SEO Copywriting guide

Part 4: Getting SEO keywords right

Humility is important when choosing keywords. The right keywords are the ones your audience chooses, not the ones you’d prefer. While you might want to position yourself as offering ‘home heating solutions’, your audience might be more likely to search on ‘boiler repair’. Much as I might long to describe myself as ‘content maven’ or ‘text creation ronin’, my potential clients will search on ‘copywriter’ so that’s the term I use.

There’s no room for pretension or decoration with keywords. If people won’t search for it, you shouldn’t be using it. The use of fancy descriptors is a hangover from print and TV advertising, when audiences are (to some extent) captive and you could impose ideas on them, potentially even creating interest or desire for a product from nothing. Online, every customer interaction starts with a need - a need that’s named by the customer. 

Beware also of jargon, buzzwords and insider-speak. Having worked for many years in publishing, I used to be fussy about the distinction between ‘writing’ and ‘editing’, since the roles of author and editor are so distinct in that world. I wanted to make it clear that I was an editor rather than a writer, since to me that meant I was better qualified. In fact, nobody cared. In B2B marketing, the copywriter is the guy who sorts out the words - period.

Now read Part 5: Connecting needs to products

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