SEO Copywriting guide

Part 1: Define your audience

Before a single word is written or a single page developed, it’s crucial to define who the website is being created for. Too many sites ‘play to the gallery’ by assuming that they have a wide, diverse readership – rather like posters on the underground (US: subway). In fact, the people who will actually be reading your site can be identified as follows:

• People who are interested. People who aren’t interested won’t be reading your site. The web isn’t like TV advertising, where you could possibly hope to cultivate a new interest in the audience. The hard sell will just drive people away. Instead, focus on giving interested visitors what all web users are after: ease of use, valuable information and efficient functionality.
• Within that group, people who use the internet. This is always worth bearing in mind. Though they may be interested, does your target audience actually use the internet regularly, and will they turn to it to find what you’re offering? Increasingly, the answer is ‘yes’ for almost any product you can name, but there are still exceptions. And of course there are people who find it hard to use the web, or simply prefer not to – although you naturally don’t hear much about them online.
• Within that group, people who know what your product is called, or can roughly describe it, meaning they can find it online using a search engine. This makes it very important to use the right words to describe yourself – the ‘right’ words being those that potential customers use.
• Within that group, the people who actually reach your website.

Your online marketing can’t do much about the size or composition of groups 1 and 2. Making groups 3 and 4 as large as possible, and hence maximising the traffic to your site, is the domain of SEO copywriting and the focus of this guide.

Now read Part 2: choosing keywords.

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