Copywriting is a very important element of every SEO strategy. High-quality content is THE thing that’ll help you rank and that’ll set your site apart from all the other sites out there.
You probably want to do SEO copywriting the right way. Without making any fatal mistakes. So what SEO copywriting mistakes should you definitely avoid? I’ll tell you all about it in this post.
1. Not starting with keyword research
SEO copywriting always starts with keyword research. Take some time to think about the terms you want to be found for. You should take keyword research seriously. It can be rather daunting, but it’ll definitely pay off.
2. Bad, unoriginal content
One of the biggest SEO copywriting mistakes people make is to write content purely for SEO reasons. Content is King. Content will probably help you rank the fastest way possible (providing you have some important technical issues covered). But content should NEVER be written only for SEO purposes.
Think about what you want to write about. Consider your audience. Define a message. You should write high-quality content based on original ideas. That’ll be the content that will drive traffic to your site. That’ll be the content that will convert visitors into customers!
3. Keyword stuffing
Do not go overboard with mentioning the term you want to rank for. Do not mention your focus keyword in every sentence. Your text will become really awful to read and your audience won’t like that. Above that, if you over optimize your text, you’ll also risk a Google penalty. In our SEO plugin, we allow 2.5 percent of your text to be your focus keyword. More than 2.5 percent focus keywords will result in an orange bullet. A keyword density higher than 3.5 percent will give you a red bullet. So, we’ve got your back in this one :-).
4. Focusing on only one focus keyword
Don’t focus too much on one focus keyword. Try to rank for multiple keywords, key phrases and synonyms. Especially if you’re trying to rank for a certain long tail key phrase (like ‘vacation home Southern Florida’) try to use a different word order every now and then. Otherwise, your text will become really weird to read. The Yoast SEO premium plugin actually has great functionality, helping you to optimize your text for multiple focus keywords.
5. Unreadable texts
A final SEO copywriting mistake that people often make, is that they write difficult or dull posts. We know writing is hard. Nevertheless, copy should always be nice and easy to read. Don’t use too many long sentences. Avoid to use many difficult words. Check whether the structure of your text is clear. Make sure people understand the message of your text. A big part of your SEO copywriting strategy is making sure you are writing a clear and readable text. People should be able to understand what you want to tell them. If you succeed in creating copy that’s easy to comprehend, people will be less inclined to click away. They might even return to your site to read your next post.
Conclusion on SEO copywriting mistakes
SEO copywriting mistakes are made when people focus too little on the quality of their texts. Text should have an original idea, a story. And, texts should be nice and easy to read. You should optimize your text for the search engines without making any concessions to the quality of your text. Perhaps it’s possible to mention your focus keyword yet another time. However, if the sentence becomes awkward, you should decide to leave that focus keyword out.
The information in this post comes from Yoast.com
