With SEO becoming an ever increasing part of our marketing lives, online writers are faced with the challenge of whether to write for SEO or the readers themselves. And with search engines constantly changing their algorithms, which can explain changes in rankings and website traffic, every writer must think of new ways to keep up with all the changes.
When copywriting for clients, a key part of Protean’s content strategy is to never prioritise ‘content manipulation’ over ‘content’ – there’s a healthy balance that can, and should, be achieved. Experience has shown that this is the best way to keep both humans and search engine robots, happy!
The latest SEO approaches from search engine giants Google and Bing, means that web content must now cater to the customer instead of purely keyword density. Rather than just looking at key word matches they now look at the levels of engagement such as the number of page visits your site experiences or how well you acknowledge your audience. Making sure that you address your audience’s questions within your content and provide them with new, interesting material on a regular basis means that your readers are more likely to revisit your site frequently and also share those articles with people within their network. This is looked upon extremely favourably by Google and will boost your search rankings considerably.
Word variety also pleases both your readers and the search engines. In days gone by, working your way through keyword stuffed articles was sometimes painful. No matter how good the copywriter, the same set of words and phrases do not look natural used repeatedly in a single piece. And after all, not everyone searches the same keywords, so using different variations of words increases the chances of people finding your website or blog.
So don’t forget you are writing in the hope that someone is going to read your content! Don’t over stuff it with keywords and phrases just because you can. Your audience will not enjoy reading it and an overly aggressive density can get you flagged as a “spammer” and result in ranking penalties.