Content Marketing Q&A

The differences between a Copywriter & an SEO Copywriter
Whilst essential wordsmith skills are shared by both and many practitioners cross-over between the two publication mediums, there are a number of individual disciplines that business owners should be aware of.
 
A copywriter writes the words that communicate an idea or details about either a business, product, service, personality or cause. The copy is most often utilised to inform, advertise or promote the ambitions and/or interests of the copywriter's client.
 
A proficient copywriter (whether SEO aligned or not), will always possess the essential skills of fully comprehending each client’s purpose to align their output to a defined marketing and communications strategy. They will acquire a sound understanding the target readership’s knowledge, issues and industry characteristics. An accomplished copywriter must become a genuine expert in their client’s field of influence so that they can realise and pre-empt opportunities to contribute creatively to conversations relevant to their client’s marketing objectives.
 
Their copy can be published discreetly in the form of a letter or broadcast widely in print advertising or public relations (PR), newsletters & company profiles, video or telemarketing scripts, on brochures, posters & billboards, television commercials (TVC's) and radio advertisements. A copywriter's objective is to inform, educate, engage and/or convince readers and viewers through the art of wordsmithing.
 
Someone who adopts the nomenclature of "SEO copywriter" is a wordsmith who understands that their output serves two masters, the human site visitor and the popular search engine algorithms who view their published words totally differently. They are an individual who specialised in preparing their client's copy for online publishing where it is encoded on to web pages and its "Search Engine Optimisation" (SEO) is most often an additional prerequisite. Online copy options include blogs, social media profiles and posts in addition to every word on a web page.
 
An SEO copywriter creates copy that enhances their allied contributors' SEO, they must work closely with all graphic webpage contributors including designers, artists, videographers and photographers to ensure that all forms of published web content are optimised for the search engine's indexing and ranking algorithms.
 
SEO copywriting techniques include crafting beneficial Metadata in addition to incorporating the most effective keywords to ensure that web crawlers recognise what each page's content is about, and can index its relevance to anticipated search words and phrases. Accomplished SEO copywriters will invariably insist on "long-form" copy (1,000 plus word count), as algorithms always rank them above pages with fewer words.
Keyword research was once the exclusive realm on the SEO expert; nowadays SEO copyrighters have adopted a combination of wordsmithing and SEO abilities to provide a comprehensive service.
 
A proficient SEO copywriter will make sure that all your online publications share six essential copy elements:

1. Relevant & attention-grabbing headlines that respond to browser search criteria;
2. Metadata that identifies the search results relevance and value;
3. An introductory sentence that encapsulates each page's individual core message
4. A concise introductory paragraph that establishes the publisher's credibility and instructs the reader what to do next (Call to action).
5. Are "word-rich," having at least a thousand words incorporating high ranking search terms (keywords) to heighten their SEO relevance ranking.
6. Text hyperlinks to relevant related material within your site or elsewhere on the web. Backlinks remain important as long as they are only from other high ranking and relevant sources (avoid questionable offers of providing large quantities of backlinks to boost your SEO).

 
Finally, once your website is published there is the matter of ongoing SEO; this is often not the role of a copywriter but a technical skill best managed by dedicated SEO providers. However, as additional communications are added to your site, and page content updated, it remains just as important to have your SEO copywriter prepare copy in keeping with your site's established content strategy and navigation structure as ad-hock additions can very often dilute the subject page's SEO.
 
John Eustace in a communications consultant (and wordsmith) who believes in strategy-first, then aligning content with intent. Having worked for 40 years across multiple marketing disciplines and in all creative media, John understands the value and roles of informed and persuasive communications.
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