engines see this and think you’re trying to game the system, pretending to have more content. They don’t like websites they think are cheating, so they penalize them and drop them further down in the search results.
Thankfully, these issues can be easily fixed! Your website administrator can look at your site’s title tags to ensure those aren’t duplicated anywhere. A copywriter can help create new ways to talk about what you do, so you get the needed word count without being repetitive.
Blogs–the Surprising SEO Booster
I’ll be honest, the first time I heard that blogs were a major part of copywriting, I rolled my eyes. I thought blogs were little more than a diary that people published for the whole world to see–an odd place to put a diary, right? Well, it’s time to leave that idea of blogs back in the early 2000s, because blogs have transformed into your website’s best bet for strong SEO.
Consistent blogs are the easiest way to keep your website floating near the surface of the internet ocean. If you redid your website a year ago but haven’t published anything new since, your website is going to sink to the bottom. It doesn’t matter that your website has a cool new design with updated words and beautiful pictures. Over time, you begin to move down in the search results.
If you aren’t putting out anything new, search engines see your website’s inactivity and think your business is inactive. And they don’t want to send people to inactive businesses. That makes them look silly. When you publish blogs consistently–two to four times per month–you’re telling the search engines that you’re still active and ready for business.
In addition to being released regularly and having enough words for each post, blogs need one more element to keep your SEO strong: keywords. When a person does an internet search, they put keywords into their search bar and wait for the relevant websites to show up in the results.
Writing blog posts that incorporate keywords used in searches increases the likelihood your site will be included in those results. Doing a little research before you write will boost the effectiveness of your blogs. If you don’t have time to research and write regular blogs, consider contracting with a trained copywriter who specializes in your field.
It may be the change that takes your website from buried treasure to the catch of the day, every day!
