21 Jan
SEO content and SEO copywriting are two different worlds and serve their individual purposes. One similarity is, they both help you push your business high.
Both SEO content writing and copywriting have to do with the words on the page, but they each serve their own distinct purpose. And this distinction helps you determine which method you need to employ in order to achieve the desired results.
Confusing the two or ineffectively combining the two will likely lead to subpar results. It’s worth considering the difference in order to choose the right method (and writer) for your project.
What is SEO content writing?
Ultimately the goal of your marketing efforts is to attract and convert prospects into new customers. But the methods used in SEO content writing for the web is much more indirect when compared to traditional marketing assets such as telemarketing, billboards, or radio and television advertisements. SEO content writers don’t typically promote specific offers or products. Instead, they seek to build relationships with consumers or businesses by providing valuable, educational, or entertaining information from an objective viewpoint. SEO content serves a variety of purposes, including:
- Increasing a website’s search ranking for specific keyword combinations
- Educating the reader
- Driving clicks from Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs)
- Encourage qualified traffic
- Attracting high-authority backlinks
- Directing users to other related pages on the website
- Converting website visitors into buyers, subscribers, or leads
More importantly, SEO content allows brands to develop a better rapport with customers, manage a positive brand reputation, and boost website domain authority. Further, SEO content doesn’t exclusively mean a blog post or press release. SEO content encompasses videos, slideshows, photos, infographics, eBooks, webinars, or even podcasts.
What is SEO copywriting?
SEO copywriting describes a particular type of online content that harnesses a combination of unique keywords. It focuses on advertising a product or brand, driving conversion/sales, and encouraging a direct response. SEO copywriting can cover a multitude of projects, and it can take many forms, depending on your company, product, and service. Moreover, SEO copywriting pertains to web pages, landing pages, tweets, blog articles, Facebook posts, product descriptions, and promotional copy. Their specialty is considering keyword density and prominence as well as tone, style, and readability. They also research product attributes, competitive keywords, and popular search trends.
Tips for better SEO copywriting
Effective SEO copywriting attempts to persuade and motivate people to take a specific action. Use these tips to improve your copywriting technique, and enjoy more website conversions.
- Showcase benefits over features: Prospects care more about the benefits provided by the product than by the features included.
- Focus on emotions: When completing a sale, emotions typically influence customers to complete the desired action.
- Highlight client testimonials: Leverage online testimonials to maximize credibility with customers.
- Use simple language: Make sure your copy isn’t too technical or too complicated for your readers.
- Create a feeling of exclusivity: Clients love to feel as though brands care about them, make prospects feel special by being part of an exclusive group.
- Prove product value: Prove the value of your product because customers want to get a good deal or feel like they’re spending their money wisely.
- Establish your authority: People tend to respect industry experts and will take your advice into account before completing a sale.
The main difference between content writing and SEO copywriting
Before getting into details, let’s discuss the basic difference between SEO content writing and copywriting. SEO content writing brings you more organic traffic using search engines. While SEO copywriting converts the traffic into sales.
Simple enough. Since both have different business effects, it’s wise to determine your project objective first. So that you can score a bull’s eye with your decision.
For example, to hit big sales, first, you need huge organic traffic which can only be driven by SEO content writing. There’s no use of customer convincing with copywriting unless you have interested customers.
Let’s get a deeper insight into their work. SEO content writing is more on the technical site. They usually cover SEO-friendly blog posts/web articles, creating local SEO content, contextual links, etc. Although every content writer and agency is different, they share the same goal. These include:
- Increasing the website’s keyword rankings
- Repurposing existing content
- Optimizing internal/external linking with existing content and
- Directing users to other pages inside the website
So, it’s not confined to bringing organic traffic only. Now here’s a thing SEO content writers must remember: what do the audiences want?
They should be aware of their customers’ needs, demands, and keep the writing relevant using certain elements: keywords and personability. Although it might sound cliche, keywords are the key. Content writers are usually familiar with the most used keywords for the services/products you’re offering.
Keywords work as a tunnel that leads people to you. Besides creating good content, the writer must ensure it resonates with the readers, engages them, and satisfies their needs too. Let’s move on to SEO copywriting.
So the most basic difference is conversion. Essentially, copywriting’s purpose is converting traffic brought by SEO content writers into sales and prospects. It mainly produces brand awareness using persuasion, which later on convinces the readers to take action.
They mostly write brochures, sales pages, landing pages, direct mails, emails, or advertisements, which can be convertible. This sort of writing also requires some elements in them to have a higher conversion ratio.
For example, injecting emotions in the copy and targeting the right audience. Copywriters tend to know numerous emotional words to trigger the reader’s emotions. Not only that, but they also have the skill to put the right words in use. It’s more effective in short articles, emails, or headlines.
Knowing the audience well never gets old. There’s nothing like knowing the audience enough. Copywriters figure out the exact emotion, whether something’s causing them pain or they’re looking for more pleasure.
Whichever it is, copywriters ensure to highlight your product/service as the solution. They need to have just enough psychological knowledge to push the audience’s right button.
When you should hire an SEO content writer
You should hire an SEO content writer to increase your organic traffic through high-quality and keyword-optimized content. The writer should know both SEO and to write content that is useful, compelling and informative. However, they may not necessarily know how to write for conversions. The purposes SEO content writing serves include:
- Website-keyword rankings are increased
- Drives Click-Through-Rates (CTR) from SERPs
- Improves website navigation
- Attracts high-authority backlinks
- Directs users to other pages on the site
- Converts visitors into subscribers, buyers, or customers
- Repurposes existing content
Providing great content can drive social shares, and improve traffic, rankings and also conversions.
When you should hire a copywriter
It is when you require a copy for different platforms such as Google ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Sales pages, Product pages, and more. Here, the primary goal is to convert your traffic into sales and leads. The traffic here may be organic, but it should be social media traffic, paid ad traffic, direct traffic, etc.
Therefore, you must hire a copywriter who is experienced in the type of copy you need and should know how to convert that particular type of traffic. For each type of project, the research, writing, targeting, marketing, and launch process can be completely different.
The foundations of content marketing
In order to fully understand the difference between copywriting and SEO writing, we first of all need to get an understanding of content marketing as a whole. Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing content with the purpose of attracting, engaging, and converting leads.
The content itself comes in various formats like emails, web pages, blog posts, video, press releases, social media posts, and any other messaging you include in your marketing campaign. The one thing all content has in common is that it all involves words that need to be written in a special way in order to achieve an end goal.
This is where the confusion can set in. While all these marketing assets require writing, not all deliverables should be written the same way.
Think of it as a conversation in real life. Even though you may tell the same story to two different people, you probably change the way you tell your mom versus your best friend. The same concept applies to content marketing because, although your end goal is the same, you’re communicating information in a different context or driving conversions using a different method.
That’s the reason significant differences exist between copywriting and SEO writing.
Elements of good copywriting
In order for a copywriter to produce a good copy, it’s important for the copy to have certain elements that will make it strong enough to leave an impression and move people.
1. Targeted
Copywriting is a discipline that creates copy for a specific audience. In order for the copy to be effective, it has to address a particular problem or pain point in that target group, presenting the brand as a solution.
Because of this, copywriters must understand the psychology of the people they are writing for. This is an invaluable skill that will help the copywriter push the right buttons in the consumer of the content.
To create targeted copy for specific individuals, you should start by creating buyer personas. This means pinpointing specific demographic groups within your target audience, which will help you remember who you’re talking to with your copy.
Without first acknowledging your target audience, your copy will easily get caught in the shuffle of constant messaging overload.
2. Emotional appeal
Another strong element of copywriting is that it has the ability to tug at the reader’s emotions. To do this, copywriters learn the skill and art of using certain words that elicit the desired emotional response. In the same vein, they also know to omit particular words to create a specific user or reader experience.
This especially applies to copywriting for mediums that require small word counts, like subject lines in emails or headlines in articles.
According to research conducted by Copyblogger, 80% of your visitors will read your headline. But only 20% will read the entire article. If you fail to hook them with your headline, no matter how great your copy is, you won’t get people to read it.
This is why copywriting is such a fundamental skill in marketing. It takes a lot of effort and talent to create a copy that produces results.
How to measure copywriting SEO performance
The success of your content marketing or copywriting campaign will depend on the specific goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) you set. Some of the most common KPIs used to measure campaign success include:
- Brand awareness.
- Lead generation.
- Email subscribers.
- Ranking keywords.
- On-site conversions.
- Click-through rates (CTR).
- Web traffic through organic search.
- Social media likes, comments, and shares.
Good content is judged by its performance and those consuming it. The exact same campaign executed by two different brands can be a success or failure depending on the brand’s goals.
If the content is earning triple the social media shares, it would be considered a success for a brand whose primary KPI was improving its presence on Facebook. But if the target KPI was lead generation, that same campaign could be considered a failure.
Conclusion
To conclude, If you want to sell something online, then you should obviously use SEO copywriting to convert traffic into leads and sales. With SEO content writing, your primary goal is to generate organic traffic through search engines. Both SEO copywriting and SEO content writing can achieve these objectives, but in order to achieve the desired results you have to choose the right method for your project or a combination of the two.
SEO copywriting is intentional, it targets specific keywords and creates useful, valuable and compelling content that prompts readers/end users to either buy a product, subscribe to a list, or anything that helps you create a sale. For this reason, people will gladly share it on social media platforms. It will increase the authority and relevance of your content and help to improve your ranking on Google for specific keywords.
While SEO content writing services also target specific keywords, it focuses on an informal sort of relationship building with people by writing blog posts, eBooks, social media posts, even a podcast script or a video script and more. So, the main goal is increasing your organic traffic through search engines.