Imagine the Internet as a vast mine. In a way, it is – a mine filled with words and data. A website is a diamond in that mine, buried beneath meters and meters of metamorphic rock. If visitors know about the diamond, they might search high and low at the prospect of untold wealth. If they don’t know, why would they bother looking at all?
The right keywords are the trail of ore you leave so consumers can find their way to your diamond website embedded amidst nearly 650 million active websites. If you are doing a copywriting job for a doggie grooming business in Boise, for instance, when someone types the phrase “dog grooming Boise” into a search engine, you want the text you write, and the keywords you choose, to bring that website to the top of the search results.
No problem, you think. Dog grooming is exactly what this company does, and they do it in Boise. It’s all on the page. We’re good to go.
If only it were that simple.
While search engines are fairly good as scanning websites for the terms of a query issued by a user, they are also somewhat easy to manipulate, and the problem isn’t with the search engines themselves. They do what they are supposed to do. They look for the user’s query as it is entered, and this is where things get complicated.
If you have the term “dog grooming” on one page and the term “Boise” on another, a search engine may never ping the page as a good result, because they look for the words together. That means you must get creative to lead consumers to your diamond.
Since search engines scan pages individually, a business address should be on every page, not just a contact page.
Content should contain simple phrases a user is likely to look up to find a business. It’s a copywriter’s job to know the term “dog grooming in Boise” will help a search engine ping a website for “dog grooming Boise”.
Longer phrases, known as long-tail keywords, are where copywriting can help a website really stand out from the crowd. If you can find a term that many users look up, but few of a website’s competitors are using, you’ll have your own gem. “Organic dog grooming in Boise,” for instance, is more specific and something not every Boise dog groomer can claim. Of course, if you are going to use it, it had better be true.
The more specific a phrase, the easier it is to rank for that phrase in search results, because there is less competition. It doesn’t do you much good, though, unless users are actually looking the phrase up. This is why knowing how to check a keyword’s viability, and to find more keyword ideas, is another important skill in a website writer’s toolbox. Keyword research can be done through Google’s Keyword Planner or by looking terms up in different search engines, seeing what results come up and how closely those results actually meet the term.
When you want users to find a website in an expansive mine of online data, keyword planning is an essential part of website copy. Once you've mastered the art of the keyword and are looking for copywriting jobs in creative writing, contact us today to learn more.