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Stop! In the name of SEO copywriting

Friday, September 24th, 2010

Martin is a freelance copywriter for Big Star Content

Most SEO copywriters will be familiar with the concept of ‘Stop Words’. Even if you’re not a web copywriter you will probably have an intuitive awareness of Stop Words, even using them (or more to the point, not using them) when you use search engines to make queries.

Stop Words are those common or garden words, the little ones, that bind the juicy keywords, the substantive content of a sentence together in the English language.

Here’s an example. Say you are based in London and you wanted to find a digital copywriter based in or around London, maybe to write some SEO articles or to do some blog copywriting. You would naturally Google (or Bing) something like ‘digital copywriter London’ or ‘London digital copywriter’. Intuitively, it’s unlikely that you would would complete a fuller query including the word ‘in’ – as in ‘Digital copywriter in London’.

It makes sense to cut to the chase – that’s exactly what Google does. Instead of trawling through billions of  stop words that offer virtually no value to the pursuit of relevance Google simply ignores them. Bing does too, offering this advice on its Advanced Search Options page: “You must capitalize the NOT and OR operators. Otherwise, Bing will ignore them as stop words (Words that are frequently used, but that do not offer descriptive value to search engines. For example, a, of, and the are considered stop words.).“ Here’s an extensive list – http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-stop-words.html

How might stop words impact on online copywriting? Could they be integrated into copy and used to assist SEO?

Well, some people certainly seem to think so. Bestseocopywriter.com for example, blog the advantages that carefully deployed stop words can have by breaking up keyword phrases to read more naturally.

Compare these two pieces:

“High impact website design is a mix of flash, content and design. The problem with high impact website design is that it has a tendency to load slowly”….. and…

“High impact website design is a mix of flash, content and design. The problem with a high impact website is that the design has a tendency to load slowly…”

See how the second use of the phrase high impact web design has been broken up in the second piece, using the stop words ‘is that the’ to make the sentence read better?

Should you do the same thing in your SEO copywriting?

If you have infinite time, patience and ability then maybe. But really any decent web copywriter will more than be able to naturally flag relevance within a piece of writing. That a Google search for Take That or The Who is topped with returns for the bands goes to show that there are many sophisticated factors at play in addition to simple word based information retrieval.

Stop words – worth knowing about – best ignored.

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Posted in SEO copywriting | 1 Comment »

SEO Copywriting and The Power of Persona – Part 3

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Martin is a freelance copywriter for Big Star Content

Painting an intimate picture of a member of your target audience is important. It enables you to identify their motivations and find the right sort of language to address them.

Sometimes though it might be impractical to use personas. It would be too restrictive to drill down to such a defined individual. Too tight a focus, too niche.

In these circumstances you could take a less persona led approach, and instead choose to engage people at the personality level.

Remember in the first blog in this series when we we briefly addressed the 4 basic personality types?:

  • Competitive
  • Spontaneous
  • Methodical
  • Humanistic

Let’s take more in depth look at these personalities and how you can best approach them.

Using the various Future Now definitions of basic personalities and cross referencing  them it is possible to define a clearer picture of what these different personalities mean and what they naturally need to make them happy.

The Competitive personality or Assertives

Are businesslike, power oriented. They like a challenge, are self motivated and disciplined.

They prefer to focus on ‘WHAT can your solution do for me?’ type questions such as:

  • What are your competitive advantages?
  • What makes you the superior choice?
  • What can you do to help me achieve my goals?

The Spontaneous or the Amiables

Are personable, quick fire and tend to lack discipline.

They prefer to focus on WHY is your solution best to solve the problem?  Sometimes ‘WHEN can I have it’ type questions such as:

  • How can you get me to what I need quickly?
  • Do you offer superior service?
  • Why will this let me enjoy life more?

The Methodical also referred to as Analyticals

Are businesslike, detail oriented, disciplined and looking for evidence.

They prefer to focus on ‘HOW can your solution solve the problem?’ type questions:

  • What are the details?
  • What’s the fine print?
  • How does this work?

The Humanistic or Expressives

Are personable, relationship oriented though lack discipline and tend to take their time.

They prefer to focus on ‘WHO has used your solution to solve my problem?’ Type questions:

  • How will your product or service make me feel?
  • Who uses your products/service?
  • What will it feel like to work with you?

Use these personality categories as the basis for smart SEO copywriting. Copywriting that mean you don’t need to streamline your online marketing so that it only address tight and very specific niches. In the fourth and final part of this Copywriting course and The Power of Persona we will look at how to do this.

Read the other three parts: SEO Copywriting and the Power of persona part one, two and four

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Should a copywriter give the public what the public wants?

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

There’s been a trend over recent years, a sales and marketing research trend that has worked hard at trying to identify exactly what it is that your customers really want. What are their true desires and unfulfilled needs? What is is that you aren’t offering that they truly crave? Where are the commercial holes in your product range and how can you fix them? Focus groups, quizzes, questionnaires, crowd sourcing, interviews, you name it. No expense has been spared in the pursuit of identifying and then meeting, as yet, unfulfilled customer needs.

A bridge over troubled spaghetti

Malcolm Gladwell,  the famous author, futurologist and Simon & Garfunkel mashup offers a famous analysis of the ‘giving the public what the public wants’ take on things in his famous  TED Talk In the name of research, if you get the time, do try to check it out, it’s brilliant. It might also help inspire your copywriting.

In his lecture Gladwell makes the compelling argument that the food industry undermines itself by asking people to share their preferences through focus groups and questionnaires. That the industry is asking an unanswerable question. That people don’t really know or simply don’t have the ability to define an optimum product. In other words – People don’t know what they want.

According to Gladwell,  if you ask people what kind of coffee they like the consensus is – Dark, rich, hearty roast! And that’s true for somewhere between 25 and 27 percent. However… in reality, most people like milky, weak coffee. Who puts their hand up and admits that when asked though? As Gladwell says: “The mind knows not what the tongue wants.” The mind doesn’t know what the mind wants either.

Tell me something I don’t know

So what’s this got to do with SEO copywriting? Simple. Of course you need to understand your audience – to do your research, to get inside the head of your reader, to be able to relate to and empathise with the pain they feel, their hopes and their motivations. Knowing your reader goes without saying. But knowing what moves them isn’t the same as letting them dictate what you write for them. Why not?

Because they don’t know what they want to read.

Don’t try and second guess perfection. Use your experience and your abilities to deliver the sort of copy content that delights and surprises people. You might even delight and surprise yourself in the process.

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SEO Copywriting and The Power of Persona – Part 2

Friday, September 10th, 2010

Martin Williams is a freelance Copywriter for Big Star Content

In the first part of our four part SEO Copywriting and Personas post we looked at the necessity of having a careful and clear understanding of the target audience. That in order to be able to communicate effectively, we need a crystal clear picture of who we are attempting to communicate with. We need to define personas.

What is a persona?

According to Wikipedia – ‘Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behaviour set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way.’

Karen Goldfarb says: “Basically, a buyer persona is to your marketing, sales and communications strategy what a mannequin is to clothing.”

It’s the job of the SEO copywriter to apply what ever techniques they have at their disposal to get inside the heads of prospective customers and really find out what makes them tick. To make the clothing (copy content) not only fit perfectly, but look great as well. Online marketers often go to great lengths to profile prospective clients so that copy can be tailored to suit.

Ideally you will use demographics such as geography, gender, income, ethnicity, education and family. You’ll use psychographics to look at likes, dislikes, type of personality and ambitions. You’ll speak with your sales people, customer support, and conduct customer surveys as well as lots of competitor research and keyword analysis.

This is personal – Fantasises, obsessions, first kiss, last FM playlist, next move. Detail matters. The more insight you can develop, the more charismatic, the more vivid you can make your reader, the more material you will have to craft persuasive copy.

Motivations – Only once you can answer the question of who your reader is can you begin to ask yourself how you can go about addressing that golden ‘What’s in it for me’ (WIIFM) question that lies at the heart of  your relationship marketing. Whilst many things may motivate readers it’s important that you peel back the layers to reveal their one clear passion. Their ultimate motivation.

Relate – Now you have a clear understanding of who your reader is, what pains them or pleases them, of what truly inspires them or grieves them, it’s time for a UK copywriter to put that empathy to work. The more empathy a writer has the more interesting the writing can be. The more interesting,  the longer and the deeper the engagement and the greater the chance of conversion. That’s the reason that long form copy is so much more powerful than short copy. Readers become so involved with the copy they are naturally drawn to the close without ever even realising it. Great SEO copy is deeply empathetic. So deep that the writing itself becomes almost invisible.

In part three of the series we will concentrate on the four basic personality types mentioned in part one and see how these can be applied to web copywriting.

Read the other three parts: SEO Copywriting and the Power of persona part one, three and four

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How the Right Hash Tag can Make Your Campaign a Success

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Lira Leirner is the Social Media Consultant for Big Star Content

Last time I talked about how the hash tag can make you a more elegant copywriter and help you create a context for your Social Media content without wasting unnecessary space from the limited 140 characters.

However, there are many other uses of hash tags. In fact, this is not an official Twitter shortcut such as the @, which directs the tweet at the user you place immediately after the symbol. No, it has been introduced by the users themselves and therefore merely relies on a code of conduct and general consensus. But since it is the users we care about, and not twitter, that’s actually quite important.

Once you understand your audience and who you’re talking to, coining a hash tag to promote a Social Media campaign is only one step away.

Hash tags tend to shift a little here and there in the beginning of their existence. Make sure you’re the first to create yours or understand which ones are trending in order to plug into the already established hash tag. At the beginning they may look like #health2eu, #HealthForTheEUParis, #HealthConferenceParisEU2 etc. The variations are of course endless. The shortest version, however, often tends to win the upper hand and more often than not, very quickly establishes itself. In the case of the Health 2.0 Europe conference in Paris, the trending hash tag turned out to be #health2eu.

Topic or Event

This is used to a great extent for conferences but is also usually the type of hash tag which holds the majority of positions in the top trending topics. There are some famous recurring trending hash tags such as #NowPlaying and #ff (Follow Friday, I’ll be discussing this in another article), which is used across the different cliques and ages of twitter. Much like the ‘voice’ of a group, each has their own recurring hash tag themes and topics. For example, in my own group I see a lot of #TodayIAmWearing, a hash tag and campaign coined by UK Vogue.

Event hash tags almost deserve their own category for being such a popular use of hash tags that it even prompted some useful tools to emerge. In many cases, the hash tag for a conference starts with the official announcement, for example #health2eu and start of the discussion. This can range from excited chatter to logistics questions to already full on discussions. Events tags are one of the few hash tags that are easily and very quickly established with a majority of consensus. To get the most out of a conference hash tag, use some of the following tools, which allow you to respond, chat and update as well as follow:

  • http://tweetchat.com/ This is an extremely useful application which gives you three options to choose from and facilitates the use of hash tags tenfold
  • http://tweetgrid.com/ Useful for when hash tags are not quite agreed upon yet – you can create a grid with a window for each variation of the hash tag allowing to follow them all at once.

Rules

  • Keep it short
  • Tweets are real time feeds – dates aren’t necessary. Not #WorkMeet2010 – #WorkMeet will do and means it can be used again later
  • Use uppercase letters for each new word
  • Don’t use spaces or symbols such as ‘&* etc, it will break the tag
  • Use proper grammar. Not #YoureCool but #YouAreCool since #You’reCool will look like #You

Handy #Tools

If you’re using the actual twitter page, you can see trending topics on your homepage on the right side. However, sometimes it is advisable to use some helpful tools

  • http://hashtags.org/ Where you can see the trends neatly displayed in a graph as well as an even neater layout listing the users, actual tweet and time
  • http://www.whatthetrend.com/ This is a great place to understand what those trending topics on the right actually mean or stand for – a useful tool when you’d like to join in but don’t understand what the deal is 100%. You want to know before you engage!
  • http://twubs.com/ Particularly useful to find grouped trending tags ranging from conferences to news to TV

Go ahead, try it! But don’t forget to actually engage within the content of the rest of the tweet, otherwise the hash tag is just a lonely signpost.

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7 SEO copywriting secrets guaranteed to make you a millionaire

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

If you thought the secret of SEO copywriting success was simply a case of;

  • slipping a keyword or keyword phrase into your ’7 SEO copywriting secrets guaranteed to make you a millionaire’ H1
  • jamming a few keywords into the beginning and end of your body text
  • keyword density
  • a couple of hundred scrapped and spun articles
  • bullet points

then you’d be right…………….if you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Of course, most of the above are important tactics. That’s all they are though. Focusing only on fixes reveals a lack on strategic understanding and the knowledge that the very simple key to SEO copywriting success, to SEO success in general, is, and always will be….. quality. That if you want to develop a sustainable and profitable online profile then you need to build it on content that isn’t just adequate. You need content that excels. Win your online wars with killer copy.

When SEO companies approach SEO and especially SEO copywriting as a challenge to outwit the search engines then you’re in trouble. The schoolboy gang mentality that treats Google as the enemy, that insists on sticking it to ‘the man’ by finding ways to circumvent spam traps and quality filters is at best short termist. At worst damaging.

Honestly. If you ever find your self surrounded by a certain breed of SEO pro at an SEO convention or meet-up you’ll struggle to avoid that nudge nudge wink wink, “I’d have to kill you if I told you” SEO stuff that can make dealing with the industry such an underwhelming experience. When secrecy is your most valuable asset I guess that’s what you ought to expect.

Don’t buy it. Don’t buy the concept that there’s a way of gaming the system that won’t damage your online profile and profits eventually. Don’t buy the idea that there’s a code you can break or spell that can be cast to instantly turn your site into a traffic magnet.

Instead of wasting your time plotting and scheming how best to bypass the relevance tests and to hoodwink the algorithms wouldn’t your efforts be better spent on developing world class content? Working with a copy partner who can help reveal your true identity, your unique personality, your differential? Developing copy content that not only impresses the search engines but entertains, amuses, informs and persuades your human visitors. Content that converts?

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What SEO can’t do

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

SEO in its simplest, purest and most wholesome sense is a wonderful thing. A website optimised for search engines is lovely. All tagged up, with your page titles succinct yet informative,  weighing in at a feather light 65 characters. Page descriptions honed to a super relevant, not toooooo salesy 140ish characters. Then there are your H1s and H2s, your anchor text, delightfully rapid load times and not a hint of floppy flabby code to confuse the bots. Your graphics are nice and compressed, your keyword density is nestling somewhere just under the 3% mark. Files are named and the navigation is a dream.

Excellent. Everything but everything SEOwise is A1, ship shape and Bristol fashion.  And after a while here comes all that lovely traffic. Lots and lots of visitors eager to spend their time mooching around your website finding out all about you and what you do and what you offer before wending their way to your checkouts, arms loaded with products. Maybe you’re not actually selling, maybe your visitors are subscribing to your publication or voting or downloading. Hey! It’s your business objective after all.

But hang on? All these first time visitors. Well, it’s a bit much isn’t it to expect them to do the do on their very first visit? And you find that many don’t. They hardly know you for heaven’s sake. Would you go all the way at the first time of asking? Probably not. Never mind. There’s always next time.

Except. There isn’t a next time. And there won’t ever be another time. You’ve gone to all that trouble attracting, enticing your prospects and well…. you’ve blown it. The came, they saw, they bounced.

Why? Because your content doesn’t cut it. All that investment in SEO to attract visitors but when it comes to engagement, entertainment, value, the close, you goofed. Maybe they were bored, or patronised or just saw that there was nothing in it for them. Maybe they just didn’t quite trust you enough.

Think about it. All you can realistically hope to achieve on a first visit is to start to nurture a relationship, to build trust. It’s only on the second, the fifth, the fifteen visit that your call might be actioned and the sale made or the email submitted or whatever. When your content offers a compelling reason for someone to revisit your site then you stand a chance of building build the necessary trust that will eventually lead to your objectives being fulfilled.

What can’t SEO do?

SEO can’t convert.

If your content fails – you fail. No matter how.

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The secret of successful web copy

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Upsetting, isn’t it? You put all that time and energy into crafting wonderful copy content and then nobody reads it.

The ultimate copy content

You understand that life’s too short to stuff a keyword and you’ve silkily and smoothly threaded them into quality copy. You’ve compelled, persuaded, entertained, amused and informed – dotted the i’s, and crossed your fingers that the hordes will descend on your new website, your new proposition. It’s only a very short matter of time until visitors will obediently fall under your call to action spell and start shelling the cash.

Buy Buy

And yet still nobody is hanging around. Your analytics are telling you clearly that visitors are in and then rapidly out. How can anyone be taking in the message when they bounce so quickly? Logic tells you firmly that it’s just not possible for your visitors to take in your content. They simply aren’t on your pages long enough. And what’s with the unique visitor stats? How come so few people return?

Well there’s something that you need to know…

People don’t read online – They scan.

Visitors will hunt for keywords and ignore the rest.  They arrived at your site because they think your content could be of use.  And they demand a variety of returns on their time including:

  • Answers
  • Easily accessible information
  • High quality information
  • Competitive advantage
  • Entertainment

You HAVE to make it EASY for people to scan. They’ll do the heavy lifting (reading) once they can quickly identify your content holds relevance.

The last thing you want when you arrive at a new site all exited and optimistic is a great slab of visually impenetrable text. That’s asking way too much of a visitor. A wall of copy is a dull return and very quickly your business objectives will be clicked into touch.

However great the quality of the content is – it won’t be read.

Here’s the secret of successful web copy

  • Death defying headlines that instantly intrigue and pull them into body text
  • First sentences that work hard
  • Second sentences that work even harder
  • Short sentences
  • Short paragraphs
  • Highlighted keywords
  • Clear and interesting sub-headings
  • Lists
  • Bullet points
  • Write with a knife

By Martin Z

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