What Role does Copywriting Play in SEO?

Terms such as content writer and copywriter are often used interchangeably. Due to modern developments, the areas of responsibility of different copywriting professions have become mixed. When it comes to texts with advertising impact, a copywriter is the expert

What exactly is copywriting? How does the work of copywriters differ from other copywriting professions? And how can we use copywriting-specific skills for non-offensive advertising texts such as content for search engine optimization?

What is copywriting?

Classic copywriting can be translated as advertising copy writer. The job of a copywriter is to write a text with advertising intent. The job originated in advertising agencies. There, copywriters are hired to create a variety of content.

These include:

• Posters,
• Brochures,
• Catalogs,
• Lyrics (for jingles),
• Magazine articles,
• News articles,
• Advertising letters/emails,
• Scripts for commercials (TV & radio),
• Slogans,
• Website content,
• Social media ads

and other texts designed to entice a reader to become a customer of the advertised brand.

Blurring definitions as a result of SEO

The definition of copywriting has blurred with other job titles in recent years. Often, a copywriter is also understood to be a content writer, or the other way around. The emergence of search engine optimization as a marketing tool is a major influencer.

• In SEO, developing content with added content value is one of the most effective strategies to influence the algorithm of Google and co. and to retain customers

The goal is not to place advertising messages in a flashy advertising text, but to write really informative articles that are helpful for the customer and therefore trigger a positive link with and recommendations for the company.

• Copywriting is purely commercial, while content creation is informative. However, the boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred.

Copywriting as a marketing tool

There may be advertising that is reduced to pictures and sounds, but for the majority of all marketing methods, no advertising without words! Whether it’s email marketing or short calls-to-action that seek to motivate you to take action with phrases like, “Take action now!”, someone is responsible for writing those copy.

The copywriter uses a feeling for language, creativity, general knowledge and a certain feeling for sales psychology to write appealing texts that trigger the desired effect. He must be able to put himself in the position of the target group, strike the right tone and pay attention to the coherence of text and image as an overall message.

Copywriting as a skill for search engine optimization

If you look at modern companies, there’s hardly a business that doesn’t have an online presence. Email marketing, websites, online stores and social media content are all possible areas of work for copywriters today, in addition to creating brochures or TV commercials. At the same time, copywriters are rarely active only for writing clear advertising messages such as ads on Facebook and Co.

• SEO strategies have meant that content writers and copywriters today often have to take on each other’s work

SEO’s focus on content creation has triggered this merging. The goal of SEO is to show up higher in the rankings of search engine results and therefore be found faster by customers. To achieve this, methods are used that influence the algorithm used by search engines to assess the quality of a page.

An important ranking factor is the existing content on a web page. Any text elements are analyzed and examined for the keywords used. A large part of SEO is therefore the discipline of writing texts that are considered by the algorithm to be good or appropriate to the search query.

Text elements in SEO

If you write content with SEO guidelines in mind, the purpose of the article is to lead to better search result rankings and thus more customers finding a business

• If you consider the following SEO content elements when writing, you are theoretically doing the work of a copywriter.

Keywords

When search engines introduced algorithms, people ranked high by placing the appropriate keywords for a search query as frequently as possible on the page. If someone searched for “potting soil, “ the algorithm searched the content on a website for the keyword “potting soil.” If it occurred often, it was likely for the algorithm that the page contained detailed information on the topic.

To avoid spam, the algorithm has since been improved. Today, texts must remain readable. Still, it helps to pick a keyword and mention it naturally and relatively often in the text

If you write an article about “potting soil for houseplants” , the word will appear frequently anyway, without it seeming forced. However, there are also SEO tools that dictate how often a certain keyword should appear when writing.

Headings

The algorithm also pays attention to where the keywords are placed. For your article on potting soil, it would be disadvantageous if the word potting soil does not appear in the title and headings. In addition, the title should be under 72 characters to be well received by Google.

• A copywriter can shine here by choosing a headline that not only impresses Google, but also piques the reader’s interest with the best choice of words.

URL & Links

Both Google and the reader benefit if the URL of a web page is short and descriptive. In the best case, it contains the most important keyword for it. For the potting soil article, it could look like this

• www.deinewebseite.de/Blumenerde-fuer-Zimmerpflanzen.

The terms you use for links in a text must also be well chosen. In SEO, links are usually built into the content with anchor texts. These are the words that are marked as a link instead of the URL in the text

If you link to a product page of your online store in your potting soil article, for example, you choose the words “potting soil for houseplants” as anchor text.

Meta information

When you search for something on Google, the search results are displayed with the meta title and meta description. The meta title is the text with a blue background that is a link to the search result. The descriptive text below it is the meta description. For this, you can use our SERP Snippet Generator.

Here you can also shine as a copywriter. Meta information has no ranking factor, so its content doesn’t exert any influence on how important the algorithm finds your website. But they are crucial in determining whether a searcher is interested in looking at the specific search result

• So the text must be short and concise and convey tothe reader that they will find exactly the information they are looking for on this web page.

If you don’t specify a meta description, Google itself will pick out a text of around 160 characters from the web page. However, you should always take advantage of the opportunity to use the description as a promotional text for the content.

Content

The advantage of SEO marketing over direct marketing is that the advertising effect is created “organically”. Instead of the customer reading an ad pointing to your website, the website is promoted by being understood by Google as a good answer to a relevant search query. So it’s considered a referral rather than an advertisement.

The algorithm bases its evaluation of your website on the opinion of others. If, for example, it finds many pages on the subject of gardens and plants that link to your article on indoor plant potting soil, it assumes that the content of the website must be good, and therefore Google is happy to recommend it to its users.

• Thus, the number one rule of content creation for SEO purposes is that it should be written less for Google itself, but always for the reader

If many readers find good content with added value on your website, they have reason to come back, recommend the content and use your products.

But also the algorithm tries to recognize good content through analysis. With its current intelligence, it can recognize semantic connections and structures. It can judge whether the text is easy to read and informative based on the words and layout.

• A text that improves the SEO ranking must therefore be one thing above all: high quality, with real added value for the reader.

Conclusion

Copywriting describes the task of writing appealing advertising texts. Traditionally, copywriters write content for advertising posters, catalogs, and more. In today’s world, their tasks are increasingly mixing with content writing. Companies are increasingly relying on informative content whose promotional impact is not directly perceived as marketing.

As an SEO strategy, texts should become an organic advertisement for a company by providing good content that is preferentially recommended by other readers and search engines. Therefore, the content that is published online today is rarely not also a promotional text that can benefit from the skills of a copywriter

However, there are online marketing efforts that are the equivalent of traditional copywriting. These include, for example, product descriptions for online stores, ads for platforms such as Facebook, or e-mail marketing.