How To Write Incredible Online Copy

Posted on Mar 1, 2011 in Blog | 1 comment

Begin with your existing assets

The best way to get started on generating your online or offline content is to set aside some time to look at and expand upon your most powerful top-tier content-related business assets.

• Business name
• Tagline
• Elevator pitch
• Keywords and keyphrases

Use the words your audience uses

When you are choosing your top keywords and phrases, you’ll want to be sure to use words that your audience uses. Using “correct” or “technical” terms may be fine for you to toss around when talking with your business peers, but to reach your market you will have to know what terms they use, so that your content will not only be accessible (and automatically served up by the search engines), but will make sense to them when they see it.

If you know your audience or target market pretty well, you probably know many of these words already. But you can also do keyword and keyphrase research using Google’s free keyword tool (adwords.google.com, look in the tools menu)
or by simply googling a certain phrase to see how many good results are served for that phrase. Compare that number with a slightly different phrase and you’ll know which one is more frequently searched on.

Write about what they want to know

The single most critical factor in creating compelling content that gets you good ranking from search engines is relevancy. Write about what your audience cares about. If you have content that your target audience really needs and wants, you are off to a great beginning.

Move toward top navigation

If you are writing for a website, the words and phrases in the primary levels of navigation on your site will be critical in terms of letting people (and search engines) know what your business does. Even if you aren’t writing for a site, these key words will be incredibly useful as you create press releases, mobile apps, print collateral, or email campaigns.
The top navigation items in your content are:

• URL — the address someone types in to get to your site
• Website name — often related to, but different from the URL
• Tagline — how your business is described in one sentence or a few keywords/phrases
• Top menus — these might also be your most important page names
• Headlines — subheads are important, too

The search engines robots that crawl the web to see what your content is will look at the content in the top levels first. If those are tightly related to what your audience wants to know, you have successfully gained your second hit of what is often called “google juice,” or solid potential to rank well in search.

Use your keywords and keyphrases in the body of your content

As always, you want to create compelling, relevant content that your audience wants and needs, not keyword-stuffed garbage. But you also want to use your most important language not only in the high levels of your content, but also in the body. This lets your target market know that they’ve found the information they were looking for. When your audience stays on the page to take in your content, and the search engines realize you are delivering what you’ve promised, everybody wins.

Make it readable

When you have highly reader-friendly copy you make readers happy. Happy readers makes search engine bots (and you thought they were so unfeeling!) happy. Even if your content is highly technical or scientific, you can follow these simple principles to make your content quickly and easily found, accessed, and appreciated.

• Keep it short. If you have a lengthy subject, it might be better broken up into smaller chunks.
• Use headlines and subheadlines. This allows people to scan your content to take it in quickly, even if they can’t spend the time to read carefully. Give them the gist by making your headlines and subheads tell the story.
• Include bullets and numbered lists whenever you can. Like this! Bulleted and numbered lists are great for helping outline content, and search engines snatch them right up.
• Ditch old habits. No more double spaces at the ends of sentences (modern fonts don’t need this, like the old monospace typewriter fonts did) or hard returns. Left justify text for maximum legibility.

Off-page items can be more important than on-page items

You may have the best online content ever created in your industry, but if you stop there, you can easily lose the battle for attention. Here are some of the other factors you will want to consider as you work to build your brand.

• High-quality incoming links – these show that people trust and value your site.
• Number of incoming links — the more you have (from quality or trusted sources), the better. Links should go not just to your home page, but to relevant pages in your site.
• Relevant anchor text – anchor text (words used in the clickable part of a link) that is relevant to your content is highly valued by search engines.